How LSA billing actually works (per lead, not per click)
Local Services Ads sit at the very top of Google, above the regular Search Ads and above the map pack, with the green Google Guaranteed badge. Unlike a normal Search Ad, you are not charged when someone clicks. You are charged when a lead comes through: a phone call over about 30 seconds, a message, or a booking request tied to the services and area you set.
You do not bid on keywords. You pick your job types, your service area, your business hours, and a weekly budget. Google averages that to a daily number and stops showing you once you hit the cap. Your position in the LSA stack is decided by review count and rating, how fast you answer, proximity, and whether you are Google Guaranteed (screened and background-checked). There is no headline ad copy to write. The badge and your star rating are the ad.
Two settings change your real spend more than anything:
- Job types. If you check every box, you pay for leads you do not want. A garage door company that also does openers but not gate automation should turn gate work off, or eat those leads.
- Service area. Pull in the ZIPs where you actually dispatch profitably. Wide areas look like more volume and quietly raise your blended lead cost with long drives and no-shows.
Billing runs weekly against your budget. You will often spend less than your cap in a slow week and never more than it in a busy one. That predictability is the point: LSA is closer to buying leads on a switch than running an auction.
There is a max-per-lead ceiling behind the scenes too. Google sets a suggested lead price for your trade and area, and it climbs where more screened competitors are fighting for the same calls. You do not hand-set that number the way you would a Search Ads bid, but you influence it: a strong review profile and fast answers earn you the top slots without paying up, while a thin profile leaves you buying visibility the expensive way. In practice, the cheapest path to a lower lead price is rarely the budget slider. It is the star rating and the phone discipline that move you up the stack.
One more thing owners miss on setup: your hours. LSA only bills you for leads during the hours you say you are open, and it uses those hours to decide when to show you. Set them to when someone will actually answer, not to a hopeful 24/7 you cannot staff, or you will pay for after-hours leads that ring out and never book.
What a lead costs by trade (real ranges, not one number)
There is no single national LSA price. Cost per lead moves with ticket size, how many competitors are screened in your area, and how urgent the job is. A burst pipe at 9pm costs more to win than a scheduled tune-up. The ranges below are typical bands for US metros, not a quote.
| Trade | Typical cost per lead | Why it lands there |
|---|---|---|
| Garage door | $40 to $90 | High ticket, high intent, crowded LSA field |
| HVAC | $45 to $100 | Emergency demand and seasonal spikes push it up |
| Plumbing | $35 to $85 | Urgency premium on drain and leak calls |
| Roofing | $50 to $100 | Big ticket, storm-season competition |
| Septic | $30 to $75 | Fewer screened competitors, steadier demand |
| Electrical | $30 to $70 | Mix of urgent and scheduled work |
| Landscaping | $20 to $50 | Lower ticket, more shoppers, less urgency |
Read these as blended averages over a month. Any single week can run high or low. Trades with fewer screened competitors, like septic, often clear cheaper leads because you are not sitting in a stack of ten badges fighting over the same call. Trades where the phone call is worth thousands, like garage door installs and roof replacements, pull the highest lead prices because every screened competitor wants that call too.
One trap: a cheap cost per lead is not automatically a win. If a landscaping lead costs you $25 but only one in eight books a $400 mow-and-go, you are paying $200 to book $400. A garage door lead at $80 that books one in three $1,400 jobs is far better math.
Geography moves the number as much as trade does. The same garage door lead is cheaper in a mid-size market with three screened competitors than in a dense metro with fifteen. If you dispatch across a metro and its outer suburbs, expect your city ZIPs to price higher and pull more spam, while the outer ZIPs clear cheaper leads with less competition. That split is worth watching, because it is often where you can trim service area to lift your blended margin without losing the jobs you actually want.
Season swings it too. An HVAC lead in a July heat wave or a January cold snap costs more than the same lead in a mild shoulder month, because every screened competitor is bidding for the same panicked homeowner. Roofing spikes after storms. Septic stays flatter year-round, which is part of why it clears cheaper leads. Plan your budget around your busy season instead of a flat monthly number, and do not judge the channel on a single peak-week price.
The number that matters: cost per booked job
Cost per lead is the vanity number. Cost per booked job is the one that tells you whether to keep the switch on. The math is simple:
- Cost per booked job = cost per lead divided by your booking rate.
If your leads cost $60 and you book one in four, you are paying $240 to land a job. Whether that is good depends on your ticket and your margin, not on the $60.
| Cost per lead | Booking rate | Cost per booked job |
|---|---|---|
| $40 | 50% | $80 |
| $60 | 33% | $182 |
| $80 | 25% | $320 |
| $80 | 50% | $160 |
Look at the last two rows. Same lead price, double the booking rate, half the cost per job. That is why the fastest way to lower your real LSA cost is almost never a budget change. It is answering the phone live, calling back missed leads inside five minutes, and quoting on the spot. LSA rewards fast answers in the ranking, and your booking rate rewards them in the wallet.
