EP 242 P1 - Inside Google Local Services Ads: Ranking Signals, Lead Costs, and Why LSAs Beat the Local Pack (w/ Eric Levine)

Local Services Ads have quietly become Google’s most influential local monetization layer. In this episode, former Googler Eric Levine explains how LSAs evolved, why verification standards changed, how rankings actually work, and what Google’s own user testing reveals about trust, confusion, and conversion behavior.

Join us next week as for Part 2 of this interview with Eric as we cover photo guidance for LSAs, LSA review dynamics, technical mistakes, AI forward speculation about this ad type, and the ongoing topic of LSA credits and refunds.

The Podcast Deets

Segment 1 (0:00–10:00): Origins & Trust Signals

How LSAs started, why Google created a separate review system, and the evolution from Google Guaranteed and Screened to Google Verified.

Segment 2 (10:00–20:00): Rankings, Leads & Monetization

What actually determines LSA placement, how multi-provider leads work, why “responsiveness” matters so much, and how Google prices leads.

Segment 3 (20:00–29:00): User Behavior & Market Impact

Consumer confusion around sponsored listings, why LSAs outperform organic results, mobile vs desktop behavior, and what this means for local SEO.

Key Takeaways

• LSAs are now Google’s primary local ad product
• Verification standards have been simplified to enable scale
• Rankings are driven by behavior, not just reviews
• Multi-provider leads are full-price, not discounted
• LSAs structurally disadvantage organic local results
• User trust and speed matter more than transparency

👇 Watch by topic:

00:00 – Introduction & Eric Levine’s background at Google
03:30 – Early LSA pilots, cold calling, and product experiments
06:30 – Why Google built a separate LSA review system
08:00 – Verification, Google Guaranteed → Google Verified
10:00 – LSAs vs Google Ads vs Google Business Profile
13:30 – Why LSAs dominate the top of search
15:00 – Multi-provider leads & how billing works
18:30 – What really determines LSA rankings
22:00 – Responsiveness, behavior signals, and algorithm feedback
25:00 – User research, confusion, and why LSAs win clicks
28:30 – Mobile vs desktop & closing thoughts

Related Links

LeadWise HQ | activate your local presence | Boost Local Visibility Today

Expert local digital strategies with Google LSAs and profiles to help businesses enhance their local presence and drive growth.

LeadWise HQ | activate your local presence

Eric Levine LinkedIn Profile

Full Transcript -->

Greg Sterling (00:00): Hey everybody, we're back. It's me, Greg Sterling and the lovely and talented Mike Blumenthal on the near memo. And today we're joined by Eric Levine, who is a former Googler who was part of the original LSA team. We're going to be talking exclusively about Local Services Ads today. And he's just started or recently started his own agency Leadwise HQ. Welcome Eric.

Eric Levine (00:24): Thanks everybody, appreciate you having me.

Greg Sterling (00:26): Yep. So give us a little bit of background and context about yourself and your time at Google and the LSA program before we get into the nuts and bolts.

Eric Levine (00:36): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I started at Google in the summer of 2019, where they were launching the pilot for professional services. So I was cold calling real estate agents and lawyers trying to get them to test Google's newest ad product, Local Services Ads. And slowly it evolved since then. But yeah, that's the origin story when I started.

Greg Sterling (00:59): When did the program start in? go ahead, Mike.

Mike Blumenthal (01:00): And from there, 
 what other positions did you hold besides cold calling?

Eric Levine (01:06): So eventually moved into a product feedback role where I was interfacing in between clients and the product team, sharing insights. We were constantly running pilots and experiments. And you've heard that from Google a lot. So I was doing a lot of translating in between the two. So meeting with clients, meeting with agencies, running feedback studies, asking when we would implement a new tool or a new feature, how people felt about it, and then we would translate those insights. 
 to the product and to the engineer teams also did like a lot of trainings. So when a new feature would get rolled out or when healthcare was rolled out, essentially training all the sales teams, frontline sales reps on how that worked. And then closer to the end, I was in a little bit more of a product-facing role where I was training the Google Ads sales reps. 
 on how local services worked. Because as you know, LSA and Google Ads have got separate dashboards, separate interfaces, separate logins. The only thing that they really share is access and security billing. But otherwise, they're pretty separate. And yeah, so I did that. And then also, all the bugs that were filed across the global teams would come to me, and then I would triage them. And I would help the engineers prioritize which bugs. 
 should be fixed. And then I would meet with the engineers weekly and we talk about that.

