What’s the Difference Between Google Ads and Google Local Service Ads?

April 11, 2025 in Google Ads, Google Business Profile, Google Local Service Ads, Leads, SEO, Website Traffic

What’s the Difference Between Google Ads and Google Local Service Ads?

Welcome to another Momentum 360 weekly blog!

In the competitive world of online marketing, businesses need to take advantage of every opportunity to reach their ideal customers. Two of the most effective advertising tools offered by Google—Google Ads and Google Local Service Ads (LSA)—can help you do just that. While both are designed to improve your online visibility and generate leads, they work in very different ways.

In this blog, we’ll break down what each platform does, how they differ, and which might be right for your business.

What Are Google Ads?

Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, is Google’s traditional pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform. It allows you to place ads across a wide variety of channels, including Google Search, the Google Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, and even in Google Shopping results.

With Google Ads, you bid on specific keywords that potential customers might type into Google. When someone searches using those terms, your ad could appear above organic search results, giving your business instant visibility. You only pay when someone clicks your ad, which makes it a cost-effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website.

This platform is highly customizable, allowing you to control everything from your daily budget to your ad copy, targeting by location, device, demographics, interests, and more. If you want to scale your marketing and test different campaigns across various audiences and formats, Google Ads offers that flexibility.

What Are Google Local Service Ads?

Google Local Service Ads are designed specifically for local service-based businesses, such as plumbers, electricians, realtors, HVAC technicians, and cleaning services, who want to attract customers in their immediate area. Instead of paying per click like with Google Ads, LSA operates on a pay-per-lead basis. That means you only pay when a potential customer contacts your business directly through the ad, either by calling or messaging.

These ads appear at the very top of Google Search results—above both traditional Google Ads and organic listings—giving your business prime real estate. LSA showcases key business information like your name, reviews, phone number, business hours, and a “Google Guaranteed” badge if you qualify. That badge acts as a strong trust signal for consumers, reassuring them that your business has been vetted by Google.

To qualify for LSA, your business must complete a background check and provide proof of proper licensing and insurance. Once approved, you’ll have access to a simplified ad management dashboard where you can control your budget, pause ads, and manage leads.

Key Differences Between Google Ads and LSAs

While both platforms help generate leads and increase visibility, they differ in a few important ways.

Billing Structure: Google Ads charges you each time someone clicks on your ad (PPC), regardless of whether they contact you or not. LSA, on the other hand, only charges you when someone takes an action and reaches out via phone or message (pay-per-lead).
Where Ads Show Up: Google Ads can appear across a wide variety of networks, including search, display, YouTube, and Gmail. LSA is exclusive to the top of Google Search results and is only available for select local service industries.
Targeting Capabilities: Google Ads allows for detailed audience and keyword targeting. You can segment by age, interests, device type, and more. LSA uses a simpler system based on your service area and business category.
Ad Setup: Google Ads requires more setup and maintenance, including writing ad copy, choosing keywords, and monitoring performance. LSA is easier to manage once your business is verified, making it ideal for busy business owners who want fast results with less technical setup.
Trust Signals: LSA includes the Google Guaranteed badge (after completing the vetting process), which can increase consumer trust and lead conversion. Google Ads do not come with this verification badge.

Which One Is Best for Your Business?

The right platform depends on your business goals, industry, and how much time or resources you have to manage your ads.

Google Local Service Ads are a great option for service-based businesses that want high-quality, local leads. If you’re a contractor, realtor, home service provider, or anyone who works within a specific area, LSA can be a low-maintenance, high-return option.

Google Ads, on the other hand, offers broader reach and flexibility. They’re ideal for e-commerce businesses, professional services, B2B companies, and any business that wants to drive traffic to a website or reach specific customer segments. With the ability to scale and customize campaigns, Google Ads is a powerful tool for businesses ready to dive deep into digital marketing.

Many businesses find that combining both platforms delivers the best results: LSAs for immediate, local leads, and Google Ads for brand awareness, website traffic, and long-term conversion strategies.

SEO Bonus: How These Ads Support Your Online Presence

While these platforms are primarily paid advertising tools, they also support your SEO efforts. Google Ads help increase traffic to your website, which can improve your engagement metrics—an important ranking factor in search engines. LSA enhances your visibility at the top of search results and boosts your credibility with customer reviews and Google’s stamp of approval.

Together, they reinforce your brand, get more eyes on your business, and complement the work you’re already doing with organic SEO and your Google Business Profile.

Ready to Launch Google Ads or LSA? Momentum 360 Can Help

At Momentum 360, we specialize in helping businesses harness the power of both Google Ads and Google Local Service Ads. As digital marketing experts, we’ll help you determine which platform is right for your goals, set up your campaigns for success, and continuously optimize performance to drive results. Whether you need help with account setup, ad management, lead tracking, or getting your Google Guaranteed badge, our team is here to guide you every step of the way.

How to Leverage Social Media for New Year Promotions

January 3, 2025 in 1 Hotel & Homes, 160over90, 2024, 360, 360 Photo Booth, 3D, 3D Rendering, 3D Vista, Advertising, Aerial, AI, Airbnb, Allan Domb Realty, Announcements, Apartments, App, Art, Black Friday, Blog, Brand Identity, Bungalow, Cameras, Canon, Cars, ChatGPT, Cloudpano, Commercial Real Estate, Construction, Content, Content Marketing, Corporate Headshots, Cyber Monday, Digital Marketing, Drone, Duolingo, Ecommerce, Education, Email, Email Marketing, Event Photography, EwingCole, EyeSpy360, Facebook, Followers, FPV Drone Services, Franchise Marketing, Funeral Homes, Gateway Classic Cars, Glassdoor, Google, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, Google Local Service Ads, Gym, Healthcare, Home Staging, Hotel, Houses, How To's, Industrial Real Estate, Influencer Marketing, Instagram, Instagram Reels, Insurance, Kuula, Laser Tape Measures, Lead Generation, Legal, LinkedIn, Live Stream, Live Streaming, Local SEO, Lower Merion High School, Lund Company, Marketing, Marriott Marquis, Matterport, Mike McCann Realty, Mishimoto, MSC Retail, Museums, Nikon, Oculus Quest, Outbound, PDF, Penn State University, Philadelphia, Photography, Playground, Portrait Studio, Property Tax, Real Estate, Recourses, Rendering, Restaurants, Reviews, Ricoh Theta, Roku, Sales, Sanofi Pasteur, School, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Small Business, Social Media, Software, SPB Hospitality, Staging, Statistics, Storage Asset Management, Support, Taxes, Texas A&M, thx, TikTok, TK Elevaator, TK Elevator, Travel, Uncategorized, Under Armour, University of Pittsburgh, VA Hospital, Videography, Videos, Virtual Reality, Virtual Tours, Visiting Media, Web Design, Website, Website Traffic, Wedding, White Label, Yelp, Youngstown State University, YouTube, Zillow

How to Leverage Social Media for New Year Promotions

Welcome to another Momentum 360 weekly blog!

The New Year presents a prime opportunity to connect with your audience, launch engaging promotions, and start the year with a strong marketing push. Social media platforms are critical tools to achieve this, but understanding how to tailor your approach to each platform is key. This blog breaks down actionable strategies to maximize your New Year promotions and how to adapt them for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

How to Leverage Social Media for New Year Promotions

Why New Year Promotions are Important on Social Media

New Year promotions allow you to:

Re-engage existing customers after the holiday season.
Attract new audiences eager to make fresh purchases.
Build excitement for your brand heading into the year.
Promote end-of-year sales, discounts, and special offers.

Social media amplifies these benefits by providing direct access to audiences and tools to track performance in real time.

General Tactics for Effective New Year Promotions

Set Clear Goals: Define what you want to achieve- brand awareness, sales, engagement, or new followers.
Craft Time-Sensitive Offers: Emphasize urgency with limited-time discounts or early-bird deals.
Leverage Festive Themes: Use New Year imagery and hashtags.
Engage with Followers: Encourage user-generated content (UGC) by asking followers to share their resolutions or how they use your products.
Analyze Performance Metrics: Monitor engagement, click-through rates, and conversions to optimize your campaign.

Platform-Specific Strategies for New Year Promotions

Facebook: Building Community and Targeting Audiences

Facebook excels at creating community engagement and offering powerful ad-targeting capabilities.

Why it’s unique: Facebook has a broad user base and supports detailed content formats, including posts, stories, and videos.
How to leverage it:
- Create event pages for New Year flash sales or countdown campaigns.
- Use Facebook Ads to reach specific demographics based on location, interests, or behavior.
- Share success stories, milestones, or “Year in Review” posts to resonate emotionally with your audience.
- Engage with local groups and communities for local promotions.

Instagram: Visual Storytelling and Interactivity

Instagram’s focus on visuals and interactivity makes it a prime platform for creative New Year campaigns.

Why it’s unique: It thrives on high-quality images, videos, and features like Reels, Stories, and shopping tools.
How to leverage it:
- Use Stories to create countdowns, polls, and question boxes for direct interaction.
- Post carousel images showcasing your best-selling products or services.
- Launch a New Year contest encouraging followers to share UGC with branded hashtags.
- Share short, engaging Reels highlighting discounts or New Year resolutions related to your brand.

TikTok: Trend-Based and Fun Promotions

TikTok’s short-form video format and trend-driven culture make it ideal for entertaining and innovative campaigns.

Why it’s unique: The platform thrives on authenticity, trends, and viral challenges, especially with younger audiences.
How to leverage it:
- Create engaging videos showcasing your products as part of New Year routines or resolutions.
- Partner with influencers to drive awareness and credibility for your brand.
- Use trending sounds and hashtags to increase your reach.
- Launch a fun challenge, such as “New Year, New Me,” encouraging users to showcase transformations with your product.

LinkedIn: Professional and Thought-Leadership Campaigns

LinkedIn is ideal for B2B promotions and connecting with a professional audience.

Why it’s unique: It emphasizes networking, thought leadership, and business growth.
How to leverage it:
- Share company achievements and milestones as part of a “Year in Review” post.
- Publish articles offering professional advice or industry-specific resolutions for the New Year.
- Promote New Year discounts or service packages tailored for businesses.
- Run targeted ads aimed at decision-makers, emphasizing ROI or productivity enhancements for 2025.

How to Leverage Social Media for New Year Promotions

Maximizing SEO for New Year Promotions

To boost the visibility of your New Year campaigns, incorporate SEO best practices into your social media strategy:

Optimize Content Descriptions: Use relevant keywords like “New Year promotions” and “2025 sales.”
Leverage Local SEO: For location-specific promotions, mention your city or region in your posts.
Include Strong CTAs: Add calls-to-action that encourage users to visit your website, sign up for newsletters, or shop now.
Track Performance: Use analytics tools to refine content and focus on strategies that drive traffic and conversions.

Final Thoughts

Leveraging social media for New Year promotions is an effective way to connect with your audience and set the tone for success in 2025. By tailoring your strategy to the strengths of each platform, you can engage audiences in meaningful ways while amplifying your reach. Start planning today to ensure your promotions make a lasting impression and drive results!

Google Local Service Ads for Realtors

March 16, 2024 in Blog, Google Local Service Ads, Real Estate

Google Local Service Ads for Realtors

Introduction

Welcome to another Momentum 360 weekly blog! If this is your first time with us, welcome! We aim to provide you with insightful marketing information to help grow your business. If you’re a returning reader to our blog, welcome back, and thanks so much for your support!

In this one gang, we’ll go over the Google local service ads for realtors, and how in 2024, it’s one of the best ways to grow your business. But before we start, we need to teach you what Google local service ads are, and why they’re so powerful. So let’s get started!

Google Local Service Ads for Realtors

Google local service ads are local ads that realtors can promote from their Google Business Profile, to show off their reviews, posts, and accomplishments to get local people searching for real estate agents, to contact them! Note, this is different from running Google search or display ads, since you pay Google when your ad is viewed on these platforms, but not local service ads! For LSA’s, you only pay when people contact you, and if they’re not a good lead, you can simply dispute the charge and get your money back or a credit for a good lead in the future!

This way, you can maximize your budget with efficiency as you only are paying for leads that make sense for your business. How much better is this than paying Google with search/display ads when people view your ad, when they don’t even contact you in the first place!

You can see that Google local service ads for realtors will be a great lead generation method for you in 2024, as you’re able to grow your business from people searching for you, instead of you having to go out, do outreach, and waste time!

Benefits of Google Local Service Ads for Realtors

We mentioned a lot of benefits in the previous section, but we’ll now review the full benefits of Google local service ads. For realtors, they can benefit from Google Local Service Ads from:

Only pay when good leads contact you
You can dispute bad leads if they contact you, so you can get a refund
You don’t pay when people view your ad, only when they contact you!
More efficient lead generation tool than Google search or display ads
Saves you time since you have a dashboard that tracks all of your leads in one place

For realtors, they are very short on time, let alone money, so this is a great tool on how they’re able to scale their business in 2024. Let’s be honest, the residential market is not that hot at all right now. In fact, in 2023, it was the lowest year of sales and mortgage originations in nearly 30 years… let that sink in. So now more than ever, you need a reliable lead generation system that allows you to grow and scale your business this year, so you’re not wasting your time and losing to the competition time and time again.

Now, for many agents, they don’t have a Google Business profile, let alone a Google local service ads account, so in the next section, we’ll show you how to actually get started with Google local service ads!

Ready to start getting more leads than ever before, with working less than ever? Let’s do it!

Getting Started

Getting started with Google local service ads is very simple. Before you create an LSA account, you need to create a Google business account, which you can do so here. You’ll need to optimize and fully build out your profile with your business and contact information, services, reviews, posts, accomplishments, and many other things to make your business look professional on Google.

After you create your Google business profile, you can then create your own LSA account, which you can do so here. You’ll essentially go through a quick background check, document check, and sync your Google business profile to get reviews to show up on your LSA profile, as you can see from this screenshot.

You’ll most likely need to wait about a week on average to get everything fully verified, although verification sometimes does happen earlier than that.

Once you get verified and processed, your LSA account is now ready to go and get leads! Before we talk about leads, we’ll need to go over the exact documents required to make your LSA account processed as fast as possible, so you’re not waiting days on end.

Google Local Service Ads for Realtors

Documents Required

For realtors looking to create an LSA account, they need certain documents to get verified in the eyes of Google. We’re currently working with hundreds of agents across the country doing this exact service, and the list of documents required is below:

Insurance policy from brokerage (ask broker for this)
Real estate license
Background check (Google has a 3rd party system they use in their LSA dashboard)
Reviews (get at least one new client review to make sure Google knows you’re a current business)

And that’s it! They make it as easy as possible for you to create an LSA account. If you’re having trouble getting these documents, we’d recommend reviewing Google’s guidelines and support forum to talk to other realtors experiencing similar issues. The issue with Google is that they don’t have American-based support reps anymore, so you’ll most likely going to deal with someone overseas, which can get messy and annoying. That’s why Momentum 360 specializes in this service and can help you whenever you need it! Simply call 215-607-6482 or email us at sean@needmomentum.com to get help with setting up your own Google Local Service Ads account.

Google Local Service Ads for Realtors

In the next section, we’ll be talking about your budget that you need in order to see leads from Google local service ads for realtors. We’re almost at the finish line, and we can’t wait to show you the best way to get leads using a custom budget that fits your needs!

