Residential vs commercial solar intent isn’t what you think

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December 9, 2024

08:26

Residential vs commercial solar intent isn’t what you think

This is one of those topics that sounds obvious on the surface and quietly ruins performance when it’s misunderstood.

Residential and commercial solar intent behave very differently online. Not just in keywords, but in devices, timing, form tolerance, and how much friction people will accept before enquiring.

In this video, I walk through what we’re seeing inside a live commercial-only campaign, why cheap clicks are often the wrong clicks, and how small changes in form strategy and delivery can materially change outcomes.

This isn’t about clever targeting tricks. It’s about understanding who’s on the other side of the screen and how they actually behave when they’re ready to enquire.

All examples are pulled from active campaigns we’re managing right now.

For context, this video was originally recorded on 8 January 2026, views & strategies may have changed since.

Featuring

Jude Cornish

Chief Commercial Officer

Video transcript

Morning. Morning. Quick one.

Today we’re going to talk about the nuances between residential and commercial solar intent when advertising online.

Yes, there’s the obvious stuff—like targeting terms such as “business solar”—but beyond that, you have to get more creative about refining your campaigns.

If you’re advertising for commercial solar, you need to filter out consumer intent. Consumer intent traffic is typically cheaper, but it’s the wrong audience, and it will dilute performance.

And if you’re advertising for residential solar, you need to filter out commercial intent, because commercial clicks often cost more, and if your landing page is residential-focused, it won’t convert that audience anyway.

So it works both ways.

The main point is this: when you run ads for a solar business, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re advertising to.

I work with a company called Assisted to run Sustain’s digital marketing campaigns. Sustain only wants commercial leads—nothing else. Assisted has loads of experience running B2B campaigns, and we’ve continued analysing performance as the campaign runs so we can systematically reduce consumer intent and increase business intent.

So far, that campaign is sitting at a 47x return on ad spend, which is pretty unreal.

Here are a few of the things we’ve learned.

1) Mobile vs desktop matters more than you think.
We noticed mobile devices carried far more consumer intent than desktop.

That makes sense: if someone is enquiring as a business, they’re often on a work laptop, in an office environment, during working hours. They have access to a laptop or tablet. If someone is enquiring as a homeowner, they’re much more likely to be on their phone.

And yes, a huge amount of web traffic is mobile now—but for commercial campaigns, desktop can be disproportionately valuable.

2) Day-of-week assumptions can be wrong. Test them.
We tested weekday vs weekend performance, assuming commercial intent would be higher during the working week.

The hypothesis sounds logical, but then you ask the real question: when do business owners and decision makers—who are stacked back-to-back with meetings and putting out fires all week—actually get time to think about strategic initiatives like reducing energy costs?

Often it’s outside normal working hours. That’s when they’re not in meetings. That’s when they can think.

And what we found was that a lot of high-quality commercial intent activity actually happened over the weekend.

If we’d just assumed “weekdays only” and run with it, we would have missed a huge amount of pipeline.

Real example: last week, just after midnight—around 12:10 a.m. on Saturday morning—a massive 1–2 megawatt lead came through, with potential for a significant EV charging infrastructure project alongside it.

If we weren’t advertising during that period, we would have completely missed that lead. And that one opportunity could be seven figures by itself.

So: start with a hypothesis, then confirm with data. And make sure you’re not confusing correlation with causation—but don’t ignore patterns that are making you money.

3) Lower cost per click isn’t automatically better.
This is the same principle we talk about on the Meta side: cost per lead should not be your north star, because it tells you nothing about lead quality.

Cheap traffic is often cheap for a reason.

On commercial search campaigns specifically, we’ve actually been increasing cost per click. That sounds counterintuitive until you understand the intent curve.

Consumer intent is cheaper.
Business intent is more expensive.
Higher-value business intent is more expensive again.

In this campaign, cost per click has increased roughly 400% since we started—because we’re filtering out low-value traffic and attracting higher intent decision makers.

What we care about is the real north star:

Cost per acquisition (what does it cost in ad spend to close a deal?)
And in commercial solar, because deal sizes vary wildly, return on ad spend is often the better metric.

That’s why the ratio matters—like the 47x ROAS we’re currently seeing.

4) It’s not just targeting—your form strategy changes with intent.
At the start, we used a multi-step form as the primary conversion method. It had multiple steps, an option for multi-site businesses, and even an optional field to upload energy bills.

The intention was good: collect more information upfront so the first call is more valuable.

But we switched it to a stripped-back contact form, and results doubled basically overnight.

Here’s why.

Residential inquiries often need more handholding. A multi-step flow can actually help, because once someone answers a simple first step, they build buy-in and are more likely to complete the rest.

Commercial is different.

Business owners and decision makers often already decided they want to enquire. They just want to submit details quickly and move on. Their time is extremely valuable.

For commercial intent, forcing someone through an eight-step funnel can feel like you’re not respecting their time—especially when some of that information can be gathered later with quick research.

So yes, the sales team might need to do a bit more upfront work before the call, but you’ll speak to more leads because you reduce drop-off.

And that’s the key: test it. Run experiments. Let data tell you what friction your audience will tolerate.

5) Next test: reduce friction even further.
The next thing we’re going to test is placing the contact form directly on the landing page people arrive on, instead of making them click a CTA and go to a separate form page.

The message is simple: this process doesn’t take long. It’s four fields. It can be done in 30 seconds. You don’t have to complete a long questionnaire just to start the conversation.

Hopefully that was useful. I’ll keep updating you on the progress of this campaign because it’s a really exciting one. Sustain are a fantastic business and deliver a fantastic service.

If you want a copy of the document as we build it out, go to the link on this post. It’s now in a website-style format because it’s hosted on Gamma.

Enter your info, I’ll check you’re a legitimate solar business, and I’ll send it over.

And if you want the implementation of everything we talk about, go to the same link, carry on through the next steps, answer a few questions about your business, and if you’re qualified, we’ll get a discovery call booked in.

Awesome.

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Dec 7, 2024

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