Paid advertising
Which paid channel is actually right for you?
There are eight ways to buy attention on this page and only two or three of them are right for any one business. This page exists to help you work out which, before anybody quotes you for a channel you did not need.
Which paid advertising channels are worth it for a local business?
For most local service businesses the decision comes down to whether demand already exists. If people are searching for what you do, Google Search ads reach them at the moment of intent and are usually the first channel to test. If you qualify, Local Services Ads sit above those results and are charged per lead rather than per click, which makes them the cheapest entry point for licensed trades and several professional categories.
If demand has to be created, such as for an elective cosmetic procedure or a new offer nobody is looking for yet, Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram are usually the better first move because they let you reach people by interest and location rather than by what they typed.
Retargeting, YouTube and Microsoft Ads are almost always second or third channels. They are efficient additions to something that already works, and a poor place to start.
The only question that matters first
Does demand for what you sell already exist, and are people searching for it? Everything about channel choice, budget and creative follows from the answer.
If someone types emergency dentist near me, the demand is already there, they are ready now, and the job of advertising is simply to be in front of them and make it easy to call. That is harvesting. Search advertising and Local Services Ads harvest.
Read the full breakdown: The only question that matters firstHide the full breakdown: The only question that matters first
If you have opened a med spa and want people to book a treatment they have never considered, nobody is searching for it by name. The job is to interrupt the right people with something interesting enough that they want it. That is creating demand. Meta, YouTube and most social advertising create demand.
The two require different budgets, different creative, different landing pages and completely different patience. Harvesting can produce a booked appointment in the first week. Creating demand usually takes weeks of testing before the cost per enquiry settles, and it will be higher at the start than it ends up.
Most wasted ad spend we see comes from running a demand creation channel with harvesting expectations, or from pointing a harvesting channel at a page that does not convert.
What each channel is actually for
This is the table we would draw on a whiteboard on a first call. The right column for you is usually obvious once it is written down.
| Item | Best when | You pay for | Time to a fair read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search ads | People already search for what you do | A click | 2 to 4 weeks |
| Local Services Ads | You are a licensed local business in an eligible category | A lead, not a click | 2 to 6 weeks |
| Meta ads | Demand has to be created, or the offer is visual | Impressions, optimised to an action | 4 to 8 weeks |
| Retargeting | You already have meaningful site traffic | Impressions or clicks | Follows the source channel |
| YouTube ads | You have usable video and a considered purchase | A view or an action | 6 to 12 weeks |
| Microsoft Ads | Google Search already works and you want cheaper incremental volume | A click | 4 to 8 weeks |
Nothing here is a ranking. A roofer and a cosmetic dentist in the same town belong on different rows for good reasons.
Go to the channel that fits
Each of these pages explains how that specific channel is built, run and measured, including what it costs in attention as well as money.
Google Ads Management
Search campaigns for demand that already exists. How the auction really works and why cheap leads are often the expensive ones.
Meta Ads Management
Facebook and Instagram for demand you have to create. Creative volume, audience structure and what boosting a post actually does.
Local Services Ads
Google's pay per lead format. Who qualifies, what the screening involves, and how disputing a bad lead works.
YouTube Ads
Video placement against intent and audience. Honest about what it does and does not do for a local business.
Microsoft Ads
Bing and partner search. Smaller, usually cheaper, and worth importing once Google is working.
Retargeting
Reaching people who already visited. The highest return channel on the list and the easiest one to make annoying.
Landing Page Optimization
The page the ad points at. Half the campaign, and the half most often ignored.
Conversion Tracking Setup
Calls, forms and chats tied back to the ad that produced them. Without this, everything above is guesswork.
Why the highest bid does not win
Understanding this one mechanism explains most of what a good account manager actually does all day.
Google's documentation lists six factors in Ad Rank: your bid, the quality of your ad and landing page, the Ad Rank thresholds, the competitiveness of the auction, the context of the search including location device and time, and the expected impact of your assets.
The practical consequence is that a relevant ad pointing at a relevant, fast page can appear above a competitor bidding more. Improving quality is usually cheaper than raising bids, which is why the work is mostly structure, match types, negative keywords and landing pages rather than bid tinkering.
