Broad targeting
Running with minimal audience definition and letting delivery find the buyers.
No interests, no behaviours, often no more than a location, an age range and sometimes a gender. The conversion signal does the targeting instead of the setup.
Why it matters for HVAC
Interest targeting was never very good at finding people whose air conditioning is about to fail, because that is not an interest, it is an event. Broad targeting with a strong conversion signal outperforms clever interest stacks in most home service accounts.
The condition is the signal. Broad targeting with a well-fed conversion event is the best setup available. Broad targeting with a broken pixel is a budget donated to the auction.
How it is measured
Compare against a tightly targeted ad set on cost per booked job over a period long enough for both to leave learning. Check the demographic breakdown to see who delivery actually settled on.
A worked example
A contractor runs one ad set targeting homeowner interests, HVAC-related pages and home improvement behaviours, and another with a 25-mile radius and ages 30 to 70 and nothing else. Over six weeks the broad ad set produces leads 22% cheaper and books 14% more of them, because the conversion signal found service-area homeowners the interest list was excluding.
These figures are invented to show the arithmetic. They describe no real business.
The trap
Broad plus a small service area plus a small budget is the combination that fails. There has to be enough volume for delivery to learn from, or broad is just undirected.
Where this is demonstrated
The Advantage+ against manual pillar scores every listed agency on what they document here, and gives you the questions that tell you which one you are being sold.