Are Local Services Ads worth it for a home-service company?
Short answer
Often, yes, provided someone answers every lead, the review rating in your ad holds up beside the companies shown next to you, and a booked job from the ads costs clearly less than that job earns. Your own account and booking records answer that last question, so check them before deciding.
Local Services Ads (LSA) are worth it for a home-service company when someone answers every lead, the review rating in the ad holds up next to the competitors beside it, and a booked job from the ads costs clearly less than it earns. When one of those is missing, the ads can cost more than they return.
What you’re paying for
A lead here means a call or a message from one homeowner who picked your ad. You aren’t charged for a click, and the lead is sent to you alone. Google screens a business before it can run Local Services Ads, and your review rating is shown in the ad. Whether Google offers them for your trade, and what the screening involves, changes from time to time, so check Google’s current list before planning around them.
When they tend to pay off
Urgent work at a company that picks up the phone is the best case. A homeowner in El Cajon whose air conditioning has failed in August isn’t reading websites. They look at the top of the page and call one of the few rated companies there. The conditions that favor LSA:
- Calls are answered live during the hours the ad runs, including evenings if you list them.
- Your review rating looks at least as good as the ones shown next to it.
- The job types switched on in the profile are jobs you want and can get to.
- The typical job is worth much more than the lead costs.
When they tend to disappoint
The trouble starts when you pay for leads that don’t turn into jobs. The causes are usually ordinary: calls going to voicemail, a profile that accepts job types or areas you’d turn down, a rating that sends the homeowner to the company beside you, or jobs too small to carry the lead price. If the lead costs a large share of what a minor repair earns, the ad can be busy and still lose money.
Each of these is something to fix or switch off before spending more. The ad type isn’t at fault.
How to judge it with your own numbers
What a booked job costs tells you more than what a lead costs. I won’t quote a typical lead price, because it varies by trade, area and season, and Google changes it. Your account and your booking records hold the real figures.
| Question | Where the answer comes from |
|---|---|
| What did the leads cost in total? | The charges in your LSA account for the period |
| How many were real customers for jobs you do? | Going through the lead list one by one |
| How many became booked jobs? | Your own booking records |
| What did each booked job cost? | Total cost divided by booked jobs |
| What is that job worth? | Your average invoice and margin, plus any repeat work |
If a booked job costs clearly less than it earns, the ads are worth running, and the next question is how many more leads you can handle. If it doesn’t, find the step that is leaking before deciding the ads don’t work. By the same sum, a good cost per lead is one that leaves a booked job costing clearly less than it earns.
What they don’t do
Each lead is bought once, and when the spending stops, the calls from that ad stop with it. Running them doesn’t improve your position in the map pack (the three businesses Google lists beside a map) or in the regular results. Google says its ads and its unpaid rankings are separate. So I treat LSA as the part of the plan that buys calls today, and local SEO as the part that builds calls you don’t pay for one at a time. Managed together, the ad spend can be pointed at the areas and job types where you don’t yet show up unpaid, and reduced where you do.