Two products, two ways of paying
Local Services Ads charge per lead, meaning per call or message that arrives through the listing. Google publishes what the auction runs on: your bid, and how likely the ad is to produce a lead, which it says comes from your responsiveness, what the customer searched for, and profile quality, meaning rating, review count, average response time and real photos. The listing shows only in the hours you set and inside the service area you drew. The listing carries the Google Guaranteed badge once Google has checked the license, the insurance and the owner's background. Junk leads can be disputed for credit inside the window Google allows.
Google Ads charge per click and rank on the bid and the quality of the ad and the page behind it. You choose the keywords, write the ad, pick the landing page and set the hours it runs. Nobody checks your license, no badge goes on the ad, and the account can go live the afternoon you build it.
Repair calls go to Local Services first
A homeowner with no cooling in July opens the phone, sees a box with a rating and a call button, and calls it. There is no page to read and no form to fill in. For that search the first dollar goes into the Local Services weekly budget, and it keeps going there until the budget is being spent every day of the week.
The search campaign sits underneath and picks up what the listing does not cover: your own company name, the equipment brands you service, the symptom searches a homeowner types before they are ready to hire, and the suburbs where the listing ranks poorly because a competitor is closer. Call assets on the ad, a tracking number on the page, and those calls stay countable on their own.
Replacements get read before they get called
A homeowner spending $12,000 does not call the first box. They read two or three pages, look at the financing, ask a neighbor, and call on the second day. Local Services has an installation job type and it produces some of these. The campaign that carries most of them is a search campaign pointed at a replacement page with the monthly number, the terms next to it, and the earliest install date you can honestly print.
Meta picks the same homeowner up in the weeks after the visit, off the quoted-and-not-booked list, which is where the third paid channel earns its budget.
Tune-ups and memberships come off the customer list
Buying a lead or a click for an $89 tune-up in the week clicks cost the most is arithmetic that rarely works out. Those visits get sold by email and text to the people who already paid you once, in the shoulder weeks, while both ad accounts stay pointed at repair and replacement.
The split moves with the season
First heat week: both accounts at their caps, ad schedules extended into the evening, the Local Services weekly budget raised in the week before the heat arrives.
Shoulder months: Local Services stays on at a smaller weekly budget, because a listing that goes dark stops collecting the reviews and the response history that rank it. The search campaign keeps running for replacement and comes off repair. In a heating metro the same shape happens twice a year, with the job types switched.
Search covers the weeks Local Services cannot
Verification takes weeks. License, insurance and background checks all have to clear before the listing goes live, so a new company or a new market waits. A suspended Business Profile takes the Local Services listing down with it, because the two are linked. A week of missed calls lowers the listing the week after. In every one of those weeks the search campaign is the only thing at the top of the page with your name on it, which is the argument for keeping it funded in the months when Local Services looks cheaper per lead.
Local Services also has no search terms report. You get the lead, the recording and the job type, and you never see what the homeowner typed. So the decision each Monday comes from cost per booked job by channel and job type. The cost per lead on either dashboard says nothing about which of the two filled the trucks.