Local Services Ads sit above everything else in local search, and you're only charged when someone actually contacts you. The catch: Google decides who shows, and your profile does the bidding.
Part of Google Ads management at Aesthetic.
Above the ads, above the map
Local Services Ads are a different animal to regular Google Ads: no keywords, no landing pages, no cost per click. Google verifies the business, ranks profiles like a marketplace, and charges for conversations instead of visits.
What it is
Google checks licences and insurance, badges the business, and shows your profile with reviews at the very top of local results. Leads arrive as calls and messages, you pay per lead, and junk ones can be disputed.
When it works
Plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, cleaners, builders: services people need now, found by people ready to call. It rewards businesses that answer the phone, because responsiveness feeds the ranking.
When it's the wrong tool
Long consultative sales don't fit a pay-per-conversation model, and some categories and regions aren't in the program yet. A business that can't answer promptly pays twice: the lead fee and the ranking slide.
What pay-per-lead really means
There's no bid to hide behind. Google chooses which businesses to show from signals most owners never look at, and the phone decides whether each lead was worth paying for.
I honestly wasn't expecting much when I signed on with Aesthetic, just hoped for a slight improvement with my ads. My cost per lead dropped significantly more than I thought it would, and I'm actually seeing results I can understand. They're smart, they explain things in normal human language, and they're actually nice to work with.
A Wollongong tradie, quoted in full. Read the rest on Google.
Free ROAS calculator
ROAS without margin is a vanity number. This calculator works out what your ads return after the cost of what you sell, for Google, Meta or any paid channel.
What you pay the ad platform each month.
The revenue those ads brought in.
The share of each sale you keep after the cost of the product or service.
Your ROAS
3.0x
Profitable. Every ad dollar makes money after costs.
Return needed to break even
2.2x
Profit left each month
$1,050
Kept per $1 spent on ads
$0.35
The budget you're thinking about.
What one click costs on average. Google's Keyword Planner shows this for your industry.
Out of every 100 people who click, how many buy.
What a typical customer spends in one go.
The share of each sale you keep after the cost of the product or service.
Projected ROAS
3.0x
Profitable. Every ad dollar makes money after costs.
Clicks per month
1,500
Sales per month
60
Projected revenue
$9,000
Cost per sale
$50
Return needed to break even
2.2x
Profit left each month
$1,050
Revenue divided by ad spend. A 3x ROAS means every dollar of ads brought back three dollars of revenue. It says nothing about profit until margin enters the picture.
One divided by your gross margin. At a 45% margin you need 2.2x just to cover the cost of goods and the ads. Anything below this line is a loss wearing a revenue costume.
What's left after paying for the products and the ads. Revenue is money moved; this is money kept, and it's the number your bidding targets should answer to.
The calculator runs in your browser. Your numbers aren't stored or sent anywhere.
It varies by trade and area, because lead prices are set by category demand rather than your bidding. What you control is the weekly budget and the number a lead has to clear to be worth buying.
The calculator on this page gives you that breakeven from your own job values.
Different product, different rules. Regular Google Ads auctions keywords and charges per click; Local Services Ads verify the business, rank the profile and charge per lead.
They run from a separate dashboard with separate budgets, which is why plenty of accounts run both without the two ever touching.
It's Google's tick that the business passed verification, with a money-back promise to the customer if a badged job goes wrong, up to a capped amount.
For the searcher it reads as trust. For you it's the entry fee: no verification, no badge, no placement.
Licence and insurance documents, business details, and background checks where the category requires them. It's paperwork rather than marketing, and it's where most profiles stall for weeks.
Having the documents ready before starting the application turns a month of limbo into days.
Yes, and it's the whole game. Placement follows review count and rating, how fast you answer, proximity to the searcher and profile completeness.
Budget mostly decides how often you're eligible, not who Google prefers. The profile is the bid.
Calls and messages from the ad count; the charge lands whether the job was real or not. Wrong-area, wrong-service and spam contacts can be disputed for credit, and Google grants more of those credits than most owners expect.
The catch is that nobody disputes what nobody reviews. The lead log needs a weekly read.
No. The profile is the destination, which is exactly why the program suits trades who never got around to a proper site. The leads call you, not your homepage.
A good site still compounds everything else you do, but it isn't the price of entry here.
Google runs an approved category list, mostly trades, home services and a growing set of professional services, and availability differs by country and region.
Eligibility is a five-minute check against your category and area, and it's the first thing worth confirming before planning anything else.
As fast as you'd want a customer with a burst pipe answered. Responsiveness feeds the ranking, so a missed call costs the lead and a little of every future lead.
If the tools are down a trench all day, set up a dedicated answering routine before switching the ads on.
Usually, once both make sense alone. Local Services Ads cap out at whatever demand exists in your category and area, and Search ads catch everything the profile can't: broader services, bigger areas, jobs that start with research.
The split is capacity maths, not loyalty to either format.
They're close to everything. Reviews decide whether you show, whether you're picked from the three that show, and what each lead ends up costing. A review ask after every finished job is part of the campaign, not a nicety.
Volume and recency both matter, so the pipeline never gets to rest.
Yes, same day, and you should. Paying for leads you can't service buys you bad reviews at full price.
The smarter version is matching the weekly budget to real capacity, so the pipeline hums instead of lurching between flooded and switched off.
The usual suspects: verification incomplete, a service area drawn too wide or too thin, review numbers behind the competitors, or answering habits that taught Google to skip you. Budget is rarely the reason.
Work through the profile signals in that order and the impressions usually follow.
Know the whole toolbox
Each one bids on a different moment in the buying journey, and the budget split between them matters more than any single campaign. Read how each works before Google sells you all eight.
New to the platform? Start with Google Ads management, where the eight fit together.
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A free 30-minute call with the strategist who'd run your account. Bring your service area and your review count, and leave knowing whether Local Services Ads will rank you, and what each lead can afford to cost.