Optimising toward the right thing
Every ad platform optimises toward whatever you tell it is a conversion. If you tell Google that any form fill is a conversion, it will find you the cheapest form fills available, and those are frequently people who will never buy. The account looks excellent and the phone brings in nothing.
The fix is to define the conversion further down the funnel. A call that lasted over a certain length. A form that reached a qualified stage in the CRM. An appointment that was actually booked. That usually means sending values back from your CRM into the ad platform so it optimises toward outcomes rather than actions.
This is also the honest reason a campaign can get worse in month two after looking brilliant in month one. Month one optimised toward clicks and cheap leads. Month two started optimising toward customers, which costs more per lead and less per customer.
Doing this properly requires conversion tracking that actually works, which is why we treat tracking as a prerequisite rather than a nice extra. If we cannot measure it, we will say so before taking budget.
Where paid budgets actually leak
In order of how much money we usually find sitting in each one when we take over an account.
- Broad match with no negative keyword list, so the account buys searches for jobs you do not do, prices you do not offer, and competitors you do not want.
- Every click landing on the home page, where the visitor has to work out for themselves whether you do the thing they searched for.
- Conversion actions counting page views, button clicks and short calls, so the platform is optimising toward noise.
- Ads running twenty four hours when nobody answers the phone after six, with no call handling or form follow up in place.
- The same audience being paid for twice, because search, retargeting and Meta are all claiming the same person.
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- Automated campaign types running with no exclusions, which quietly spends a large share of the budget on placements you would never have chosen.
- Location targeting set to people interested in your area rather than people in it, which is a default that costs many businesses a third of their budget.
- A tracking setup that broke three months ago and nobody noticed, because nobody checks that the numbers in the platform reconcile with the phone log.
None of these are exotic. They are the first eight things a competent audit looks at, and they are present in most accounts we are handed.
What it costs, honestly
Ad spend and management are separate, and you should always see them broken out. We do not mark up media. Your spend is paid directly to Google or Meta from your own account, which you own.
How much spend is enough depends on the cost per click in your category and how many leads you need to see before the data means anything. In a competitive legal or medical category a single search click can cost more than a hundred dollars, and a budget that produces four clicks a day will take months to tell you anything. In a less contested trade category the same budget produces thirty clicks a day and gives you a read in a fortnight.
Read the full breakdown: What it costs, honestlyHide the full breakdown: What it costs, honestly
The useful test before committing: what is a customer worth to you, and what share of enquiries do you close? If a customer is worth two thousand dollars and you close one in four enquiries, you can afford far more per enquiry than a business where a customer is worth two hundred. Knowing those two numbers changes the whole conversation, and if you do not know them, that is the first thing to fix.
We do not publish a price for this piece of work on its own, because the right scope depends on what already exists. What is published is the bundle pricing: 2,400, 3,600 or 4,800 dollars a month depending on which channels are running. You can read the full breakdown on the pricing page, and you will get an exact number in writing before anything starts.
What a click and a lead typically cost
LocalIQ publishes annual averages from its own customers' Google and Microsoft Ads accounts. Attribute it as what it is: a large vendor sample, not a market average, and not a number we commit to hitting.
SourceSearch Advertising Benchmarks, LocalIQ, 2026
The spread behind those averages is what matters. In the same 2026 data, legal sits at $9.87 per click and $131.63 per lead, dentistry at $8.00 and $72.97, home improvement at $8.33 and $90.92, and beauty and personal care at $4.62 and $39.25. If someone quotes you a single industry average, ask which industry.
How an account is actually run
The same shape applies whichever channel you end up on. What changes is the creative volume and how long each phase takes.
Before anything spends
Tracking is built and tested first: calls, forms, chats, and where possible a signal back from your CRM about which leads were real. Then the landing page. Then the campaign. An account that starts spending before tracking works cannot be judged, only guessed at.
Weeks one to four
Structure, match types, negatives and audiences. In this phase the search terms report is read several times a week and the negative list grows fast. Expect cost per lead to be at its worst here. This is normal and is the price of the data.
Weeks four to twelve
Creative and message testing against the segments that are converting, budget shifted toward what works, and the definition of a conversion tightened as CRM data starts to come back. This is usually where cost per qualified lead falls noticeably.
