Somebody typed your trade and your town into their phone about four minutes ago. They were not browsing and they were not undecided. They had a problem, and the only question left was who they were going to call about it. Google Ads is the channel where that question gets answered, and it is the one where being absent costs you the job outright.
If you run Local Services Ads, the pay-per-lead ones with the badge, they are being folded into Google Ads and turned into Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. Google's first phase starts in August 2026 for United States home and storefront service businesses. The trades named in that first phase include roofing, lawn care, house cleaning, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, pest control and moving.
This is the part people panic about and it is the part that is not changing. Google's wording is that you still only pay for valid leads, such as phone calls and messages, rather than ad clicks. The billing model survives the move intact.
Once your account migrates you lose access to the Local Services Ads dashboard, and your historical performance reports do not come with you. Your lead history does. If those old reports matter to you, that is a thing to save before the date, not after.
The migration is automatic and Google says no action is required from you. Notification emails land fourteen days and seven days beforehand. The risk here is not the change itself. It is a campaign quietly moving into an interface nobody in your business has ever opened.
Google sells local businesses two genuinely different things and they get talked about as if they were one. They sit in different places on the results page, they charge you on different events, and the right answer is often both.
You are billed when someone calls or messages.
These are the ones with the verified badge, sitting right at the top above everything else. You are not paying for people to look at you or click through. You pay when contact actually happens, which makes the maths unusually easy to follow for a channel like this.
This is the format moving into Performance Max. It suits trades where the job is urgent and the caller wants somebody today: a leak, a lockout, a tree on the drive.
You are billed when someone clicks through.
Standard Search campaigns, sitting above and below the map. You pay for the visit whether or not it turns into anything, which sounds worse and often is not, because you control exactly which searches you show up for and exactly where the click lands.
This is the one that suits considered work. Extensions, remodels, commercial jobs, anything where somebody researches for two weeks before they call anyone at all.
Your ad spend is separate and goes straight to Google on your own card. We never mark it up.
It starts here and moves with scope. Five services across six towns is more work than one service in one town, and the quote says so.
The ad does its job. Somebody searched for gutter cleaning, saw you, and clicked. Then they land on a homepage that talks about the whole company, and they have to go looking for the one thing they came for. Most of them do not bother. You paid for every one of those visits.
The page matches what they typed. If they searched gutter cleaning in Lower Burrell, the headline says gutter cleaning in Lower Burrell. Nothing on it competes with the reason they came, and there is exactly one thing to do next.
This is included, not quoted as an extra. Building pages is what this company already does all day, so it would be strange to charge you again for the one page that decides whether the ad money did anything.
Google prices you partly on how relevant your page is to the search behind the click. A page built for that exact search is treated better than a homepage sent everywhere, so relevance is not only a conversion argument. It shows up in the bill.
Conversion tracking goes on calls and form fills, so you find out which searches produce actual work instead of which produce traffic. Without this the reporting is decoration and the optimization is guesswork.
Search is faster than most channels because the intent is already there, and it is still not instant. Here is the shape of it, including the weeks where you are spending and the data is too thin to tell you much.
Account structure, campaigns, keywords, the negative keyword list that stops you paying for the wrong searches, conversion tracking, and the landing page. If a pay-per-lead campaign is in scope, verification status gets checked here, because that is the thing most likely to hold up a launch.
Ads run and the early data is messy. Some searches you thought were valuable are not, and some you never considered are. This is where the negative keyword list earns its keep, because the fastest win in this channel is usually cutting spend rather than adding it.
Budget moves toward the searches that produce booked work rather than the ones that produce clicks. Ad copy and the landing page get reworked against what people actually did. This is the first stretch where the numbers are worth drawing a conclusion from.
What was spent, what came back, what changed and why, in plain English rather than a dashboard export with forty metrics and no conclusion. You keep your own login to the ad account throughout and can check any of it yourself.
Worth understanding before you sign anywhere, not only with us. Plenty of agencies run clients inside the agency's own account because it is quicker to set up, and it means that on the day you leave, the campaigns, the keyword data and the conversion history all stay behind with them.
Your Google Ads account, your conversion history, your landing page.
We take access to yours instead of building you inside ours. Your card is on it, your name is on it, and the performance history that makes the bidding smarter over time accumulates on your side of the line.
The landing page we build for you is yours as well, the same as any other page we would build.
No buyout, no export request, no hostage situation.
There is nothing to hand over because nothing was ever held on our side. We come off the permissions list and every campaign, keyword and conversion carries on sitting exactly where it already was.
If you are with someone else now, ask them this question first. The answer tells you most of what you need to know about the relationship.
Still not sure? Hand this page to an AI that has no stake in the answer, tell it about your business, and let it tell you whether paid search is even the right place for your money.
Opens in ChatGPT or Claude with the question already written. We do not see the conversation, and we do not get to edit the answer.
They are moving inside Google Ads and becoming Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. Google's first phase starts in August 2026 for United States home and storefront service businesses, and the listed trades include roofing, lawn care, house cleaning, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, pest control and moving.
The migration is automatic and Google says no action is required from you, with notification emails fourteen days and seven days beforehand. The part worth knowing is that once you are migrated you lose access to the old Local Services Ads dashboard, and your historical performance reports do not come across. Your lead history does.
Yes. That is the part people assume is being taken away, and it is not. In Google's own words you still only pay for valid leads such as phone calls and messages rather than ad clicks.
The billing model survives the move. What changes is where the campaign is managed and what it is called, which matters far more to whoever runs the account than it does to your bank balance.
The green Google Guaranteed badge was retired and replaced by the blue Google Verified badge. If your business was already verified, that status and the badge carry over into Google Ads on their own.
Google has also said that insurance and license reverification are no longer required, though they reserve the right to ask for additional checks. If you have never been verified, that is a separate process and it is worth starting before you need it rather than during a campaign.
That is the starting point, and the work in it is the campaign build and account structure, conversion tracking so calls and form fills are actually counted, keyword and negative keyword management, the custom landing page the ads point at, ongoing optimization, and monthly reporting in plain English.
It goes up from there depending on how many services and how many towns you need covered, because five service areas is genuinely more work than one. You get the number before you commit to anything.
We will not give you a single number here, because anyone who does is guessing. A click in one trade can cost a few dollars and in another it can cost more than fifty, and the honest budget depends on your trade, your towns and what one customer is worth to you. Tell us those three things and you get a real figure before you spend anything.
What we will say plainly is that ad spend is separate from the management fee, it goes to Google directly on your own card, and we never mark it up or touch it.
Yes, and it is included. Sending a paid click to a general homepage is the most common way to waste an ad budget, because the visitor arrives looking for one specific thing and has to go hunting for it.
So the page gets built for the campaign: the service they searched for, the town they are in, and one obvious thing to do next. It also helps on cost, because Google prices you partly on how relevant the page is to the search.
If people already search for what you sell, start with Google. Someone typing an emergency plumber into their phone at ten at night has decided already, and you only need to be the one they find.
Meta is the other job, going and finding people who were not looking for you yet, and it takes longer to read. For most home service businesses the honest order is Google first and Meta second. Tell us your trade and we will say which, including when the answer is neither yet.
One conversation, no deck. What you do, where you do it, and what one customer is worth to you. We come back with a real ad budget for your trade, what the management would cost at your scope, and whether paid search is the right place for the money at all. Which towns you can profitably buy clicks in is the first thing we work out, and for most of our clients that means somewhere in the Pittsburgh metro. If the ads have nowhere good to land, a landing page in 299 minutes fixes that before you buy the first click.