Mike Blumenthal (02:26): Which bugs should be fixed this year and which bugs should be fixed in 2030? That kind of thing.

Greg Sterling (02:30): Yeah.

Eric Levine (02:31): Basically, basically a version of that.

Greg Sterling (02:33): So how much of a feature of the Local Services Ads program is outcalling today? I mean, I can imagine when you joined, it was already fairly well established, like in other categories and professional. the Google Guarantee program essentially had been around for a number of years, and you were now on the Google Screened side with professional services. And so I can understand to get that going, you were using cold calling or. 
 outcalling. How?

Mike Blumenthal (03:01): which is the evolution 
 from guaranteed to verified, I think, right? So in professional services, became, right, they became verified as opposed to.

Greg Sterling (03:05): Yeah, it's now all verified.

Eric Levine (03:09): Yeah, they had three badges 
 at one point. Google guaranteed, Google screened, and then when healthcare came out, it was called license verified by Google. Because a screening is a, it's like a healthcare procedure. So they had to come up with a third badge for that. And then it was natural that it was too many badges, they unified it, Google verified.

Greg Sterling (03:24): Mm-hmm. 
 So I just wanna ask how widely used is cold calling or out calling today when you left versus when you started?

Eric Levine (03:35): So as far as I know, they weren't doing cold calling for early on when we were seeding that initial pilot. They wanted to even see if professional services was even going to work, if people were interested in that, if lawyers even cared about that. But yeah, I don't believe that they have been doing cold calling since then. I know that they're always running pilots. And so probably on an extremely limited basis, they may be.

Greg Sterling (03:39): Well, you were doing cold calling initially,

Eric Levine (04:00): doing some tests and doing stuff like that, doing outreach, but actually having like cold calling a sales floor and stuff like that. think a lot of that stopped after that initial pilot.

Greg Sterling (04:09): Right.

Mike Blumenthal (04:09): So 
 is the bulk of it currently still self-serve or is a lot of it going through PPC ad reps from your point of view?

Eric Levine (04:18): So 
 a lot of it is self sign up where people either hear about it or they come through like that. And then if you do that, typically they'll either ask if you want to have a rep reach out or they may automatically a rep on an onboarding team may reach out and help you get through the process because there is some hand holding required. yeah, and then on the pay-per-click side, similar to people just hearing about new things, they want to know about local services. 
 that top real estate at the very, top of Google, it's impossible to ignore. It's got reviews. It's got call-outs. It's a pay per lead model, which is completely different. So it's just naturally built some buzz like that.

Mike Blumenthal (04:54): So you were there during the transition from both into professional services and then the broad expansion across multiple verticals in the 2020, 2021, the fraud that from your own review, from its own review system and from the listing fraud that occurred where somebody could have locations in just about any city, whatever. And then the subsequent sort of tightening up of that with

Greg Sterling (04:54): Peace.

Mike Blumenthal (05:23): by moving over to GBP verification and GBP reviews. Could you sort of articulate sort of what was going on and you know, the arc of this transition?

Eric Levine (05:33): Well, the end state of having all the reviews unified makes sense to just have a unified trust. Yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (05:39): Made sense though in 2017 though. Meanwhile, you still rolled out your own review system. Why'd

Greg Sterling (05:40): Why

Mike Blumenthal (05:43): you roll out your own review system?

Greg Sterling (05:45): was it independent in the beginning?

