Local Services Ads management, judged by booked jobs.

When a homeowner searches for a repair, Local Services Ads (LSA) put a short row of Google-screened companies at the top of the results with their review ratings, and Google charges each company for every call or message its ad produces. LSA is the pay-per-lead part of my Google Ads management work.

How a Local Services Ads lead works

A lead is one homeowner contacting one business. The homeowner sees that row of screened companies above everything else on the page and picks one to call or message. That contact goes to the company they picked and to nobody else. You pay for the lead whether or not you book the job.

A lead marketplace works differently: it sells the same homeowner to several contractors at once.

What you control, and what Google decides

What you fill out is a profile that says which job types you accept, plus the areas you cover and the hours you take calls, with no keyword list and no ad text to write. Google matches that against the search and chooses which companies appear. Google has said that how close you are to the searcher, your reviews and how reliably you respond all play a part. No one outside Google can make the ad show more often, and the number of leads in a given week isn’t something I can promise. A company that lists every job type to look bigger pays for leads it then turns down.

Why answering is the biggest lever

The homeowner has other companies one tap away. Picture a plumbing company in Oceanside whose LSA calls ring through to a cell phone in a truck. A call that goes to voicemail at 7pm is a job lost, since the homeowner has already tried the next company in the row. Depending on Google’s rules at the time, it may also be a lead you paid for.

So before I look at anything else, I ask who answers and during which hours, then what happens after hours. Call tracking shows how many calls were missed and when.

Checking what you were charged for

I go through the lead list and sort every lead against what the profile asked for: a real customer in your area for a job you do, the wrong job type, outside your area, or not a customer at all. If wrong-type leads keep arriving, a profile setting is usually too broad. The share of leads that became booked jobs is also the figure that lets you compare LSA with search ads. Google’s rules on which leads it credits back change, so I check them at the time and don’t promise refunds.

The reviews in the ad

You earn the rating shown in the ad the same way you earn the reviews that help you in the map pack (the three businesses Google lists beside a map): by asking real customers after real jobs. Steady review management therefore serves the paid and the unpaid results together.

Where LSA fits beside the map pack

LSA buys a call today, and the map pack earns calls that aren’t paid for one at a time. I manage them against the same rank grid. Where you already appear in the map pack, I watch whether LSA leads are extra jobs or calls you’d have received anyway. As map pack ranking spreads across your service area, the LSA budget can come down.