“Should I run Google Ads or the Google Guaranteed ads?” Both show your business in Google’s results when someone nearby searches for your trade, but they charge for different things. A Search ad in Google Ads charges when someone clicks it, whether or not they ever call. A Local Services Ad charges for a lead: a call, message or booking request that meets Google’s rules. (The “Guaranteed” badge is now called Google Verified; our Local Services Ads article covers that change, the screening and the move into Google Ads.)
With a big budget you can run both and compare. With a few hundred dollars a month, you want to know which one gives that money the best chance. Here is how each spends it, what each needs from you, and how to tell afterward whether it worked.
What you pay for in each
Search ads: a click. You set a maximum bid, but Google says you are “often charged less -- sometimes much less” than that, because you “only pay what’s minimally required to clear the Ad Rank thresholds and beat the Ad Rank of the competitor immediately below you.” You also set an average daily budget. On a busy day a campaign may spend up to twice that, but over a month it will not charge more than the daily budget times 30.4, the average number of days in a month. Google’s own example: a $10 daily budget can spend $20 on one day and at most $304 in a month.
Local Services Ads: a lead. You are charged for each valid lead: a call, a message or a booking request, including a call you miss during business hours if the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds. Google says lead prices “may vary depending on your location, the job type, the type of lead, or your bidding mode,” and that message leads are “typically priced lower” than phone leads, though not always. You set an average weekly budget. Lead Services Compared lists exactly what is charged and what is not.
What a small budget buys
Say a plumber has $600 a month for advertising. The bid ranges and rates below are illustrative; your own come from the tools named here.
On Search ads
Before spending anything, open Keyword Planner inside Google Ads (Google says you must finish account setup, including billing information, to use it). For each phrase in your area it shows two bids: the “low range,” an approximation of the 20th percentile of what advertisers have paid to show at the top of the page, and the “high range,” the 80th percentile. Its forecasts estimate clicks, cost and average cost per click, with Google’s caveat that they are built from history and may differ from what you get.
Suppose the planner shows $12 to $35 at the top of the page for “water heater replacement” in his county. A $600 month is a daily budget of about $19.74 ($600 ÷ 30.4). At $35 a click that buys about 17 clicks; at $12, 50. If one click in ten turns into a call or a form, which depends on his page and is his number to measure, that is 2 to 5 leads.
Two settings decide how much of a small budget is wasted:
On Local Services Ads
There are no keywords to choose: the ads show when people search for the services you offer in the areas you have chosen, and the budget buys leads at whatever your market charges. A $600 month is a weekly budget of about $140. For the “Maximize leads” mode, Google recommends “a minimum budget of 10 leads per week for optimal results,” so at $140 a week that mode fits only if your leads average $14 or less. If they cost more, the budget is below what Google recommends for that mode, and “Target cost per lead” lets you set a target instead. Your first few weeks of charged leads tell you your real price.
One change to plan for: Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads, in stages from August 2026 into 2027, and the weekly budget becomes a daily one; our Local Services Ads article covers what else changes.
The landing page each needs
Search ads need a page that finishes the job. The click lands on your website, and you have paid for it whether the visitor calls or leaves. Google scores “landing page experience” as “how relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad,” and says “higher quality ads typically cost less per click.” Its advice: “Choose a landing page that closely matches your ad and keywords,” provide “useful, original information” about what you advertise, “make it quick and easy for customers to perform the action you want them to take,” and make sure the site is mobile-friendly. For a trade, that means a page about the one service in the ad, with a tap-to-call button and a short form, not your home page. A price range on that page answers the question most visitors arrived with; Your Website Is a Brochure explains why that matters.
Local Services Ads need no page, but they need you on the phone. Customers “call you or send you a message request” or book straight from the ad, so your website plays no part. What they weigh instead is your rating, and Google says “star ratings and number of reviews affect how your business is ranked.” Those reviews come from your Google Business Profile. And because a missed call of more than 20 seconds during business hours is charged, every unanswered call is money spent on a customer who may be dialing the next company; a one-week answer-rate audit tells you how many that would be.
Tracking what you got
For Search ads, set up conversion tracking before the first dollar goes out, or you will be judging the campaign by clicks. Google Ads can count calls from your ads and calls to the number on your website after someone clicked an ad (both use Google forwarding numbers), and taps on the number on your mobile site. You set a minimum call length, and only calls at least that long count, which keeps the wrong numbers and hang-ups out of your results.
For Local Services Ads, the leads page shows each lead’s charge status: charged, not charged, in review or credited. Either way, write each lead down with its outcome, and once a month put both channels in one table of spend, leads, jobs won and gross profit. Tracking Where Leads Come From sets up that table, and the number to compare is cost per won job, not cost per click or cost per lead.
Which to try first
If you go with Search ads, the page behind the ad decides what the clicks are worth. NapkinPrice™ puts an instant price range from your own pricing rules on the site you already have and sends you the visitor’s answers with the lead, so a paid click can end with a number and a name instead of a back button.