Local Services Ads: the managed system

01Where we started

The July audit found four gaps. None of them were effort problems. All four were the same shape: a lead arrives, and nothing happens fast enough.

Against $3,298.84 of spend from February to July and 81 leads, the money was not being wasted on bad leads. It was being lost after the lead arrived.

02What is already running

Each audit finding now has a system behind it, not a promise.

03What changes in August: Local Services moves into Performance Max

Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads as a Performance Max pay-per-lead campaign. The rollout begins in August 2026 with selected US home service advertisers, HVAC among them, and continues through 2027.

What stays the same

• Ads still appear only on Search and Maps.
• Still keywordless, still driven by your Google Business Profile.
• You still pay only for valid leads.

What actually changes

• Manual bidding goes away. Setting a maximum cost per lead is no longer supported, and per-category bidding is replaced by one campaign-level target.
• Weekly budgets become daily averages, converted automatically.
• Management moves into Google Ads, alongside the rest of the account.

The practical effect of losing manual cost-per-lead control is that the account gets steered by the quality signals you feed it rather than by a bid ceiling. Which makes marking booked leads, the fourth audit finding, go from housekeeping to the main lever.

04How the account gets managed

Four things, on a fixed rhythm.

Every day

• New leads handled on arrival. Texts answered in under a minute, calls caught when the office cannot get to them, both booked onto the schedule.
• Booked leads marked back to Google. Every lead that turns into a job gets reported, which is how the algorithm learns what a good lead looks like for you.

Every week

• Budget and pacing. Spend checked against booked jobs rather than against lead count, and adjusted where the return justifies it.
• Lead quality review. Invalid leads flagged for credit, and the pattern behind them fed back into targeting.

Every month

• A written account of what came in, what got booked, and what it cost. Built from our own records, so it does not depend on Google's dashboard surviving the migration.

05One decision to make: the phone number

Local Services calls and your existing ad calls can either share one number or run on separate ones. Our recommendation is one number, with office-first answering on it.

• No Local Services call goes to voicemail. Your office rings first. If nobody picks up, the assistant catches it and books rather than losing it. That is the second audit finding closed for Local Services calls too.
• Google rewards answered calls. Responsiveness feeds your Local Services ranking, so a call that gets answered helps you twice.
• Attribution does not need a second number. Google already tells us which leads came from Local Services, so splitting numbers would add moving parts without adding information.

06Terms

The first 30 days are setup and stabilisation: systems wired to your account, lead handling switched on, the reporting baseline established. No per-appointment fee during that period.

From day 31, $100 per booked appointment. You pay when the system puts a job on your calendar, not for activity, impressions or leads that go nowhere.

Against a current cost of roughly $188 per booked job, the question worth asking on the call is not what the management costs. It is what happens to that $188 when 58% of message leads stop going unanswered.

07What we agreed on August 10

Recorded here so the decisions live with the document rather than in anyone's inbox. Items marked done were completed the same day.