Surviving Highly Competitive Niche

Hello! I work in-house managing a local HVAC company’s entire marketing strategy, we are located in South Florida so it is extremely competitive. From my best estimates (using SEMRush, SpyFu, and my own list from searches) we have 30-40 competitors in Google’s PPC space just in our office’s main county alone.

That being said, I’m pretty sure the owner is expecting the impossible but I wanted to run this past some other eyes to see if I’m missing anything big.

Currently our CPCs are averaging $17 and our cost per conversion is around $100-120. Our CTR is 5-7% and our conversion rate is 12-18%. This data is last 30 days across 5 campaigns (separated by services or service areas). Our average daily spend on Google alone is $1,800.

When I check for our service areas in keyword planner, I see that we’re paying roughly the middle expected costs for the keywords that we’re using. Our quality scores are all 5-6/10. We also have conversion tracking set up through CallRail and lead form integration on the website.

Our campaigns are all set to Maximize Conversions with a target CPA obtained from historical data of the last several months (around 150 conversions per month), and I adjust the target by up to 10% in either direction as needed. All of our keywords are set to Broad, but we don’t have a ton due to how limited our services are in breadth. I also monitor insights to make sure that we aren’t getting irrelevant searches and I add to both a negative keyword list and our campaign’s keywords as needed.

The owner is upset that costs have continued to go up, but I’ve told him that the CPCs are just insanely high in this niche so even with a decent conversion rate every conversion will still be expensive. We tried removing the tCPA as per his suggestion and our CPCs soared to $80-200 until we turned it back on (I’m assuming way too many people automated bidding at the same time?).

Is there anything else that we could be doing? Or is this niche just doomed to be extremely expensive? I’m seeing new competitors weekly in the advertising space, all with next to new reviews and a basic website with stock photos.

The owner wants 50 jobs per day which I’ve already told him is borderline impossible even with a much higher budget. Thoughts?