Ongoing
Seasonal adjustment, new offers, landing page tests, and periodic audits of the things that silently break: disapproved ads, expired assets, tracking, and automated campaign types quietly drifting.
You keep ownership of the ad account, the conversion history and the audiences throughout. If you leave, you take all of it.
The rules that constrain what ads can say
Advertising platforms and the law both set limits, and the limits are stricter in the categories where marketing is most tempting.
Google Ads policies restrict healthcare and medicine advertising, some financial services, and personalised advertising around sensitive categories including health conditions. Meta applies similar restrictions and in several categories removes detailed targeting options entirely, which is why a campaign structure that worked for a retailer will not transfer to a clinic.
Underneath the platforms sit the Federal Trade Commission's truth in advertising rules, which apply to claims you make anywhere. Claims about results have to be substantiated. Before and after imagery in medical and cosmetic categories carries additional expectations. Endorsements and testimonials have their own guides.
We keep campaigns inside those rules because the alternative is an account suspension that takes weeks to unwind, and because a claim you cannot support is a liability that outlives the campaign.
Where paid sits against the rest
Paid advertising and SEO answer the same question on different timelines. Paid is immediate, controllable and stops when you stop. Search work is slow, compounds, and keeps producing after you pause spending. Running both means you are not renting all of your traffic, and the paid data is the best available input into which pages are worth building.
Landing pages and site speed sit underneath every campaign. A fast, focused page raises quality and lowers what you pay per click, so web design work often pays for itself out of the ad budget.
Follow up decides whether any of it was worth doing. An enquiry that waits four hours for a reply is frequently gone, which is why automation and CRM work belongs in the same plan as the ad spend rather than in a separate conversation next year.
Find out which channel you should actually be on.
Bring what you are spending now and what it is producing. We will tell you where the money is leaking and which one or two channels we would run, before anybody talks about a retainer.
Straight answers.
Should I start with Google or with Facebook and Instagram?
If people are already searching for what you do, start with Google, because you are meeting intent rather than manufacturing it. If nobody is searching for your offer by name, start with Meta.
A quick test: type what you sell into Google as a customer would. If the results are full of competitors bidding on it, demand exists and search is the place to be.
Is ad spend included in what I pay you?
No. Management and ad spend are separate and you will see both broken out before you commit. Your spend goes directly to the platform from your own account. We do not mark up media.
How much should I spend to know if it works?
Enough to generate a meaningful number of leads inside the period you are willing to judge it over. In practice that means working backwards: if a click costs twelve dollars and roughly one in twenty clicks becomes an enquiry, each enquiry costs around two hundred and forty dollars in media, so thirty enquiries needs around seven thousand dollars of spend.
Those numbers vary enormously by category. We will run that arithmetic with your actual click costs on the call rather than quoting an industry average at you.
Do I own my ad account?
Yes. The account, the conversion history, the pixel and the audiences stay yours throughout and go with you if you leave. We work inside your account rather than inside a shared agency account, specifically so that this is never a negotiation.
Can you run ads without touching my website?
We can, but we will tell you what it costs you. The landing page is roughly half of campaign performance, and Google's own Ad Rank includes landing page quality, so a weak page raises what you pay per click as well as lowering how many clicks convert.
If the site cannot be changed, standalone landing pages are the usual compromise.
Why did my cost per lead go up after you took over?
Usually because the definition of a lead changed. If the previous setup counted every form fill and every call over five seconds, the cost per lead looked excellent and most of those leads were not real.
Once the account optimises toward qualified enquiries, cost per lead rises and cost per customer falls. We show both numbers so the comparison is honest.
Will you use automated campaign types?
Where they earn their place, and never without exclusions and a clear view of where the money went. Automated campaign types can work well once an account has reliable conversion data, and they waste money quickly when they do not.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- About Ad Rank, Google Ads Help (opens in a new tab)
- About Quality Score, Google Ads Help (opens in a new tab)
- Google Ads policies (opens in a new tab)
- About Local Services Ads, Google (opens in a new tab)
- FTC truth in advertising (opens in a new tab)
- Advertising FAQs: a guide for small business, FTC (opens in a new tab)What substantiation a claim needs, whichever platform it runs on.
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.