Podcast Episode 006 - Fix the Feast-or-Famine Cycle with Google Local Service Ads
Hosts: Matt DeLong and Booker Fritz Runtime: ~21 minutes
What We Cover
If your sales cycle is three months or less, you live and die by two things: where the work is, and whether your phone rings this week.
In this episode, Matt and Booker break down Google Local Service Ads (LSAs) — one of our most popular services at United Foundry — and the three reasons we recommend them over almost any other channel for roofers, remodelers, fencing companies and other short-sales-cycle contractors.
Who it's for: Remodelers, roofers and home service contractors who close jobs in three months or less and are tired of riding the feast-or-famine roller coaster.
We cover:
Who LSAs are (and aren't) for: why they shine for short sales cycles, and why custom home builders with 6-month to 3-year cycles aren't the best fit.
Service areas: how to include or exclude by county, city, ZIP code or neighborhood — and skip rental-heavy, industrial or too-far-away areas.
Weekly budgets: how to scale up when crews are wrapping up and scale down when you're booked out, in seconds.
Live, exclusive phone calls: no midnight form fills, no shared leads sold to six other contractors.
Disputing junk calls: how to get credited for telemarketers, job seekers and wrong numbers.
Rating and recording calls: how scoring leads trains Google, and how recordings help you coach your sales team.
What's changing: Google is moving LSAs into the main Google Ads platform.
Transcript
[00:02] Matt: All right, Booker, we're here at Episode 6. Today we're going to talk about how to fix that feast-or-famine, job-to-job roller coaster with one of our popular services: Local Service Ads. How are you doing today?
[00:18] Booker: Doing great. Excited to be here.
[00:20] Matt: Awesome. So this tool, Google Local Service Ads, is really ideal for contractors with a shorter sales cycle. If you're a custom home builder, it isn't necessarily a great fit. We do have some clients who use it, but it's not the best tool for the job. This is for folks whose sales cycles are maybe three months or less — quick decision cycles. Most custom home builders are looking at anywhere from six months to three years, so that's not the best fit.
[01:01] If you have that short sales cycle, there are really two things you live and die by: where the work is, and whether your phone is going to ring this week, right? That applies to roofers, kitchen remodelers, bathroom remodelers, remodelers in general, fencing companies — anyone with that shorter sales cycle, where the customer is the homeowner. And that rhythm is why LSAs are a better fit for short-decision-cycle contractors than other marketing channels. We'll get into the three reasons we like it in a second.
[01:46] So there are really three advantages. One is service areas. You can define where you want to work and where you want leads from — and where you don't. We'll get into the specifics.
The second is budget. You can scale the budget up and down in literally a few seconds. If you've got way too many leads next week, or the crews are finishing up a bunch of projects, you can adjust on the fly. It really takes seconds to say, "I want to spend $1,000 a week," or "I want to go down to $100 a week."
And the third reason we like it is live phone calls. It's not a contact-us form that came through in the middle of the night, where you're playing phone tag trying to get someone on the phone. It's an actual live phone call.
[02:44] So let's dive into each of these. Booker, if you're ready, let's talk specifically about the service area. How much control do we really have?
[02:55] Booker: Well, you actually have quite a bit of control. What's really cool is that you can include the very specific areas you want — by city, county or ZIP code. And sometimes, if it's a big enough area, you can even include it by neighborhood — or exclude by any of those as well. So you can really dial it in. For example, you could target all the ZIP codes within a certain county, and if there's a particular city in that county you'd like to avoid, you can set that as an exclusion within the county. It's quite powerful.
[03:36] Matt: Awesome. So if I said, "I want leads in Lee County, the Fort Myers area, but I don't want Cape Coral specifically — the whole county, but not that city," I can do that pretty easily, right?
[03:56] Booker: Oh yeah, definitely. You can set it up exactly the way you want. We'll draw out your service area with real precision. It's great for that.
[04:08] Matt: Right. And when we've set this up, you can also see a physical map, with circles around the specified areas. So you can include and exclude, and it actually draws a diagram of where that is so you can fine-tune it, right?
[04:26] Booker: Yeah, that's the other aspect of it. It's super visual, so you really get to see it. We're not just throwing in a few hundred ZIP codes and that's all we see. We get a map view, which makes it great for getting an overview of the service area.
[04:44] Matt: Right. We've set it up before where we include two full counties, then exclude a city, or a ZIP code you don't want to work in — maybe you get lots of calls from there, but no one ever pulls the trigger. So you can fine-tune this over time as more and more leads come in. It's not set-it-and-forget-it. Maybe you get a lot of calls from a certain area but they rarely buy. Or maybe you get a lot of calls from certain neighborhoods and they all like your estimates, and you want more of those.
So that's one of the top three reasons we like it: the specifics. If an area is a little too far away, has too much traffic, or isn't a good fit, you can zoom in and out and include or exclude it. What are some other reasons this is important for contractors?
