Facebook shows your business to people who were not looking for it. Google shows it to people typing “emergency plumber near me” at 7am with a puddle in the kitchen. Google Ads for local service businesses converts better than any other paid channel for exactly that reason — and it is why the budget is so easy to burn: the same auction that sells you the 7am emergency also sells you a student researching a school project. This is the setup that keeps you on the right side of that line.
Everything here assumes the lead has somewhere to land and someone to answer it. If your follow-up is next-day and your calls are untracked, fix that before spending — the local ads article makes the same case and the reason is the same: paid traffic multiplies whatever system it lands in.
The three campaign types worth running
| Type | What it does | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Local Services Ads (LSA) | The “Google Guaranteed” block above search results and on Maps; you pay per lead, not per click, and you are screened and background-checked first | Trades, home services, legal, wellness and other eligible categories |
| Search campaigns | Text ads on the exact searches you choose, sending clicks to a page you control | Everyone — the workhorse, and the only one you fully control |
| Performance Max | One campaign across Search, Maps, YouTube, Display and Gmail, automated by Google — and now the home of migrated Local Services Ads | Businesses with solid conversion data; risky as a first campaign |
Skip Display and video “awareness” campaigns entirely at local-business budgets. They spend quickly and produce numbers that look like marketing rather than jobs.
The Local Services Ads change, and what to do about it
Google has started moving Local Services Ads out of their separate interface and into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign type, rolling out in phases by country and category. What stays the same: the ads still appear only on Search and Maps, and you still pay for valid leads — calls, messages and bookings — rather than clicks. What changes: manual bidding goes away, per-service target CPAs are replaced by a single campaign-level target, and weekly budgets become average daily budgets.
Before the migration reaches your account, export your Local Services Ads history — total spend, leads, average cost per lead, and performance by service category and location. Historical LSA reporting does not carry across, and without it you cannot tell whether the new campaign is better or worse than what you had. Check your account for the migration notice rather than assuming a date; the rollout is staged.
Budget: work backwards from jobs
- Average job value and margin. A £250 boiler service and a £6,000 bathroom justify very different costs per lead.
- Lead-to-job rate. If one in three enquiries becomes a job, an affordable £75 cost per job means £25 per lead.
- Jobs you can actually service. Ten extra jobs a month at £25 per lead and a 1-in-3 close rate is roughly £750 a month in ads. Buying more leads than you can answer is the most common way local advertisers lose money.
- Minimum viable spend. Automated bidding needs conversions to learn from — Google’s own guidance points at roughly 30 a month. Most local businesses never hit that, which is an argument for fewer campaigns with pooled data, not more.
Search campaign setup, in order
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Conversion tracking first, and properly.
Form submissions, click-to-call taps, booked appointments, and — the one most accounts miss — phone calls, imported as conversions with the source attached. The tracking guide and call tracking cover the plumbing. Without this, Google optimises for clicks and you optimise on guesswork.
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One campaign per service line, one ad group per intent.
“Boiler repair” and “bathroom installation” are different budgets, different pages and different customers. Inside each, keep ad groups tight: five to fifteen closely related keywords, so the ad can match the search.
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Keywords: phrase and exact before broad.
Start with what customers actually type — service plus place, service plus “near me”, the problem (“no hot water”), and the urgent forms (“emergency”, “same day”). Broad match works only once the account has real conversion data to steer it.
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Negatives: the list that saves half the budget.
Add before launch: free, cheap, DIY, how to, jobs, salary, training, course, apprenticeship, parts, wholesale, second hand, plus competitor brand names you do not want to pay for and towns outside your service area. Then review the search terms report weekly for the first month and add what it shows you. Every account I audit that is “not working” is missing this list.
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Location targeting: presence, not interest.
Set your radius or towns, and change the location option to people in your target area rather than people interested in it — otherwise you pay for someone in another country reading about your town.
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Ads that repeat the search.
Headline one contains the service and the place. Include the price or a price range if you can (“boiler service from £85”), the guarantee, and availability. Add every relevant asset: sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call and location assets, and lead forms where they fit.
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Landing page that matches the ad.
Never the home page. One page per service line with the offer in the headline, a form above the fold on mobile, proof, and a phone number that is tracked. A fast page is part of the ad’s cost — Google charges more for clicks to poor experiences, and visitors leave anyway.
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Schedule and devices.
If nobody answers the phone after 6pm, either run ads only when you can answer or set up missed-call text-back so the lead is captured anyway. Most local searches are mobile; check that the call button works on the phone you actually carry.
The first six weeks
| Week | Do | Do not |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Launch, watch search terms daily, add negatives | Change bids or budgets |
| 2 | Negatives again; pause obvious losers; check call tracking is logging | Add new campaigns |
| 3–4 | Switch to a smart bidding strategy once you have conversions; test a second ad per group | Judge on cost per click |
| 5–6 | Review cost per booked job by service line; scale the winner by 20% | Rebuild everything because one week was quiet |
What good looks like
Judge the account on cost per booked job and, after a quarter, on revenue per pound spent from the CRM — not clicks, not impression share, not the ads dashboard’s “conversions” unless you know exactly what is counted. A healthy local account shows most spend on a handful of high-intent keywords, a search terms report that is mostly relevant, and a cost per lead you would happily pay again tomorrow.
Mistakes that cost the most
- No conversion tracking, so every decision is a guess.
- No negative keywords.
- Sending clicks to the home page.
- Broad match on day one with automated bidding and no data.
- Letting Google’s “recommendations” auto-apply — they will broaden your targeting.
- Running ads with no way to answer the phone.
- Judging in week one.
Further reading: Local Services Ads Help · Google Ads: call reporting and conversions · Google Ads location targeting.
FAQ
How much should a local service business spend on Google Ads?
Work backwards from jobs: take your target cost per booked job, divide by your lead-to-job rate to get an affordable cost per lead, then multiply by the leads you can actually service in a month. In practice most local service businesses need a few hundred a month minimum per campaign for the data to be meaningful — below that, results swing wildly week to week.
Local Services Ads or regular search ads?
Run Local Services Ads if your trade is eligible and you can pass the screening — you pay per lead rather than per click and sit above the normal results. Run search ads alongside them for the searches LSA does not cover, and for services outside the eligible categories. Most trades benefit from both.
What is changing with Local Services Ads and Performance Max?
Google has begun moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign type, in phases. Ads still appear on Search and Maps and you still pay for valid leads, but manual bidding and per-service target CPA go away in favour of one campaign-level target, and weekly budgets become average daily budgets. Export your historical LSA reports before the migration reaches your account.
Why are my Google Ads leads poor quality?
Usually a missing negative keyword list (you are paying for “free”, “jobs”, “DIY”, “salary” and competitor-brand searches), broad match without good conversion data, or a landing page that invites anyone to fill in a form. Fix negatives first, then feed real conversions back to Google so it learns what a good lead looks like.
Want the tracking, the landing pages and the follow-up built so the ad budget lands somewhere that converts? See the lead generation packages — the ads are the last switch we flip, and the first thing that finally pays back.
