What Local Services Ads are
Search "furnace repair Halifax" or "plumber Moncton" on a phone and, in a lot of cases, the first thing you see is not a website or the map. It is a short row of businesses with a star rating, a few words about hours and service area, a badge, and a button to call or message. Those are Local Services Ads.
They are a separate product from the Google Ads most people know. A normal search ad sends a click to your website. A Local Services Ad sends the customer straight to you by phone, message or booking request, and the profile they see lives inside Google rather than on your site.
You may have heard them called "Google Guaranteed" or "Google Screened" ads. Those were the old badges. Google retired them in October 2025 and replaced them with a single Google Verified badge for every advertiser who passes screening. The money back guarantee that came with the old Google Guarantee badge was discontinued at the same time, so any article still promising your customers a refund from Google is out of date.
You pay Google for a phone call or message from someone looking for your trade in your area, not for a click, and only after Google has checked that your business is who it says it is.
Which trades can use them in Canada
Local Services Ads are available in Canada, but only for a fixed list of categories. Google's Canadian getting-started page lists sixteen:
- The core trades. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC (heating and air conditioning), and roofers.
- Repair and restoration. Appliance repair, water damage services, window repair, and locksmiths.
- Property services. Lawn care, tree services, pest control, and junk removal.
- Cleaning and moving. Cleaning services, carpet cleaning, window cleaning, and movers.
If you are a general contractor, a framer, a painter, a landscaper doing hardscaping, or an auto body shop, you are not on that list today. That does not stop you appearing in the map pack or in organic results, which are free, but it does mean this particular ad box is closed to you for now.
Being in a listed category is necessary but not sufficient. Google says availability also depends on where the business is, and its help pages send you to an eligibility check rather than publishing a list of provinces or cities. Run that check with your own postal code and category before you plan around it. In smaller Atlantic towns you may find the category exists but very few people search for it in a given week, which matters more than whether the door is technically open.
Paying per lead instead of per click
This is the part trades usually like. With a normal search ad, you pay every time someone clicks, whether they read your page, ring you, or leave after three seconds. With Local Services Ads, you pay for a valid lead.
Google counts three things as a lead: a phone call you answer and speak to the customer on, a text message or email from the customer, and, in the United States and Canada, a booking request. A valid lead is someone contacting you about a service you offer, in the area you serve. Google says leads it decides are invalid or low quality are not charged, and since 2024 that review has been automatic: charged leads are reassessed by Google's own models and credited back if they turn out to be junk, usually within about thirty days.
The price of a lead is not published as a rate card. Google says it varies with your location, the job type, the type of lead and your bidding mode, and message leads are priced partly on how likely that customer is to book. You set an average weekly budget, and Google spreads it across the leads it sends you.
What that means in practice
You are buying phone calls, not traffic. That is good when the calls are from people with a leaking pipe and bad when they are from someone who wanted a different trade, a supplier, or a price-shopper who will never book. Automatic credits catch some of that, and you do not get to argue each one individually anymore. Budget for a share of leads you will pay for and never win.
The verification steps
Before your ad can show with the Google Verified badge, Google screens the business. For Canada, its screening page lists the pieces, though which ones apply depends on your category:
- A public, verified Google Business Profile. This is a hard requirement. If your profile is suspended, unverified or still sitting at an old address, sort that first. It is the single most common thing we fix in a Google Business Profile setup.
- Background checks on the business and the owner, and in some categories identity checks on field workers.
- Licences at the provincial or national level where your trade requires one. Electricians, plumbers and gas fitters in Atlantic Canada should have these ready to upload.
- Insurance. Most categories need proof of general liability coverage, and some also ask for professional liability.
Google says the process takes three to four weeks on average after you submit documents. Ads can start showing before every step is complete, but Google places those listings below providers who have finished onboarding, so a half-finished application mostly buys you a seat at the back.
Reviews feed into this too. Your star rating and review count show on the ad, and Google uses them, along with how quickly you respond, to decide where you rank. A business with four reviews is going to sit under one with sixty, whatever it spends.
How they sit alongside the map pack and your website
On a typical trade search, the page stacks up roughly like this: Local Services Ads at the top, sometimes normal search ads, then the map pack with three businesses, then the ordinary website results. All four can show the same business at once.
They feed each other more than people expect:
- The map pack and your Local Services profile share a foundation. Both lean on your Google Business Profile, its category, its service area and its reviews. Work you do on the profile helps both.
- Ranking in the ad box depends on behaviour, not just budget. Google's ranking help says your bid, your responsiveness, your reviews and the quality of your profile all count. Missed calls hurt responsiveness, which is why the ad works best for trades who can actually pick up.
- Your website catches the people who do not tap. Plenty of homeowners see the ad, then search your business name to check you out before calling. If that search lands on a slow site with no prices, no photos and a contact form from 2014, the ad bought the attention and the website lost it.
The other thing a website does that an ad cannot is keep working when you stop paying. Local Services Ads switch off the moment the budget does. A site that ranks for "heat pump installation Dartmouth" keeps bringing calls in through a slow winter when you might not want to buy leads.
If you are an HVAC company, a plumber or an electrician, the sensible order is usually profile first, website second, and ads third, once the first two are good enough to convert the people the ads send.
When they are worth paying for
The maths is the same as any lead source. Take the price you are paying per lead, divide it by the share of those leads you actually book, and compare that to what an average job is worth to you after materials and time. If one booked furnace repair costs you three or four leads, and those three or four leads together cost less than the margin on the job, the ad is earning its keep.
In our experience they make most sense when all of these are true:
- You are in one of the listed categories and the eligibility check says your area is covered.
- Someone answers the phone during the hours the ad runs, or a missed call gets a text back within a minute or two.
- You already have a decent number of recent reviews.
- You have room in the schedule. Paying for leads during a month you are already booked solid is money for nothing.
They are usually a poor fit for a brand-new business with a handful of reviews, a one-person operation that cannot answer during the day, or a trade in a small market where only a few people a month search for that service.
One more thing to watch: Google has announced that Local Services Ads are moving into the main Google Ads platform as Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. Google says you still pay only for valid leads, the badge carries over, and the ads keep showing in the same places. The rollout started in the United States in August 2026, and Google's timeline puts accounts outside the US in 2027. Expect the dashboard to change, not the basic deal.
We do not run your ad spend. We fix the two things that decide whether the leads it buys turn into jobs: a Google Business Profile that passes screening ($199 to set up properly), and a website that answers the questions people ask before they call. For trades who keep missing calls, the Lead Machine adds automatic text-back, a quote estimator and one lead list, for $800 to build and $399 a month.
Sources
Everything above about how Local Services Ads work comes from Google's own help pages, checked on 2 October 2026. Google changes this product often, so check them again before you commit a budget.
- Getting started with Local Services Ads, Canada (Google Local Services Help)
- Business screening and verification requirements, Canada (Google Local Services Help)
- About Google Verified badge (Google Local Services Help)
- How leads work (Google Local Services Help)
- About automated Local Services Ads lead credits (Google Local Services Help)
- About ad rankings (Google Local Services Help)
- Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals (Google Ads Help)