Gain Qualified Leads with Google’s Local Service Ads
Are you a local service provider looking for qualified leads? Do you want to pay only for leads that are relevant? Do you want premium advertising space? Well, if you’re a business that offers a local service such as house cleaning, plumbing, or locksmiths, to name a few, then Google’s Local Service Ads is right for you!
Local Service Ads connects you with customers with high intent to book your service. It’s also a pay-per-lead model: you only pay for leads that are related to your business and the services you offer.
If you get charged for an irrelevant lead, Google makes it easy to dispute the lead through their web interface or app. LSA is only offered in specific geographic areas for certain business-types so please be sure to check your eligibility.
As you can imagine, Google requires more business information than is required to create a Google Ads account in order to sign up for Local Service Ads. Your business must submit a background check for the business owner, business entity and possibly, depending on the business type, other service professionals who work for the business. The background check is handled by a third party and is commonly-known the bottleneck the entire process – so if you are interested, do this as soon as possible!
You must also submit a copy of the business insurance and license. For business-specific requirements please refer to Google’s helpful article. It may take up to 2-3 weeks to get approved, but their LSA team is very helpful in getting your local service ads up and running.
Local Service Ads are unique in that they’re featured in prime real estate at the very top of the search engine results page. Ads also feature the ‘GOOGLE GUARANTEED’ badge meaning that for all jobs booked through LSA, customers are covered up to $2,000.00 in insurance. Failure to reasonably satisfy customers would likely negatively impact your eligibility in the program. Once a user clicks on your ad they have the option to call or message your business. Calls are routed through a Google forwarding number, recorded by Google, and monitored so that obviously irrelevant leads will be automatically archived and you aren’t charged. Before the call connects, both the customer and the business will hear an automated recording to notify all parties of the Google’s presence during the call. You have up to 14 days to answer a new lead before they are automatically archived. For more details on how your data is managed, please refer to Google’s privacy policy.
To access your Local Service Ads you can either visit the LSA website or use the mobile app on your Android or Apple device. Within the LSA interface, you’ll be able to edit information such as geographic area, job type, budget, and business offers. Google also gives you the option to pause ads, but if you’re pausing for the purposes of holiday hours or similar, Google instead recommends changing the business hours for the particular day since there may be a lag when you toggle the ‘Pause Ads’ button.
As far as budgets, you set a weekly budget and Google approximates leads at a certain rate for a given business. Average is around $23/lead for our specific industry. After your budget is spent, the local service ad will be placed beneath paid listings, the ‘GOOGLE GUARANTEED’ badge is removed, and leads are free. You can review Google’s policies on free local service ads.
