Local Services Ads vs Google Ads for contractors (2026)

• You pay per lead, not per click. Per Google, a charged lead is an answered call, a missed call during business hours where the caller stayed on more than 20 seconds, or a text, email, voicemail or booking request. A repeat contact from the same customer within 15 days is not charged again.
• Invalid leads are not charged, and charged leads are reassessed for 30 days and credited automatically if found invalid.
• Bidding can maximize leads, aim at a target cost per lead, or cap what you pay per lead.
• The listing carries Google's Google Verified badge, which replaced Google Guaranteed and Google Screened from October 2025. Per Google, garage door services, locksmiths and health care cannot run ads while their checks are still in progress.

Google does not publish a lead price. One lead generation vendor, 99 Calls, reported Q1 2026 averages from its own clients of $56.90 for plumbing, $76.45 for HVAC, $65.80 for roofing and $35.70 for electrical. That is one vendor's client data, not a market average.

• You pay when someone clicks. Whether that click becomes a call depends on your ad, your landing page and whether someone answers the phone.
• You choose the searches you bid on, the wording of the ad and the page it sends people to, and you can exclude searches like jobs or DIY with negative keywords.
• There is no minimum spend. You set a daily budget; Google can spend up to twice it on a given day but never more than 30.4 times it in a month.
• For cost figures by trade, see how much Google Ads cost for contractors.

Starting August 2026, Google is migrating Local Services Ads into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. It began with select US home service advertisers in plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving, widens in late 2026, and moves non-US accounts in 2027.

• Per Google, the weekly budget becomes a daily budget (the weekly figure divided by 7), with the same 30.4x monthly cap as other Google Ads campaigns.
• Bidding narrows to Maximize Conversions or Target CPA. Manual max-per-lead bidding goes away.
• The Verified badge carries over, and the ads still show only on Search and Maps.

In practice, the line between the two products is blurring: both will live in one Google Ads account, with different billing.

• Local Services Ads suit a trade where most jobs start with a phone call, and an owner who would rather pay per call than manage keywords and landing pages.
• Search ads suit a business that wants control over which searches it shows for, what the ad says and where people land, or that sells a service Local Services Ads do not cover.
• Running both is common: the Local Services Ad sits at the top, the search ad below it, and together they take more of the page.
• With either one, the money is wasted if nobody answers. A paid lead that goes to voicemail is still a paid lead.

Nova Solutions manages Google and Meta ads for a flat $397 a month for up to about $2,000 of monthly spend and $897 for up to about $5,000, with the spend paid to Google directly. For how agencies price this, see Google Ads management fee structures explained. If calls go unanswered while you are on a job, missed-call text-back texts the caller back within 60 seconds.

Google help pages on Local Services Ads pricing and charged leads, bidding, badges and verification, the move to Performance Max and budgets after the move; the Google Verified announcement (August 20, 2025); Google, how ads work and daily budgets; WordStream, 2026 Google Ads benchmarks; 99 Calls, a vendor reporting its own client data. Read November 8 and 9, 2026. These are published figures, not Nova Solutions results.