Eric Levine (05:47): Well, local services itself was independent. Local services is separate from Google Ads, separate from Google Business Profile. And my guess, because I wasn't in the room at that highest level back then, my guess is that it was just part of the pilot, that they wanted to see whether people would potentially infer higher trust to local services if they knew that these people were background checked and verified, that maybe this was an additional layer of trust. 
 or whether people like those reviews more or less, also whether the advertisers cared more about those reviews more or less. But over time, it just ended up being so confusing, having different numbers. And as I don't even tell you guys that reviews to a business owner is, it's their lifeblood. It's extraordinarily sensitive. So doing any kind of manipulation or any type of difference between the two, I think just caused too much consternation. 
 But that's just my guess.

Greg Sterling (06:40): Well, Mike, I-

Mike Blumenthal (06:41): It was an opportunity 
 to get verified reviews. You knew when the transaction took place, but unfortunately that opportunity was lost when there was a decision to make to scale reviews and to surface a review link that businesses could send out where anybody could leave a review and there was no vetting. There was no algorithms in place that monitored those reviews. So there was a period of time where I was paid regularly to get fake LSA reviews down, you know, which was very difficult at the time.

Greg Sterling (06:45): Right, that's what I was going to say.

Mike Blumenthal (07:10): there was no forms, was no mechanism. LSA didn't seem this was during your early days of your tenure.

Greg Sterling (07:16): All right, so there's a whole lot of things to talk about here. But let's talk about the guaranteed and the Google screened process a little bit. So we understand the rationale for both of those. Tell us about the evolution of that. How rigorous was it in the beginning, and now how rigorous is it or is it not? What's, you know.

Eric Levine (07:36): as far as the verification 
 process in general.

Greg Sterling (07:38): Yeah, I mean, as Mike, I think alluded to earlier, it was something that Google took very seriously in the beginning. it was a, you know, I mean, was a Google's stamp of approval on these businesses and it carried the Google brand and all of that stuff. And it seems like the process has been become very diluted over time. Outsource to third parties and, you know, so on and so forth. Tell us what's the reality behind that.

Eric Levine (08:04): Yeah, think what you're saying is right. Google has slowly over time made it easier for businesses to get verified. So one is like the enterprise equivalency program. So if you're a business of a certain size, you're able to essentially sign a contract that says, hey, Google, we've got so many. 
 individual users, know, we don't have the time to give you 100 or 1000 licenses and insurance. So we're willing to sign a contract that says all of our technicians are up to Google standards. We're willing to sign a contract that basically says that. So enterprise equivalency. So that's one way that Google has made it easier, the verification process. And then over time, also, like the Google business profile itself, having to have a verified Google business profile. 
 Google's coming up with other ways to infer some legitimacy onto the business, which is really, that's what I think people care about. But yeah, still at least having some sort of verification that does separate Local Services Ads and does, especially when somebody's coming into your house or somebody's a locksmith, knowing that this person has been vetted, I think adds to that trust and what makes local services so popular.

Mike Blumenthal (09:11): Is the guarantee still in place or not?

Greg Sterling (09:14): It's verified, right? Just Google verified.

Eric Levine (09:14): No, no.

Mike Blumenthal (09:16): Thank

Eric Levine (09:17): Yeah, 
 everything's Google verified now.

Mike Blumenthal (09:19): And that process is beyond GBP verification. Is there a process beyond GBP verification in terms of vetting these listings?

Eric Levine (09:29): Yeah, so you still have to prove that you have a license and then verticals that require like insurance and background check. You still have to have that. But yeah, I think, you know. 
 The biggest hurdle for local services is this deep verification that you have to do, right? Every single step that you add to onboarding makes it difficult for people to pass requirements. So if there's ways to make it easier, I'm sure that they're exploring that, but still having to balance that with making sure that this is a legitimate business, that they are actually licensed, that the technicians, not just the business owner, people who are coming into your house, are safe and don't have criminal records or anything like that. 
 But yeah, that's the idea.

