Google recently made a new change to the Local Services Ads platform, which is an ad format for service based businesses. The new feature allows users to expand the local services ads results from 2 or 3 spots to now show additional ads for up to 8 spots for local advertisers on mobile devices.
In the screenshots below you can see the new Local Services Ads expandable dropdown for the personal injury vertical.
Originally Google started with showing a 3 pack on desktop and a 2 pack on mobile for Local Services Ads, but for the personal injury vertical we have seen them testing 3 spots on mobile for quite a while now. As far as we can tell, the expandable Local Services Ads section only shows up for verticals where there are more than 5 paying advertisers. Otherwise, just the normal two or three pack will show before taking you into the full platform.
This change makes sense in personal injury due to the high demand, fierce competition and number of advertisers in this vertical. Real estate is another vertical that has a high number of advertisers and increased competition and we suspect that will begin testing 3 spots for the real estate agent vertical shortly.
ADSQUIRE’s Take On The Recent Change.
We think this change has many angles. The first one is that we think Google is trying to cut down on free leads that advertisers are currently getting by being on this platform but turning off their budget.
This new dropdown feature does encourage people to not go into the entire platform that has 50 paid ad spots for injury lawyers and so this change limits the amount of searching a user has to do to compare local businesses.
The second reason is to make the platform work better and get paying advertisers more leads. We have seen them testing throwing local services ads into other ad formats and maps to try and get advertisers with big competition more chances for leads from this platform.
The addition of a dropdown will increase the chances of paying advertisers to be able to get more leads by showing them before users go into the full platform with 50 advertisers.
Will it work? Only time will tell.
From our experience in legal advertising, clients are not particularly thrilled with the lack of control on this platform and the quality or specificity of leads. Other issues have been calls from current clients, and less accepted returns in recent months. We have also seen a proliferation of spam tactics in this platform and advertisers gaming the system, specifically with fake reviews and LSA verified fake reviews.
Google has also recently introduced a policy manager section to Local Services Ads as well an ad transparency center within the platform. So while we are skeptical that recent changes made will improve the platform overall we are also hopeful that they may. Some of the recent moves made by Google do inspire hope as some of these changes are welcome and things that advertisers have been asking for.
Here is a screenshot of the new policy manager recently added to all Local Services Ads profiles (Below)
The new ad transparency center inside of the Google Local Services Ads platform. It does not currently show advertisers ads or settings but we think they are working on that functionality and it should be rolled out shortly.