[05:45] Booker: Well, it's super important because a lot of contractors have a set limit they don't really want to go past. If a job is 90 minutes away, they might not want to take it — or they might. It really depends on the contractor. So you can set that radius so you're not driving hours away for a maybe. Or you can, if you want to — it's totally up to you.
It's also great because you can target higher-wealth areas, if that's something you want to target, and you can exclude different areas as well. For example, if there's an industrial area, we can exclude that ZIP code, so we're not showing kitchen remodel ads to an area that's primarily industrial.
[06:39] Matt: Right. Or, at least in Tennessee where I live, there are lots of areas with heavy concentrations of apartment complexes. If you're remodeling kitchens, you're probably not going to sell to someone who's not a homeowner. And you certainly don't want to spend dollars on people who don't qualify.
[07:03] Booker: Yeah, totally. You definitely don't want to show those remodeling ads to people who are renting. Excluding those areas is huge. It saves your budget, your conversion rate goes up — it's just all-around great practice.
[07:18] Matt: Right. So let's say you're five-mile famous — you're well known in the five-mile area around where you work — and you want to expand to become 10- or 15-mile famous. It's as simple as a checkbox, right? You add some more ZIP codes or update your service area. You're not creating a whole new campaign. You're just clicking a few buttons, and now you're getting leads from a bigger area.
[07:44] Booker: Yeah, definitely. It's really that easy.
[07:48] Matt: Right. The second thing we like about Local Service Ads is the budget control. As leads come in and you're booking jobs — let's say you got too many one week or one month, and not enough the next — you can literally scale up and down as much as you need. And Local Service Ads use weekly budgets, correct, Booker?
[08:14] Booker: Yes, they're weekly budgets.
[08:17] Matt: So let's say, for argument's sake, every lead is $100. Obviously certain areas and certain categories cost a little more or a little less, but let's say an average of $100 for this discussion. If I want four or five leads a week at around 100 bucks each, I'd allocate $400 to $500. And if that's not enough, or it's too much, I can scale it up or down as needed.
We have some clients spending $20,000 a month on these leads. How much you can scale depends on the market you're in, how many competitors there are, and how much demand there is for the services you offer in your service area — whether it's bathroom remodels, kitchen remodels, fencing or roofing. It depends a lot on the market and the demand at that time.
[09:40] So as your crews are wrapping up some projects, you can literally turn the budget up and accelerate the number of leads you're getting. Or if the pipeline is pretty full and you're booked out months in advance, you can turn it down so you're not paying for leads you can't service. It's kind of a waste of money to make your phone ring and then tell the homeowner, "I can get back to you in two or three weeks," when they want to make a decision in the next two or three weeks. So you can scale up or down pretty quickly — literally in a few seconds.
[10:21] Obviously your reputation and reviews fit into this too. But compare this approach to what we talked about in Episode 1: that feast-or-famine, up-and-down roller coaster. Your sales cycle is basically how much time passes from the very first conversation with a homeowner to when they pull the trigger and sign a contract. It varies, of course. But for a bathroom remodel, a kitchen, a full home remodel, a basement finish — what does it take for your specific business? Two weeks? Eight weeks? Twelve weeks? Anything three months or less is the ideal time frame for that shorter sales cycle. So again, you can dial it up or down based on your workload, which makes it pretty convenient.
[11:24] The other really interesting thing, Booker, is that you're not paying for leads nonstop for months and months before you find out whether this is working, right? Because the leads come in right away. Usually, once we set someone up, they start getting leads within a week. We set it up, configure it, and we're ready to go: budget defined, service area defined, services defined.
Then we can track how leads flow through the different stages: "We got an appointment with this homeowner on Wednesday," "We've given these three estimates and we're waiting to hear back." We can track all of that. And it becomes an investment — imagine that for every dollar we spend, we can deliver $5 to $15 of booked business.
[12:20] Again, these aren't shared leads. This is a homeowner calling you directly. It's not like Angi or some of those other sites with shared leads, where you pay for a lead and they sell it to six other people, and then you're all competing on price and no one wins.
So it just becomes a matter of volume. How much can your team handle? How much can you quote, estimate, close, schedule, order materials for, get on the books and actually work? It's pretty easy to scale up and down. It's not a set-it-and-forget-it budget, but you can switch it pretty easily.
Booker, what's the third advantage — the other reason we like LSAs so much?
[13:09] Booker: Well, it ties into what you were just mentioning. When these leads come in, they're not form fills or anything like that. They're live phone calls with actual people interested in your service. They're recorded and stored on Google. And if a call comes in that's not for a service you offer, or it's irrelevant for whatever reason, you can dispute that phone call. If your dispute is approved, you actually get refunded for it.
