Reaching HVAC Customers When Intent Matters Most

Once the purchase is made, that customer may not return to the category for another eight to ten years.

For marketers, that creates a critical challenge: reaching the right homeowner is not enough. Brands must reach them at the precise moment they enter the market.

Scale Marketing partnered with PGM Solutions to answer a simple question. Could PGM’s in-market audiences find high-intent households better than broad homeowner targeting, and would that lead to stronger campaign results?

Scale Marketing is a performance agency with deep experience with home service and lead-generation brands. Through its partnership with PGM, Scale saw an opportunity to activate PGM’s unique data in a category where recency and intent can make the difference between capturing demand and missing it entirely.

For home service marketers, high-intent audiences are essential but they represent only one part of the opportunity. Brands must reach homeowners actively entering the category while continuing to build awareness among those who may become customers in the months or years ahead.

The goal was to identify the right balance: maximize investment against high-intent signals without sacrificing the broader reach needed to prime future intenders and sustain long-term demand.

To evaluate that balance, PGM’s audience was compared with three targeting tiers representing different combinations of homeowner attributes and levels of precision:

• Psychographic targeting
• Targeted demographic targeting
• Standard demographic targeting

Performance was assessed using the metrics most closely tied to lead-generation outcomes:

• Incremental cost per lead
• Lead-form volume per million impressions
• Incremental conversion rate
• Conversion relative lift

This structure allowed Scale and PGM to determine not simply whether high-intent targeting could generate leads, but how prominently it should factor into the overall CTV audience mix—balancing immediate efficiency with the scale and awareness required to support future growth.

Efficiency held at a meaningful scale: Psychographic targeting came closest on cost per lead, but scaled at much lower volume in one market. PGM was the only premium tier that combined leading efficiency with enough scale to support further investment across all markets.

Broader reach did not translate into better performance: Standard targeting absorbed roughly half of total campaign spend while producing the weakest cost per lead and the lowest lead-form rate of any audience tier.

The premium-audience thesis held up: A narrower audience built around timely intent signals outperformed broader definitions of a likely HVAC customer across every primary performance measure.

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First, Scale will incorporate additional PGM audience segments into its CTV buying strategy, allowing the agency to test new signals and applications across the homeowner journey.

Second, media teams will begin applying these learnings beyond CTV, exploring how PGM audiences perform across additional programmatic and social channels.

The initial test demonstrated that premium data can do more than refine targeting. When it reflects a genuine, timely need, it can help home-service marketers reach customers during the brief window when they are most likely to act.