Google Local Services Ads are the pay-per-lead ads that appear above regular search ads and the map when someone searches for a plumber, a roofer, a cleaner or a lawyer nearby. You pay for a call, a message or a booking, not for a click, and the ads show only on Google Search and Google Maps.
In the past twelve months Google changed three things that affect every advertiser:
- October 20, 2025: one Google Verified badge replaced Google Guaranteed, Google Screened and License Verified. The money-back guarantee ended.
- August 2026: Local Services Ads (LSA) started moving into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with a pay-per-lead goal. The old dashboard closes on migration day.
- October 1, 2026: missed calls during business hours can now be charged as leads.
This guide covers each change, what moves into Google Ads and what doesn’t, which leads you pay for, what leads cost by trade, and what to do before your account migrates. Every rule below was checked against Google’s help pages on October 18, 2026, with a link next to it.
What Changed, and When
| Date | Change | Who it affects | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 20, 2025 | One Google Verified badge replaces Google Guaranteed, Google Screened and License Verified | All LSA advertisers | Local Services Help |
| December 7, 2025 | Last booking date covered by the money-back guarantee | Customers who booked through LSA | Local Services Help |
| August 2026 | First wave of migration into Performance Max | Select US advertisers in nine home and storefront categories | Google Ads Help |
| October 1, 2026 | Missed calls in business hours charged after 20 seconds | LSA advertisers | How leads work |
| Late 2026 | Second wave of migration | Service-area businesses without a storefront, accounts with custom bidding or booking | Google Ads Help |
| 2027 | Final wave | Remaining categories and all accounts outside the US | Google Ads Help |
Google’s help page lists the missed-call rules but not their start date. The October 1, 2026 date comes from Google’s notice to advertisers, quoted by Search Engine Roundtable.
Local Services Ads vs Google Ads Search Campaigns
| Local Services Ads | Search ads | |
|---|---|---|
| You pay for | A valid lead: call, message or booking | A click |
| Targeting | Service types and areas, no keywords | Keywords, locations, audiences |
| Where ads show | Google Search and Google Maps | Google Search, plus search partners unless you turn them off |
| Before you can run | Business screening and verification, 3-4 weeks on average in the US (Google) | An account and a payment method |
| What decides your position | Bid, response speed, reviews, profile quality | Bid, ad quality, landing page |
With Local Services Ads, customers contact you straight from the ad. There is no landing page to build, and no keyword list to control which searches you appear for. Search ads give you that control and charge for every click. For when each one makes sense and how we run them in one account, see how Local Services Ads compare with Search ads.
Google Guaranteed Is Gone: What the Google Verified Badge Means
Until October 2025, home service businesses showed a Google Guaranteed badge, professional services like lawyers and financial planners showed Google Screened, and some trades showed License Verified by Google. On October 20, 2025 Google replaced all three with one badge: Google Verified (Search Engine Roundtable, quoting Google’s announcement).
What this means in practice:
- The money-back guarantee is gone. Customers could ask Google for a refund only for services booked through LSA before December 7, 2025, within 30 days of the job being finished (Google). If your website, truck or estimates still promise «Google Guaranteed», take it off: there is no guarantee behind it anymore.
- Existing advertisers don’t need to do anything. If you passed verification, the badge was applied automatically and your ads kept running.
- Ranking doesn’t change. Google says the switch to one badge does not affect how Local Services Ads rank.
- New advertisers get the badge by passing the same screening and verification as before.
The Move to Performance Max, Wave by Wave
Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign type with a pay-per-lead goal (Google Ads Help). The name causes confusion, because these are not regular Performance Max campaigns. Regular Performance Max charges per click and shows ads across YouTube, Gmail, Display and Search. Pay-per-lead campaigns stay on Search and Maps, in the same ad positions as before, and you still pay only for valid leads.
The campaigns have no keywords. They are built from your Google Business Profile, your service categories and your service areas, so headlines, videos and sitelinks don’t apply.
| Wave | When | Who moves |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | August 2026 | Select US advertisers in plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving |
| 2 | Late 2026 | Service-area businesses without a storefront; accounts with custom bidding or booking configurations |
| 3 | 2027 | Accounts outside the US and categories not migrated in 2026 |
The account administrator gets an email 14 days before migration, a reminder 7 days before, and a confirmation after. On migration day the old dashboard stops working: logging in sends you to the campaign overview in Google Ads. Google says to allow up to two weeks for the migration to finish and performance to settle.
