Advertising and lead tracking for home service businesses

Most home service leads are phone calls, and most of those calls come from people who need someone today. That single fact shapes everything else on these pages. A burst pipe, a leaking roof after a storm or a dead furnace in January produces a search, a tap on a phone number and a decision within minutes. The business that answers first usually gets the job. A form that sits in an inbox until the morning is a lead the competitor already booked.

The paid side of that search page has three parts, and they are reported in three different places. Local Services Ads sit at the top and charge per lead, not per click. Search ads sit below them and charge per click. The Business Profile in the map pack is free to appear in, but it produces calls too. An owner who adds up the leads each one claims will usually find more leads than the job system has customers, because the same homeowner called twice, or found the business on the map after seeing the ad, or was a supplier ringing the number on the van.

Local Services Ads now carry one badge for every advertiser, Google Verified. Google has discontinued the money-back guarantee that came with the old Google Guaranteed badge, so the badge is now a screening signal rather than a promise to the customer. The screening itself differs by trade: plumbers, for example, go through an extra level of service professional background checks, and license checks apply where state law requires a license. Check the requirements for your trade and state before you plan around a start date.

The money is not in the lead. It is in the completed job recorded in ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber or the roofing CRM, often with an invoice value attached. A lead that becomes a small service call and one that becomes a full replacement look identical in the ad platform unless that value is sent back. This is why we start every engagement on the job system rather than on the ad account: once completed jobs can be matched to the call or click that produced them, bidding, budgets and the channel split all have something real to work from.

Each niche below has the tracking guide for the trade. Where it exists, there is also a Google Ads playbook written for that trade (service area, which calls count, negatives, ad groups) and a Local Services Ads guide (job types to switch on and off, what a bad lead looks like in that trade, and how to measure cost per booked job when the lead has no click ID).