Local Services Ads

Its partners check registration, an active trade license per category, a general liability certificate meeting your state minimum, and background checks on the owner and, in several categories, field staff.

Applications stall on mismatches: a license under a DBA that differs from the Google Business Profile, a certificate naming another entity, a category the license does not cover. Each bounces back and needs documents that agree.

Screening is ongoing. An expired license or certificate suspends the badge and the ads without warning, so we track expiry dates; a lapse costs a week of lead flow during re-verification.

The budget is a weekly amount tied to the leads you want.

So Local Services Ads cost per lead is not comparable to cost per click, and blending them hides both.

Trust the Local Services lead inbox over the conversion column: credited leads do not reconcile cleanly with Google Ads, so an account can look like it produced fewer leads than it did.

Local Services Ads sit inside the Google Ads account and are managed alongside Search, not in a separate silo.

You can still flag a bad lead with "Rate this lead". Google no longer credits "job type not serviced" or "geo not serviced" leads, so an accurate list of job types and service area is now the protection.

This is recurring work: a weekly pass through the leads list, rating bad leads and checking job types and area, with a written record of what was rated and credited, and what the pattern says to adjust.

Our earlier guide covers how LSA lead credits used to work.

Nobody can buy the top position, and no agency can promise one.

So review requests become campaign work: sent when the job is signed off, from the technician who did it. Answer rate is campaign work too, because an unanswered LSA call affects how often you show next week.

Check hours first. Listing hours you do not staff generates charged leads nobody answers, which costs twice: the charge and the responsiveness signal.

Search reaches the rest: queries outside your verified categories, research and comparison queries, brand terms, and areas where your Local Services Ads presence is thin.

Let Local Services Ads take the high-intent core queries in the geographies where you compete, fund Search for the rest, and run both as one pipeline. When LSA is capped out and still producing, more budget there is usually cheaper.

Roofing accounts run both particularly hard because of storm seasonality, covered on the roofing page and in Local Services Ads for roofers. To see what your site records today, run the free tracking scan.