Greg Sterling (10:04): Once upon a time, Google had this strategy, which was to get everybody into GBP or Google My Business at the time. And then that would be the on-ramp to AdWords, right? That was the strategy for a long time. And that didn't work because people were not making the leap automatically from Google My Business into AdWords. And so my assumption is that Google shifted. 
 to LSAs as the primary local advertising vehicle. I mean, even though there are different kinds of local ads and we see ads in the Local Pack and elsewhere. And my perception is that Local Services Ads are enormously successful for Google. Can you give us any insight into that? I mean, I don't know, they don't break out any revenue for any specific type of ad, but. 
 I mean, obviously they just announced earnings and they had you know, 89, roughly $89 billion quarter with most of that being ad revenue and a 400 billion, you know, it was another a hundred plus billion dollar quarter beating last quarter, which was the first. So ads are going.

Mike Blumenthal (11:05): Just to 
 add a little bit to your question, my understanding is that GBP actually ended up moving under ads in the org chart away from maps, relatively recently during your tenure there. In other words, it was under maps and then it moved under ads sometime in the last couple years, three years, four years. that seems, I mean, if you could answer this question from Greg, just. 
 if that can answer whether that's actually.

Greg Sterling (11:32): Well, answer 
 Mike's question first, because it's a simpler question. And then you can go on to answer my question.

Eric Levine (11:39): As far as how GBP is rolled up under the org, I'm not sure. But what I can say is Local Services Ads used to have its own website. And now if you type in Local Services Ads and go to their landing page, I believe it's under the Google business profile domain. I mean, we can do a check right now. But I believe the last time, yeah, so if you type in Local Services Ads, exactly. Yeah.

Greg Sterling (12:01): Yeah, it's business.google.com. Yep. Yeah.

Eric Levine (12:07): Yeah, so to your point, know, local services was designed for small businesses in mind. So like, there's fewer...

Greg Sterling (12:14): Originally, there was 
 no bidding. There was no bidding at all. It was a fixed fee, by category, and geography.

Eric Levine (12:20): the fewest levers possible. Like my dad, for example, he is a general contractor. He would not have been able to set up a Google Ads account. It would have fried his brain. But he could absolutely set up a local services account. It's pretty easy to set up. So I think lowering the barrier to entry for an ad product is a big deal. Making it more accessible. 
 And LSA really is that. It's also easy to sell. when we were cold calling, if you had somebody who was interested, who understood the value of the digital real estate at the top, and you could tell them, yeah, you're going to show up at the top. Your reviews that you care so much about, we're going to display those prominently. I think it was an easier sell once people understood what was happening. So yeah, I think that that definitely lowered the barrier to entry. But I really think of... 
 the relationship between GBP and LSA. That GBP is sort of the brain in some sense, and LSA is almost a sleeve worn over the GBP. All the key business information, business name, address, phone number, all that information, the reviews, photos, I mean, it's very, very similar. The CTAs, call-outs, booking, all that stuff, it's very, very similar.

Greg Sterling (13:25): So give us a sense of how successful these ads are in terms of revenue generation. My perception is that they're very, very successful. I mean, we're seeing lots and lots of ads, lots of categories. It's a kind of a compulsory thing now for many categories because you're just not going to get clicks if you don't appear at the top. So give us some sense, even if it's just directional, of what the success of these ads units is.

Eric Levine (13:54): Yeah, absolutely. So I can't speak to revenue directly, but if the LSAs are there in that extraordinarily valuable digital real estate, the inference you can make is that they are very successful, that they are not pushing. I'm sorry, please.

Greg Sterling (14:08): Well, we can see 
 that. I'm sorry, I don't mean to cut you off. We can see that from the user testing that we've done that Michael talked about in a second. But I assume that this is the revenue driver that Google always was hoping for from AdWords, from small businesses that didn't materialize. This has become that thing.

Eric Levine (14:26): likely, likely, but again, the best way to think about it for Holistically, because again, I'm not in the boardroom. they are likely having much higher level conversations and have access to info that I just don't have. But the fact that they are in that spot, pushing Google ads down the page.

