Boosting Certas Energy Heating Service Enquiries Through Paid Media

Certas Energy is one of the UK’s leading fuel distributor, supporting homes and businesses across the country with heating oil, fuel supply services. 

For its Winter 2025–2026 campaign, Certas Energy wanted to promote its Heating Services oil boiler maintenance plans alongside its emergency breakdown support. The aim was to build awareness with relevant household audiences, drive quality traffic to the campaign landing page and encourage meaningful actions, including phone call clicks, form fills and boiler service enquiries. 

The campaign needed to work within a highly specific set of postcode areas, making efficient media planning essential. It also needed to balance two different audience mindsets: proactive customers considering regular boiler servicing, and reactive customers who may only need emergency breakdown support when something has already gone wrong. 

That meant the media strategy needed to keep Certas Energy visible during the colder months, while ensuring warmer, more engaged audiences could be retargeted with timely and relevant messaging. 

We developed a paid media campaign across Meta and programmatic advertising, using a combination of paid social, native and display ads to reach households in the agreed postcode areas along with specific demographic targeting data. 

The strategy was built around two key creative routes. The first focused on annual heating services, encouraging customers to avoid unexpected boiler issues through regular, year-round maintenance. This route used warm, character-led creative, supported by clear messaging around being prepared for winter. 

The second route focused on emergency breakdown support, using animated graphics, bold seasonal colours and direct messaging to build awareness of Certas Energy as a provider to consider when heating problems happen. 

Across the campaign, we used prospecting activity to build reach and awareness, while retargeting campaigns focused on driving action from users who had already shown interest. As the campaign progressed, budget and delivery were optimised around the strongest postcode groups, best-performing creative formats and highest-value audience segments. 

On Meta, new creative variants and placements were introduced throughout the campaign to refresh activity, test messaging and optimise delivery around the strongest-performing audiences and postcode groups. 

For programmatic, display and native ads worked together to build awareness and drive action. Display supported reach across the target areas, while native retargeting helped convert warmer audiences who had already shown interest. 

Across paid social and programmatic, the campaign delivered strong reach, engagement and conversion performance during a key seasonal window for heating services.

Retargeting was the primary driver of action, generating the majority of conversions across both Meta and programmatic activity. On Meta, retargeting delivered around 76% of total conversions, while programmatic retargeting generated around 74% of total conversions. 

Native advertising was particularly effective from a conversion perspective, outperforming display in driving actions. Retargeting activity and the warm, character led creative delivered some of the strongest engagement and conversion results, showing the importance of distinctive creative hooks when reaching warm audiences. 

Campaign results (combined):

• +5.1 million impressions
• 15.5k clicks
• 181 conversions

Meta results:

• +2.2 million impressions
• 11.5k clicks
• 128 conversions

Programmatic (display and native ads) results:

• +2.9 million impressions
• 4k clicks
• 53 conversions

The results highlighted the importance of optimising future journeys around click-to-call behaviour, particularly for urgent or service-led enquiries where customers may prefer to speak to someone directly. 

Overall, the campaign successfully built awareness for Certas Energy’s Heating Services across highly specific target areas, while generating direct enquiries through a focused mix of paid social, native and display advertising.