Set a ceiling before you turn LSA on. Take your average job value, decide the most you will pay to book one (many contractors sit at 8 to 15 percent of the job), and work backward to the lead price you can afford at your real booking rate. If the trade's lead prices blow past that ceiling, LSA is not wrong, your intake or your ticket is the constraint to fix first.
Most contractors do not actually know their booking rate, which is why they cannot tell a good LSA month from a bad one. Track it for 30 days: every lead in, every quote out, every job booked. Once you have a real number, the whole channel gets legible. A 20 percent booking rate on $60 leads is $300 a job and probably a phone-answering problem, not a Google problem. A 45 percent rate on the same leads is $133 a job and worth scaling. The lead price barely moved in that comparison. Your intake did all the work.
Watch lifetime value, not just the first ticket. A garage door tune-up that books at a modest price today can turn into a full spring-and-opener replacement next year and a referral down the block. Trades with strong repeat and referral business, like HVAC maintenance and septic pumping, can afford a higher cost per booked job than the first invoice alone would justify, because the second and third jobs cost nothing to acquire. If you only measure the opening ticket, you will underspend on channels that are quietly building your best customers.
Not every charge sticks: disputing bad leads
Google knows some LSA leads are junk, so it lets you dispute them for a credit. This is real money on the table and most contractors under-use it. If you dispute nothing, you are paying full freight for spam and wrong-service calls.
Leads Google will typically credit:
- Spam, robocalls, or sales solicitations.
- A service you do not offer (the gate call the garage door shop did not want).
- A location outside your set service area.
- A job type you did not select.
- No customer on the line or a lead you could not reach after genuine attempts.
What Google usually will not credit: a real customer you simply did not book, a job you were too busy to take, or a price disagreement. Losing a job is not a billing error, and disputing valid leads can flag your account, so dispute honestly.
The discipline that makes this pay: log every LSA lead the day it comes in, and dispute the bad ones inside the window Google allows. A contractor who disputes cleanly can knock a real slice off their blended cost per lead over a month. That is not a trick, it is just refusing to pay for leads that were never yours to book. If your dispute rate is very high, treat it as a signal too: your job types or service area are probably set too wide and are buying you the wrong calls in the first place.
Record calls where legal in your state. When you dispute a no-answer or wrong-service lead, a recording is the cleanest evidence, and it doubles as intake coaching for whoever answers your phone.
LSA vs Search Ads: which lever for which contractor
LSA and regular Google Search Ads both live in paid acquisition, and plenty of contractors run both. They are not the same tool, and the cost structures reward different situations. Here is the honest split.
| Local Services Ads | Search Ads | |
|---|---|---|
| You pay for | Leads (calls, messages) | Clicks |
| Placement | Very top, above Search Ads | Below LSA, above map pack |
| Control over targeting | Job type and area, that's it | Keywords, negatives, copy, landing pages |
| Setup effort | Screening and badge, then light | Ongoing management |
| Best when | You want calls fast, minimal tuning | You need control and want to shape intent |
LSA is the switch. It is the fastest way to put a screened, badged listing at the top and get the phone ringing this week, with per-lead billing that caps your downside. The tradeoff is control: you cannot write the message, target a specific keyword, or send traffic to a landing page built to convert.
Search Ads are the scalpel. You choose exact keywords, block wasteful ones with negatives, write the copy, and point clicks at a page built to book. That control is why Search Ads can scale past what LSA volume allows, and why they can also drain a budget fast if nobody is minding the negatives and the landing page.
For most contractors the sequence is: turn LSA on first for fast, cap-limited leads, then layer Search Ads once you know your booking rate and your ceiling. Run them so they cover different searches instead of bidding against yourself on the same call. We keep the full comparison in a companion guide if you want to decide which one runs first.
How to keep your LSA cost per lead honest
Once LSA is live, the account drifts if nobody watches it. Costs creep, junk leads pile up, and the badge that used to sit at the top slips down the stack. A short monthly habit keeps the number honest.
- Reconcile leads to jobs. Every LSA lead should map to a status: booked, quoted, junk, or disputed. Without that, cost per lead is a number floating free of your revenue.
- Dispute weekly, not never. Bad leads age out of the dispute window. A five-minute weekly pass recovers real dollars.
- Feed your reviews. LSA ranking leans on review count and rating. More recent reviews mean better placement and, over time, cheaper effective leads because you win more of the calls you already appear for.
- Answer live and call back fast. How fast you answer is a ranking factor and the single biggest lever on booking rate. A missed call is a paid lead you threw away.
- Right-size job types and area. If your dispute rate is high, you are buying the wrong calls. Tighten the boxes before you touch the budget.
Watch the trend, not the day. LSA cost per lead bounces week to week with demand and weather. A single expensive week means nothing. A cost per booked job that has climbed for three straight months means something, and it usually traces back to intake or review velocity, not to Google raising prices on you.
Where paid runs alongside SEO, the map pack, and AI-search visibility, the goal is coverage, not competition: LSA and Search buy the calls you need now while the earned placements lower how much of your pipeline you have to pay per lead for over time.