Greg Sterling (14:40): Sure. OK.

Eric Levine (14:46): makes me believe that they are extremely powerful, that even probably beyond revenue, there's probably other, you know, intense signals and there's other things that they see that's happening based on the user behavior that they are pleased with. Otherwise, I don't think that they would be sort of allowed to monopolize that area. But again, that's just my guess.

Greg Sterling (15:06): Okay, Mike, proceed.

Mike Blumenthal (15:08): Well, so I, for those of you who are listening, we brought up a screen. my location is set as Brooklyn, New York as personal injury lawyer near me. And the top three results are LSA ads. The next subsequent results, there are no PPC ads showing in the next results are PAC results, the top of which is sponsored. So, you know, a couple questions. One is, 
 In this display, you see request multiple options, which allows a user to get callbacks from I think up to four personal injury law firms. How does that work? How does it get billed? How does the cost of that get distributed across 40 people? Do they pay their full boat per click or is it some reduced value? Maybe you could explain that to folks.

Eric Levine (16:01): Yeah, absolutely. So one thing I will say is when I first started, when we were calling real estate agents, one thing they would say is, you know, don't become like Zillow, don't become like these other lead gen platforms where, you know, send one, a customer sends one message and it goes out to everybody, whoever responds first kind of gets it. But what was found...

Greg Sterling (16:26): But yet 
 here we are.

Eric Levine (16:28): Yet here we are. 
 Well, what they're building for is what customers are already doing. So customers are already messaging multiple people. So they just made it easier for them to do that anyway. if you were messaging somebody and you had an issue, let's say an emergency and you needed a plumber. 
 Are you going to text one person or are you going to text whoever's I mean you have an emergency you're going to need to find out I mean what if somebody doesn't get back to you in an hour and you need something fixed and the second person gets back to you immediately I mean it's just customer behavior that they're

Greg Sterling (17:04): Sure, 
 consumer rationale is self-evident, it's clear. People are often gonna reach out to multiple vendors, multiple providers, and they want a couple of estimates or they wanna have a sense of the range of possibilities. So there's no question about that, dispute there. But in terms of the, yes, yes.

Mike Blumenthal (17:22): So how is it paid billing? How is it billed though? I mean, 
 does the lawyer pay full boat for it or is there some pro rated value when that happens or?

Eric Levine (17:32): I know that the help center, what's available externally has changed sometimes. think at one point it referred to being half price, like 50% of what a phone lead was. But I believe now, and I can check again, but I believe that it's full price. So I believe if they're messaging multiple people that it's full price.

Greg Sterling (17:50): Of course 
 it is. Of course it is. So how is it determined who gets the lead? So we see these three. I click the button and it goes to four. Is it these three and then somebody else, the next one in line? Or how is that determined?

Mike Blumenthal (17:54): I we don't know. I'm Troy Maskin. I'm trying to learn here.

Eric Levine (18:10): I believe if you click on it, you're able to select which ones you want to reach out to.

Mike Blumenthal (18:14): It says Google selects top four rated near you who typically reply in a few minutes.

Greg Sterling (18:18): So it's reviews. 
 So reviews plus response time.

Mike Blumenthal (18:25): Top rated who have fast response times, yes. That's what it.

Eric Levine (18:25): and 
 Yeah, not just 
 reviews, not just reviews. Because as you can see, the person at the very top has 322 and below them has 1,400 five star. So it's not just reviews. They don't just stack by reviews.

Greg Sterling (18:40): review 
 fraud, by the way. The 1400 five-star is a review fraud person.

Eric Levine (18:42): What is? 
 It does seem statistically pretty outrageous. I mean, just knowing how people are. But yeah, even just based on that, you can see, but yeah, there's a whole bunch of factors. I mean, also what determines the top three is, all agree. Sure.

Greg Sterling (18:54): Unlikely. 
 Yes, exactly. Let's go there. 
 What are the factors behind those top three positions or top two positions sometimes?