You can’t create a new pay-per-lead campaign inside Google Ads yet. New advertisers still start at g.co/localservices.
Handyman services are not on the August list. HandyBandi, a handyman company in Chicago whose Local Services Ads we run, falls into a later wave. Everything in the checklist below can be done before the 14-day email arrives, and that is how we are preparing that account.
What Changes Inside Your Account
| Before (Local Services dashboard) | After (Google Ads) | |
|---|---|---|
| Bidding | Manual bidding, including a maximum cost per lead | Manual bidding deprecated |
| Targets by category | A separate Target CPA for each category | One Target CPA for the whole campaign. Different targets need separate campaigns |
| Callouts | BBB callout available | BBB callouts removed. Up to 6 callouts per category; Google recommends using at least 6 others |
| Photos | Business photos | Carried over, plus up to 100 more in Campaigns > Assets |
| Reports | Impressions, clicks, weekly spend, ad-level data | Not carried over |
| Lead history | Contacts, messages, call recordings | Carried over |
| Name, address, hours | Edited in the dashboard | Synced one way from your Google Business Profile |
| Insurance and license re-verification | Required | No longer required, though Google may ask for other checks |
| Where things are | One dashboard | Budget, bidding, areas, service types: Campaigns > Settings. Leads: Goals > Conversions > Leads |
Source for every row: Google Ads Help.
Three of these need attention.
Budget. Google divides your weekly budget by 7 to get a daily average, and caps monthly charges at that daily average × 30.4. A $700 weekly budget gives $100 a day and a monthly cap of $3,040. Single days can go over $100. The month cannot go over the cap.
Business Profile sync. Your name, address and hours now come from Google Business Profile. Small edits sync within 24 hours. A change to the business name, storefront address or primary category goes to review, usually for 24 to 48 hours, and the campaign may pause until it is approved. Don’t change your primary category in the week you need the most calls.
What «conversions» means. In a pay-per-lead campaign the Conversions column shows charged leads. A charged lead is not a booked job. If you want to know cost per job, you need your own record of which leads turned into work: a CRM, a spreadsheet, or call tracking tied to your booking system.
Checklist Before Your Migration Date
- Export your reports now. Impressions, clicks and weekly spend don’t transfer. Google says a download page for old reports will be available «soon»; until then, take screenshots of anything you want to keep, especially cost per lead by month.
- Check your Google Business Profile. Name, address, hours and primary category will overwrite what the ads use. Fix them before migration, not after, so the campaign doesn’t pause for review in its first week.
- Decide whether one Target CPA fits. A company that runs plumbing and HVAC in one account gets one target across both. If leads in one category are worth much more, plan a separate campaign for it.
- Replace the BBB callout. Write at least six callouts per category that a customer would care about: same-day service, licensed in your state, free estimates, financing.
- Check who gets lead alerts. Every account user and direct manager is opted in by default. Remove former employees, and make sure at least one person who answers leads stays opted in.
- Match your hours to the phone. This one costs money if you skip it. The next section explains why.
- Set up a record of booked jobs if you don’t have one, so you can compare cost per job before and after migration.
Which Leads You Pay For (Rules from October 1, 2026)
Google notified advertisers that from October 1, 2026 it changes how call leads from Local Services Ads are charged. The rules are on Google’s How leads work page:
| Contact | Charged? | Condition |
|---|---|---|
| Answered call | Yes, if valid | Judged on the conversation. The 20-second rule doesn’t apply |
| Missed call during business hours | Yes | The caller stayed on the line for more than 20 seconds |
| Missed call outside business hours or ad schedule | No | A missed call is charged only if it falls in both your business hours and your active ad schedule |
| Call to voicemail or an automated greeting in business hours | Yes | Counts as connected. Charged after 20 seconds, whether or not the caller leaves a message |
| Phone menu («press 1 for…») | Yes | The 20 seconds start at the first key press. A caller who hangs up without pressing a key is not charged |
| Missed call under 20 seconds that you call back | Depends | Your callback is judged as an answered call |
| Text or email message | Yes | A valid lead |
| Booking request | Yes | US and Canada only |
| Same customer again within 15 days | No | Follow-ups from the same number or email within 15 days aren’t charged again. After 15 days of no contact, a new lead |
| Spam, duplicates, low-quality contacts | No | Filtered at first contact |
«Business hours» means the hours in your Google Business Profile. That makes your profile hours a billing setting. If the profile says 7 AM to 9 PM and the phone is answered until 5 PM, every call between 5 and 9 that waits 20 seconds is a lead you pay for and nobody takes. A voicemail greeting doesn’t help: in business hours it counts as a connected call.