[13:42] Matt: Right. So let's say it's a telemarketer — like the ones we get all the time, probably three a day these days — someone trying to pitch you a loan or some accounting service. You're saying you don't pay for those leads?
[14:02] Booker: You do not pay for those. Probably the biggest one you'll see is people calling in looking for employment. You don't get charged for those either.
[14:14] Matt: "Are you hiring?" Yep.
[14:16] Booker: Yes. So we can dispute those, and you don't get charged. You get a credit on the account, so your very next lead is essentially free because you have that credit.
And it's not a form fill. You're not paying for a click like you would with traditional Google Ads. This is an actual live customer, and it's an exclusive lead, like you mentioned.
[14:40] The other part is that you can listen to these phone calls. Since they're recorded, you can play them back, see exactly how the call went, gather that information and see if it was a good lead. You can also rate the leads — there's an option right on that page to score how great or how poor a lead was. That really affects the future performance of the account, because it tells Google, "I want more of these, or fewer of these specific types of calls."
[15:12] Matt: Exactly, right. And because they're recorded, if you have sales development or sales training, your team can review those calls internally. When that very first phone call comes in, are we asking the right questions? Are we figuring out whether this is a good fit for the company, based on what the homeowner is looking for? What else? Tell us a little more.
[15:45] Booker: I'd say it's such a unique program, because I really can't think of any other paid advertising program where you're only charged for qualified leads. If somebody calls in trying to sell you something, just hang up. It's obviously not a lead, and you're not going to get charged. Now, Google's system uses AI, and it's not perfect. But if something goes through that shouldn't, you have the option to dispute it.
[16:16] Matt: Right, awesome. So even a wrong number, or someone looking for a job — or you're a remodeling company and someone wants you to hang a picture or a painting, the kind of stuff a handyman would typically help with.
[16:35] Booker: Yes, exactly.
[16:39] Matt: Right. So at the end of the day, there are plenty of channels out there — plenty of places to throw your money. But for short-decision-cycle contractors, we feel having all three of these — controlling your service area, scaling your budget up and down, and getting live phone calls — is why we like Local Service Ads more than pretty much any other channel for this exact situation. You're not trying to reach a homeowner who filled out a contact form at midnight. You're not playing phone tag and chasing them down. Obviously every builder and contractor has slightly different preferences, but that's why we think it's a really good match.
[17:43] The other thing, like we mentioned before: LSAs don't really work as well for new-construction builders. We've had some clients try it, and they've gotten some leads through it, but the sales cycle is too slow. If you're a custom home builder, six months to three years is typical. And if the homeowner doesn't have a piece of land yet, you're going to be closer to that two- to three-year sales cycle. So it can work — it just doesn't work as quickly in those situations.
[18:22] Booker, we did hear that Google is going to roll Local Service Ads into their traditional Google Ads program. That was supposed to happen this past summer, I think, and it hasn't happened yet. What are some things to look for as that rolls out?
[18:42] Booker: Well, it's going to be a very welcome change. Historically, the LSA platform has been a little rough around the edges, but Google's really starting to take it seriously now, and they're moving it over to the Google Ads platform, which is super polished. They said they'd do it at the beginning of August. It's been pushed back. I know some people actually have beta access, but the first really big migration wave is still to come. I have a meeting with my Google representative next week, and we're going to cover this exact thing. There's no date yet, but it's going to be a great change. It'll be more reliable, they'll be adding a bunch more features, and it's just going to be a great update to the program.
[19:34] Matt: Right. And one of the things we can do at United Foundry is help remodelers, builders and contractors set up and manage their LSAs. Like we said, it's not set-it-and-forget-it. That means defining your specific service areas, getting strong in one area and then expanding over time. It means scaling your weekly budget up when jobs are finishing and down when your queue is full. And every lead is a live customer call, so you can listen, coach your sales team, and dispute the junk to get credited back. Very few channels have all three of those combined. That's why we recommend LSAs for that shorter sales cycle.
[20:43] We've also built a custom integration that takes your LSA leads from your Google dashboard and puts them into GoHighLevel, the CRM we're huge fans of. So we can set that up for clients too — not just the Local Service Ads, but our own custom integration our team built. It takes the phone number, and even the recording, and puts it inside your GoHighLevel account, so you can see every lead and track every conversation. And that's part of the trick to advertising: figuring out what works and what doesn't.
So that's what we have for you guys today. Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to like this episode and subscribe for more. Thanks, and we'll see you in our next episode.
Things to Remember
Use LSAs for short sales cycles. They work best when jobs close in three months or less.
Dial in your service area. Include and exclude by county, city, ZIP code or neighborhood, and cut out rental-heavy, industrial and too-far-away areas.
Flex your weekly budget with your workload. Turn it up when crews are wrapping up jobs and down when you’re booked out.
Treat every call like the live lead it is. Answer it live, rate each lead, dispute junk calls for credit, and use the recordings to coach your team.
