Pick up your phone and search “emergency plumber near me”.
Top of the screen, before anything else, is a block of businesses with photos, star ratings and a call button. That is Local Services Ads. Below it sit the ordinary Search ads. Below those, the map pack. Organic results are somewhere off the bottom of a phone screen entirely.
Now ask where your budget currently sits in that stack.
For most contractors the answer is that all of it is fighting for the second and third positions on that list while the first one goes to somebody else. That is the case for LSA in one sentence, and it has not changed.
What has changed is nearly everything about how you run it. Three things moved in the last year, and most of the advice you will find online still describes the old product.
What actually changed
The Google Guaranteed badge is gone. Google retired it in October 2025, along with the $2,000 consumer money-back backing that came with it, and replaced it with a single blue Google Verified badge.
That matters in two directions. If your website or your truck still advertises the Google Guarantee and the money-back protection, that is now inaccurate and worth fixing today. And if you were considering LSA specifically because of that guarantee, the reason you had has been withdrawn.
Manual lead disputes ended. You used to be able to open a charged lead and argue it. Google replaced that with automated review, issuing credits on its own judgement, typically within about seventy two hours.
What you have left is the short survey after each lead. That is now your only input into lead quality, and it is the single habit worth building, because it is the only signal you can still send.
There is some reporting that a dispute route returns inside the Google Ads interface after migration, covering wrong service, out of area, spam and duplicates. Check what your own account actually offers rather than trusting either me or a blog post from last year, since this is moving.
LSA is moving into Google Ads. The first accounts began shifting into Performance Max campaigns in August 2026, with the rest following through 2027.
Practical consequences already reported: the manual maximum cost per lead goes away, bidding becomes automated against one campaign level target cost per acquisition, and your weekly budget becomes a daily budget multiplied by seven.
If you have never touched Google Ads, your LSA account is about to land inside it. Worth reading what Performance Max does with a budget before that happens to you rather than after.
What it costs
Reported 2026 cost per lead for most home service trades runs roughly $30 to $80. HVAC and plumbing sit around $51 to $57. Remodeling runs higher, commonly $60 to $150, because the jobs are worth more and the auction reflects it.
The number that matters is not that one. It is that figure divided by the share of leads you actually win, the same arithmetic I went through for shared lead marketplaces.
The difference, and it is a real advantage, is that an LSA lead is somebody who chose you off a list and pressed call. It is not sold to four competitors simultaneously. Win rates are correspondingly better, which is why a $55 LSA lead frequently beats a $50 shared one despite looking more expensive.
What you still control
Automation took the bidding. It did not take these.
Answering the phone. LSA ranking factors in responsiveness, and a missed call is both a lost job and a worse position tomorrow. If calls go to voicemail after five, you are paying for placement you then decline to use. This is the highest return thing on the list and it is not a marketing task.
Reviews. They show in the ad unit itself, they feed ranking, and they are the only visible difference between you and the two businesses either side of you. Ask every customer, and reply to the bad ones properly, because how you answer a one star review is read by the next person deciding who to call.
Your service list and service area. Both are set by you and both are usually too broad. If you do not do sewer line replacement, untick it. If you will not drive forty minutes, cut the radius. Every wrong lead you pay for and then decline is money and a survey response you did not need to file.
The survey after every lead. Ninety seconds. It is your only remaining input to the credit system, and contractors who skip it are the ones who complain loudest about lead quality.
Not bidding against yourself. This is the one nobody checks. If you run Search ads on “emergency plumber” while your LSA runs on the same query, you are buying two slots on one screen for one customer. Look at your search terms report, find where the overlap is heaviest, and decide deliberately which position you want rather than paying for both by accident.
When it is the right first spend
You are a licensed trade with the screening to pass. Background checks and license verification are the barrier and also the moat. It filters out competitors who cannot be bothered.
Your work is urgent. Emergency plumbing, HVAC in July, lockouts, roof leaks. The person at the top of the list gets called first and the other four often never get called at all.
You answer the phone properly. Said twice on purpose.
When it is not
You cannot clear the screening, or your license situation is complicated. Fix that first.
Your service is considered rather than urgent. A kitchen remodel involves three quotes and a fortnight of thinking. The advantage of being first to be called is smaller, and $150 a lead is a lot to pay for a position that matters less.
Nobody is available to answer during the working day. The system will punish you for it and you will conclude the product does not work.
Before lunch
Four things, about forty minutes.
Search your own main service plus your city, on a phone, not a desktop, and screenshot what the top of the screen looks like. That is your market, ranked.
Then check your website and any printed material for the words “Google Guaranteed” or a mention of the $2,000 backing. If they are there, update them, because that program ended last October.
Open your LSA service list and area settings and cut anything you do not actually want. Untick the services, tighten the radius.
Last, if you also run Search ads, pull your search terms report and look for queries where both your LSA and your Search ad are showing. Decide which one you want to be paying for.
Whether any of this clears financially still comes down to the cost per customer arithmetic, which is the same calculation regardless of which Google product is charging you.
My notes on performance marketing cover where this sits in an account. If you’d like a second read on your own setup before the migration reaches you, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch.