Local Services Ads Cheatsheet: Radius, Lead Costs and Creative
Radius rules, observed lead costs by trade, creative that books jobs — and a hard warning against fake local-customer avatars that get accounts banned and jobs disputed.
Local service ads are a radius, a calendar and a phone number — not a national DTC funnel. This sheet maps observed lead costs by trade, workable drive-time radii, creative that books jobs, and the fake-local-avatar landmine that gets accounts restricted and customers disputing jobs they never had.
Buy booked jobs, not form fills from the next county
A $22 lead that is 40 minutes outside your service area, on a Sunday night, for a job you do not even offer, is not cheaper than a $55 lead that becomes a $1,200 install on Tuesday. Local maths starts from job value, close rate and drive time, then works back to an allowable CPL. HVAC, plumbing, dental, legal and lawn all have different radii, seasonality and phone-vs-form mix. If you copy a national ecommerce budget rule (50 conversions to exit learning, 20% daily scale) onto a single-location plumber, you will over-split the account and never get a clean read. One offer, one radius, one destination (call or form, not both in the same ad set) until the weekly booked-job count is stable.
Radius is a creative problem as much as a geo pin
Dropping a 25-mile pin around a city centre will pull cheap clicks from suburbs you cannot profitably serve and miss the street two miles away that actually calls. Set radius from drive time at peak traffic, not as-the-crow-flies miles, then say the service area on screen ('South Austin + 15 minutes, not the whole metro'). That line filters junk leads before they spend your CPL. Zip-list targeting beats a blob when you already know which zips close. Expand radius only when close rate at the edge is within 15% of the core — not when you simply want more volume.
Warn: fake local-customer avatars will burn you
This is the landmine. An AI or stock face that says 'I'm your neighbour on Maple, I called this plumber last week' is a deceptive testimonial and a location lie in one clip. Platforms reject it; real locals report it; state testimonial rules still apply. Do not generate a customer who 'lives in your town', and do not stitch a skyline behind a generic avatar to imply a job you did not do. Allowed: the real owner or tech, permitted job-site B-roll, labelled dramatizations that name no street, and problem demos with no local identity. Need volume? Generate the job-site demo and the owner script — never a counterfeit neighbour.
How to use the tables and still produce enough creative
Locked: CPL and close-rate bands by trade, radius and schedule rules, a shot list that is legal, a fake-avatar / testimonial policy table, and daily budget vs lead-hour maths. Local businesses still need creative refresh; they just cannot fake the customer. Film 20 minutes of real van, real tech, real before/after on a permitted job, then cut and generate extra problem-hooks around that footage. Klip Kanvas can multiply owner-to-camera and job-demo variants from a product or service URL — keep the avatar generic or as the business, never as a named local customer.
5 locked tables: observed CPL/close-rate/job-value by trade, radius and lead-hour rules, a legal local shot list, a fake-local-avatar and testimonial policy sheet, and daily budget maths from allowable CPL.
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