You have three options:
- Set the ad schedule to the hours someone answers. Your Business Profile can keep its full hours, and missed calls outside the ad schedule aren’t charged.
- Change the profile hours if they are wrong anyway.
- Cover the gap with an answering service or on-call staff who can book the job, so the lead you pay for turns into work.
For HandyBandi we took the first option: the profile shows the hours the business works, and the ads run only when the phones are covered.
Missed calls also hurt your ranking. Google lists responsiveness as a ranking factor and says missed calls «may negatively affect» it (Google). An unanswered call now costs you twice: once as a charged lead, and again as a lower position.
Google Local Services Ads Cost in 2026
Google doesn’t publish a price list. The price of a lead depends on your location, the job type, the lead type and your bidding. Message leads usually cost less than calls, but not always: Google prices each lead by how likely the customer is to book (Google).
The most recent figures by trade come from 99 Calls, which compared average cost per charged lead in its own LSA campaigns in 2025 and 2026:
| Trade | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appliance repair | $20.33 | $34.35 | +69.0% |
| Junk removal | $19.85 | $33.14 | +67.0% |
| Landscaping | $22.67 | $37.29 | +64.5% |
| Handyman | $25.06 | $38.51 | +53.7% |
| Electrical | $28.58 | $43.15 | +51.0% |
| Roofing | $73.62 | $106.87 | +45.2% |
| Cleaning services | $22.94 | $33.21 | +44.8% |
| Window repair | $46.83 | $59.99 | +28.1% |
| Water damage | $171.64 | $215.31 | +25.4% |
| Tree services | $33.93 | $37.77 | +11.3% |
| Painting | $32.94 | $33.06 | +0.4% |
| Plumbing | $70.06 | $66.17 | -5.6% |
Source: 99 Calls campaign data for categories with at least 30 leads in both years, published in a Lead Smart Inc. press release, September 2026. Lead Smart runs a pay-per-call network, and neither company disclosed the number of accounts or the months compared. Use the table for direction, not as a quote for your city.
The direction is clear: 11 of 12 trades paid more per lead in 2026 than in 2025, and seven paid at least 40% more. Plumbing was the only trade that got cheaper.
If you are comparing this with Search ads, our Google Ads cost calculator estimates cost per click and cost per lead by industry.
Bad Leads and Credits
Google reassesses charged leads for 30 days. Leads it later finds to be poor quality, duplicates or invalid are credited to your account balance automatically, usually within 30 days, and some within the first 24 hours (Google). The original charge still appears on your invoice, so check the credits as well as the invoice when you reconcile.
Each lead shows one of four statuses in the Charge Status column: Charged, Not charged, In review or Credited.
What doesn’t get credited:
- leads marked «job type not serviced» or «geo not serviced». Keep your service types and areas to the jobs and places you actually take, because a lead for work you don’t do is yours to pay for;
- health care, tax specialists, and any advertiser in Europe, the Middle East or Africa.
You can also rate each lead in the lead survey. Google says it «may occasionally» credit leads reported this way. Google’s current help pages describe no separate dispute form for individual leads.
How Local Services Ads Rank
Google lists these ranking inputs (Google):
- Bid. After migration this is the campaign’s Target CPA, not a manual cost per lead.
- Responsiveness. How fast you answer calls and messages. Missed calls count against you.
- Search context. The service searched for, the time, the location.
- Relevance. How well your services and bio match the search.
- Contact options. Turning on message and booking leads gives customers more ways to reach you, which matters at night and on weekends.
- Profile quality. Rating, number of reviews, average response time, good photos, and the verification checks you’ve passed.
Reviews for Local Services Ads are managed in your Google Business Profile, not in a separate account (Google). Work on reviews helps your ads and your Maps listing at once, which is one more reason to keep the profile in order. Our Google Business Profile optimization guide covers the rest.
Local Services Ads, Search Ads, or Both
- Your category is in the program and most jobs start with a phone call: start with Local Services Ads.
- You want specific high-value jobs, or areas and services LSA won’t let you pick: Search ads, with keyword control and your own landing pages.
- Most home service businesses: both, managed by one person, so you don’t bid twice for the same customer. Search ads also keep running after the Local Services budget is spent.
If you already run Search ads, check them for wasted spend before you add Local Services Ads: broad match, search partners and missing negative keywords are where service businesses usually lose money.
We set up and manage both types in one account that stays in your name. See our Google Ads management page.