Eric Levine (19:18): So, reviews, quality and quantity of reviews, responsiveness, so how likely somebody is to answer the phone, radius, so the actual area that is being targeted. But then also other things like whether or not you're.

Greg Sterling (19:34): Is that from the centroid, radius from the centroid?

Eric Levine (19:37): So the service areas that are targeted inside the local services platform, inside your profile and budget, the service area section, depending on where you target. Now, lawyers are a little bit different because if you're licensed in the state of New York, you could target the entire state. But what we've seen in the past is that people who target too wide, let's say if you're in the home services space and your GBP and your LSA's address is in Los Angeles, but you're targeting the whole state,

Greg Sterling (19:43): Mm-hmm.

Eric Levine (20:05): You are likely not driving, your technicians aren't driving the entire length of California back and forth. So yeah, people have been flagged for widespread serving. And I think even Google mentions that you have to serve as wide as you can reasonably serve. But that doesn't apply in professional services, because again, if you're licensed in the state, you can target everywhere. But back to the ranking. that's service areas. In home services, you're also able to do booking. 
 So with professional services, it's just messaging and calls. with home services, you can also add booking. What you'll tend to see when you do a search for a plumber near me is that the people at the top typically have, just from what you can see on its face, is very, high reviews relative to the competition. But then they are also opted into all the CTAs. And 
 Again, this is just because Google wants to give its users more options, providing an additional way to reach out to a plumber. And then what we would always say is that Google is always experimenting. So there is no one way to sort of stay ahead of the algorithm or to predict what is going to happen because there is no one algorithm. There's a whole series of things that they're doing.

Greg Sterling (21:24): Sure. 
 What about responses or click-throughs or booking or messaging? that, in an AdWords context, clicks matter in terms of subsequent ranking and how much you have to pay to get into that position? Is there something similar going on here where if one of these people is frequently called or frequently booked or messaged, that that gives them some sort of advantage versus competitors?

Eric Levine (21:52): Yeah, it's tough because it's a little bit of a golf score. It's a little bit of a tiny bit of everything that you're doing. Now there are more prominent signals like the three Rs, ratings, reviews, responsiveness, and radius, also opting into the CTAs, but there are other signals that there aren't levers for that they're likely taking into account.

Greg Sterling (22:18): such as...

Eric Levine (22:19): whether somebody's ads been clicked on a lot, whether they've got really, really good photos, whether their responsiveness is, their phone responsiveness is really good, but also their message lead responsiveness is good. Those two responsiveness scores are different from each other. But yeah, there's a whole bunch of things that they're taking into account.

Greg Sterling (22:42): So people who have an IVR system, for example, and who can't respond immediately sometimes, IVR is supposed to route you to the right person, but maybe it goes to voicemail or something, that disadvantages that individual if they're not responding to it. So if I get a message and then I call back sometime later, does that disadvantage me in this of signals environment that you're describing?

Eric Levine (23:08): To a degree, yeah, because the way you want to think about it is if somebody calls and they click the get phone number and they just call that one person without Google knowing anything else, they know that they probably had a good experience with that person. But if somebody is calling multiple people, then there's a chance that they know that the original person who they called maybe didn't provide the best experience or maybe the person is shopping around. It's kind of hard to know. 
 Yeah, that's

Greg Sterling (23:38): So they're 
 watching people call multiple vendors, multiple providers in a sequence, and then they're drawing inferences about the quality of their interaction from that, and that's factored back into the algorithm somehow. Is that what you're saying?

Eric Levine (23:53): Sure, to some degree. Now, I won't claim to understand how the algorithms work and there's people far smarter than me that put these experiments and algorithms together. But yeah, they're certainly taking in as many signals as possible. And then that's why they're running these experiments. They're running these experiments to try to figure out what works the best. Because if there's one thing that I know about Google, they care about being number one. 
 And if they provide such a poor experience that it causes people to churn and to leave, that is not good. That is not what they want. The people there are absolutely committed to trying to make it work. And yeah, they're absolutely trying to hit earnings and do that as well. So it's a little bit of a balance, but that's the idea.