Budget

Budget, budget, budget – that’s what everyone is talking about today. Do you know your marketing budget? If yes, great! If not, let’s talk about it.

For Google local service ads for realtors, we’d recommend at least a 5-10% of your monthly revenue to reinvest back into sales. For some people, that could be a little bit of money, or a lot, it all depends on the type of business you have right now, which makes it custom so you’re able to get as many leads as possible with the budget you have in mind.

The nice thing about working with Momentum 360, is that we actually finance the ads for you. Yes, you heard that right, we finance the ads to get you cashflow during the month! What will happen is Momentum 360 will put our card down on your ads account, and then at the end of the month, we’ll get reimbursed for the total ad budget that was spent, and repeat the process for months to come!

This way, you have more cash flow to spend during the month, so you can have less stress for your business as time goes on. This has worked well for many of our other clients, and it’ll work well for you too!

The budget depends on the type of business you have at the end of the day, so we want to make sure that we have a budget that is big enough that works for you to get leads, but not so much that puts you in a hole and puts you in the red.

Google Local Service Ads for Realtors

In the next section, we’ll discuss how leads come in, how you contact them, how you manage them in the dashboard, and ultimately get paid for them! We’re almost finished with showing you how to get more leads using Google local service ads for realtors, aren’t you excited? Us too!

Leads

Finally, let’s talk about leads and how to get more clients!

In the Google LSA dashboard, you have two options on how to get contacted: by text or by call. We’d recommend doing both of these, so you have double the chances of getting more leads!

Some people don’t necessarily have the time to call, so they prefer to text, and some people don’t like to text, so that’s why they call – you need to give your leads the easiest way to contact you that they prefer, not you. This way, they’re already comfortable with you as you’re giving them a great first impression.

Now, inside of your LSA dashboard, you’ll have a tab that says “leads”, which is the most important tab in the entire dashboard, as that shows all of the leads that have called or texted you. For your leads, you want to make sure you’re updating them accordingly, either saying they’re a good or bad lead, you’ve contacted them or haven’t yet, etc. Think of this dashboard as your CRM system, you want to make sure it’s updated properly so you’re able to give Google the information it needs to give you more leads. If Google sees that you’re properly updating and managing your dashboard on a regular basis, you’re going to earn more leads on Google, since you’re adhering to their policies, it’s that simple!

And that’s it! Once you contact them, you will send them your normal paperwork to move forward with them if they need to buy or sell, it’s a very easy process to get more leads.

Google Local Service Ads for Realtors

In the next section, we’ll talk about the secrets of scaling your business using LSA’s for your entire team!

Scaling

The secret to scaling with Google local service ads for realtors is getting more people on your time. The more agents you have on your time with a Google business profile, the more agents you can set up with a LSA account too… think about it.

The more agents = more LSA accounts = more leads = more revenue!

It’s that simple, you just need to make sure all of your agents are onboard and have a dedicated budget, which can get complicated if you don’t have proper tracking of your expenses and revenue and metrics, so you need to make sure to do this, especially as you’re scaling your business to get more leads. If you truly want to grow with LSA’s, you need to track data, and get more people onboard to win, it’s that simple.

Next Steps

Well, there you have it!

Now you know how to set up your Google business profile, then your LSA account, then upload the required documents, to ultimately get successfully verified and setup to get more leads and scale your business!

The great thing about all of this, is that you don’t have to do this alone. Momentum 360 can help you grow your business using Local Service Ads for realtors. We have a dedicated team of over 100+ people to help scale your real estate business from the ground up.

Need help? You can simply call us at 215-607-6482 or email us at sean@needmomentum.com to get started. We offer free calls, and want to give you the support and help you need to grow your real estate business in 2024. Times are tough, but that doesn’t mean you need to struggle.

Thanks again for reading, and until next time friends, cheers!