Google Search Too Expensive? This B2C Display Strategy Got Us 9.5x ROAS

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What If Display Could Outperform Search?

If you’re a B2C advertiser, you’ve probably felt the sting of rising Google Search costs. CPCs keep climbing, and at some point you have to ask: is there a better way to generate leads without bleeding budget on Search?

For one of our local HVAC clients, the answer was yes — and the results blew past our expectations. We built a targeted Display campaign that generated leads at a fraction of the cost of Search while delivering a 9.5x return on ad spend. Here’s exactly how we did it.

The Setup: Picking the Right Service to Test

This client offers the full range of HVAC services — heating, cooling, plumbing, water heaters. Rather than going broad, we picked a single service (water heaters) and ran a very targeted Display ad test. The goal was twofold: gain a high volume of impressions for brand awareness, and see if we could squeeze out some direct leads as a bonus.

The bonus turned into the headline.

The Results

In Q3 alone, the water heater Display ad group generated:

5 leads directly from Display
$27 cost per lead — exceptional for this client
Just under $1,000 in ad spend producing nearly $9,000 in revenue
9.12x ROAS for the quarter

We originally built these campaigns for awareness and impressions, hoping for some trickle-down effect into our Search campaigns. Instead, we saw direct conversions right inside Display.

How We Built the Custom Audience

This is where the strategy gets interesting. We went back to the client and asked a simple question: When a water heater lead comes in the door, what do they typically say? What’s the problem they describe?

The answer was consistent: showers. Every time. “I have no hot water in my shower.” “My shower is cold.” “I can’t get a warm shower.”

So we built a custom audience around those exact pain points. The search terms we used were straightforward:

“Why is my shower cold?”
“Fix cold shower”
“Shower has no heat”

These are the actual queries people type when they’re experiencing the problem — before they even think about searching for an HVAC company.

Matching Creative to Intent

Once we had the audience dialed in, we made sure the ad creatives spoke directly to that pain point. Every ad featured the same clear visual theme: cold showers.

The goal was emotional engagement. When someone scrolling through a website sees an ad about cold showers and that’s exactly the problem they’re dealing with, there’s an immediate connection. They recognize their problem, see a solution, and click through.

Aligning your creative with the exact language and frustration of your audience is what makes Display work — not generic brand ads, but targeted problem-solution messaging.

Scaling What Worked

After seeing these results with water heaters, we expanded the same strategy into other service categories — air conditioning first, and later heating. We saw similar results across the board, which confirmed this wasn’t a fluke. The framework works:

Talk to your client — understand the exact language customers use when they have a problem
Build custom audiences around those pain-point search terms
Create ad creatives that mirror that language and emotion
Test on a single service before scaling

Key Takeaways

If you’re over-reliant on Google Search and feeling the cost pressure, don’t overlook Display, YouTube, and Demand Gen. There are real opportunities to generate leads at lower CPCs — you just need to be strategic about your audiences and creative.

The biggest mistake we see is advertisers treating Display like a branding-only channel. With the right custom audiences and targeted creative, it can absolutely drive direct conversions at a fraction of Search costs.

Questions? Book a call and let’s talk through your strategy.