Greg Sterling (24:33): So Mike, why don't you go ahead.

Mike Blumenthal (24:33): So sure. 
 One of the things that we do consumer behavior research, we give them a problem. My cousin was injured and he's going to be okay, but he's asked you to take, to find him legal representation to the injury, go to Google and solve the problem. And so we do that regularly and we've done it several times in the legal space where we watch user behavior and several things that I just wanted to ask you about. One is 
 People see the sponsored LSAs. There's only one word sponsored above the top one. Some small percentage of people, one to 2% or 3% seem to indicate that the subsequent two, they don't think they are sponsored, point one. Point two is they see a sponsored listing at the top of Google Maps. And for those of you who watching, you can see this on the screen. There's a sponsored listing and some small percentage, again, one to 2% think that all Google Maps are sponsored. So again, 
 They drive them back to Local Service Ads, but in some verticals, like in PI, personal injury lawyers, you have photos next to the listings and don't have them in LSAs, but don't have them next to the Google pack profiles. And then you have calls to action that are more immediate and available. For example, in the LSA, it's, you when I'm looking at it's message and get phone number. 
 In the pack, it's go to the website or get directions. it and as a result, what we see is that users extol the value of LSAs in terms of providing pictures and reviews and years in business and contact information. And it often at the expense of free listings. I'm curious if these things are tested together or apart to get to this state. 
 It seems that the pack is sort of disadvantaged in this environment. And I'm curious just how it got to that point if you can shed any light on it.

Eric Levine (26:37): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. one thing we can see here, so that top business in the map pack right there that says sponsored, that's PPC. So that is an ad that's called a local search ads that I believe is purchased through PMAX. And sometimes LSAs will show up on maps. And then the way to tell the difference between LSA and local search ads.

Mike Blumenthal (26:46): Mm-hmm.

Eric Levine (27:06): is the LSAs will have the LSA callouts, and then local search ads will have website and directions like that.

Mike Blumenthal (27:12): Yeah, we've seen

Greg Sterling (27:12): Well,

Mike Blumenthal (27:12): occasionally

Greg Sterling (27:12): and the-

Mike Blumenthal (27:13): when you click through to, from more businesses, sometimes LSA ads show up when you do that even not always often it's if there's a PPC available, it'll do that. But, so anyways, obviously in this environment, there's no question that the LSAs look better and do more. And and we've seen users selected more as a result, whether through a little bit of confusion or whether the, the 
 more attractive design, they're better. are they tested together or are they tested separately? how do you get there? That's the question, right?

Greg Sterling (27:41): Well, they're just very effective. Yeah, they're very effective.

Eric Levine (27:50): Both yes, yes and yes and yes. Of course, absolutely. But I mean like this this is on desktop vast majority searches are done on mobile. So when you do

Greg Sterling (27:52): All of the above.

Mike Blumenthal (28:00): When you say vast 
 majority, is it more than 60% or?

Eric Levine (28:04): I believe it's 70%, 80%. it's phone usage on Google in general.

Mike Blumenthal (28:09): Yeah, this does display differently in mobile, for sure. And there are images on the Local Pack in mobile. You can see here. So there is that. It does display, but there's still a sponsored ad here. And then they get a carousel here, which they do here as well. So they're closer on mobile although, again, 
 The LSA has the calls to action. Thepack has some, not as many, right? The ad has a call. Maybe if we scroll over, Thepack brings the call up if they scroll over. So the call to action is one swipe away here. Still not as functional, I guess, for lack of a better 
 word.

Mike Blumenthal (29:02): Thank you very much for joining us for this interview with LSA expert Eric Levine, formerly of the Google LSA team and now the owner of an LSA-focused agency, Leadwise. Join us next week as we cover photo guidance for LSAs, review dynamics, technical mistakes, AI forward speculation about this ad type, and th