When a homeowner searches "plumber near me," Google shows them two kinds of paid results. At the very top sit the Local Services Ads: a row of businesses with a "Google Guaranteed" badge, a star rating and a phone button. Below that are the regular Google Ads: the text ads with headlines and a link to a website. Both say "Sponsored." They work completely differently, and the right order to turn them on depends on your business.
How Local Services Ads work
Local Services Ads (LSAs) are pay-per-lead. You don't pay for clicks; you pay when a homeowner calls or messages you through the ad. Google sets the price per lead by trade and market, and you set a weekly budget. To run them, your business passes a background and license check, which earns the Google Guaranteed badge. Your ranking in that top row depends mostly on your review rating and count, how quickly you answer the phone, your proximity to the searcher and your budget.
What's good about them: the leads are usually real homeowners who need the service now, you're only charged for actual contacts, and you can dispute leads that turn out to be spam or wrong. What's hard: you have very little control. There's no landing page to improve, no ad copy to test, and if you miss calls, Google quietly shows you less.
How regular Google Ads work
Regular Search ads are pay-per-click. You choose the searches you want to show for ("water heater replacement fort worth"), write the ad, send the click to a page on your site and pay each time someone clicks. The cost per click in home services ranges from a few dollars to well over fifty for emergency trades in big metros. What you pay per lead depends entirely on how well the landing page turns clicks into calls.
What's good about them: total control. You pick the exact searches, exclude the ones you don't want ("plumber salary," "DIY"), write offers, test pages and track every call back to the keyword. What's hard: it punishes a weak website. If your landing page is slow or vague, you'll pay for clicks that never call.
Which one first?
For most home service businesses, the honest answer depends on two things: how good your reviews are and how good your website is.
- Strong reviews, weak website: start with LSAs. They don't need a landing page, and your rating will rank you well in the top row. Fix the site while the LSA leads come in.
- Weak reviews, strong website: start with Search ads. LSAs will bury a 12-review profile under competitors with 300. Search ads let the website do the convincing instead.
- Both strong: run both. They sit in different spots on the page and together you own the top of the results.
- Both weak: fix the foundation first. Ads on top of a bad profile and a bad site is the fastest way to decide "marketing doesn't work." This is why our process puts the foundation before demand.
The mistake that kills both
Missed calls. LSAs track your answer rate and show you less when it's bad. Search ads charge you for the click whether or not anyone picks up. If your phone goes to voicemail during jobs, you're paying Google to send homeowners to your competitors. Before you turn either on, decide who answers: you, an office person, an answering service or a setter team. At minimum, run missed-call text-back so a voicemail becomes a conversation.
A simple way to compare them for your business
After 60 days, pull three numbers for each: what you spent, how many booked jobs it produced and the revenue from those jobs. Not leads, not clicks, booked jobs. Divide spend by jobs. That's your cost per job, and it's the only number that tells you which channel deserves more budget. If you want help setting that tracking up before you spend a dollar, that's the first thing we do on Google Ads engagements.