Ask ten hearth and patio dealers what they advertise on and you will get ten different answers: the county magazine, a radio package, a home show booth, boosted Facebook posts, a Google account somebody set up years ago. Ask which of it produced leads last season and the room usually goes quiet. So rather than repeat what the category is supposed to do, here is what we see in real dealer accounts, and what the numbers say about each piece.
The short answer
The dealers producing steady leads run paid search first, on both Google and Bing, with a small social layer around it, and they count phone calls as leads. Everything else is optional. That is not a philosophy, it is what falls out of the reporting once a store starts measuring.
What follows comes from three accounts whose full numbers are published on our results page: a 150 year old fireplace retailer, a newer showroom that launched into its first fireplace season, and a fireplace and grill center in St. Louis.
Search is where the buying happens
Somebody who types "gas fireplace insert installation" into a search bar has already decided what they want. They are looking for who does it. That is a fundamentally different person from someone scrolling past a fireplace photo on Facebook, and the results reflect it.
Across a full year, Bromwell's produced 1,667 leads, and their search ads ran at an 8.25% click-through rate. HomeFlame, launching cold into its first season, hit 9.9%. Typical retail search campaigns live in the 3 to 5 percent range. The reason the hearth category clears it so easily is that the searches are specific and local, which means a tightly built campaign can be relevant nearly every time it shows.
That specificity cuts the other way too. A campaign built on broad terms like "fireplace" burns budget on people researching how a chimney works. The dealers doing well are the ones whose keyword lists read like their invoice book: inserts, gas logs, stove installation, chimney service, the brands they actually carry, the towns they actually cover.
Most of the leads arrive as phone calls
This is the finding that surprises dealers most, and it changes how you should read every report you get.
Of Bromwell's 1,667 leads, 1,426 were phone calls. At HomeFlame, 82% of leads came by phone. At the fireplace and grill center, 712 of 816 leads were calls, with website forms and emails making up the rest. Six or seven of every eight leads in this category pick up the phone rather than fill out a form.
They are also real conversations. Bromwell's calls connected 98% of the time, from 969 unique callers, and 54% of them ran longer than two minutes. Nobody spends two minutes on the phone about a fireplace they are not considering buying.
The practical consequence: if your advertising is judged on form fills, you are looking at roughly one seventh of what it produced, and you will probably conclude it does not work. Call tracking is not a nice extra in this category. It is most of the measurement.
Social reaches people, it rarely closes them
Social advertising in this category does a real job, and it is not the job most people expect.
In Bromwell's 2025, social delivered 57% of the year's 299,223 ad impressions on under 4% of the budget. It produced 5 leads. HomeFlame's retargeting layer reached 195,000 homeowners and produced no tracked leads of its own. Read plainly, that looks like failure. Read correctly, it is cheap presence: a fireplace is a considered purchase that people think about for weeks, and being visible during those weeks costs almost nothing and makes the search ad land on a name the shopper recognizes.
The mistake is expecting social to be the lead engine. If you are boosting posts and waiting for the phone to ring, that is the mismatch. Keep the social layer, keep it small, and stop grading it on leads it was never going to produce.
Bing is roughly a fifth of the search leads
22% of Bromwell's search leads came from Microsoft Bing. Not 22% of impressions. Leads.
Bing carries a smaller share of searches nationally, but it defaults on Windows machines and in Edge, and it skews older and more affluent, which describes the person paying for a fireplace installation better than the average search user. Clicks there usually cost less than the same term on Google. It takes a few minutes to import an existing Google campaign into Microsoft Ads, and most dealers we audit have simply never done it. That is a fifth of the leads sitting on the table.
The season decides the budget, not the calendar
Bromwell's leads by month in 2025 ran 61 in May and 341 in December, and 63% of the year's leads arrived between October and January. Everyone in this business knows the shape of that curve. Fewer act on it.
Spending evenly across twelve months means overpaying for attention in July and underbuying it in November, when the people who are ready to buy are all searching at once. The correction is not to go dark in summer, because the campaign needs history and the grill and patio side has its own season. It is to have the budget already scaled up before the cold snap, not two weeks after it, and to move spend toward whatever is producing leads that month rather than what worked last quarter.
The first two months are the expensive ones
New campaigns start out inefficient and get better, and the curve is steeper than people expect. At the fireplace and grill center, cost per lead started at $117 in the first full month and fell to $14 by the peak of the season, at roughly flat monthly spend. Same store, same budget, same ads platform. What changed was accumulated data about which searches and audiences actually turned into calls.
Two things follow. Judging a campaign on month one is judging it at its worst. And launching in October means paying the learning curve during your best selling weeks, which is the single most avoidable mistake in this category.
What almost nobody is doing
From auditing dealer accounts across the country, the same gaps repeat: no call tracking, so most leads are invisible; no negative keyword list, so budget leaks to job seekers, DIY researchers, and people looking for parts; Bing never set up; a website with a single contact form buried on one page; and manufacturer co-op money left unclaimed because the paperwork is tedious. That last one is real cash. Most hearth brands will reimburse a meaningful share of qualifying advertising, and plenty of dealers never file.
How to check your own numbers
Three questions will tell you where you stand.
Can you say how many phone calls your advertising produced last month? If the answer is no, you do not currently know whether your advertising works. Start there.
Is Microsoft Ads running? If not, that is the fastest win available to you, and it is an import rather than a rebuild.
Look at your search terms report, not your keyword list. The keyword list is what you asked for. The search terms report is what you actually paid for. The gap between them is usually where the budget went.
None of this is exotic. It is search ads built by someone who knows what a direct vent insert is, on both engines, with the calls counted, a modest social layer, and the budget shaped like the season. The dealers doing all five are not doing anything clever. They are just the ones measuring.