What counts as a lead in Local Services Ads?
Three things: a phone call that connects and runs past a minimum duration, a message request submitted inside the ad unit, and a booking created through an integrated scheduling partner. They behave very differently. Calls are the highest intent and the most forgiving of slow follow-up because the customer is already on the line. Message leads decay within minutes. Bookings are the strongest but require a scheduling integration to exist.
Calls: high intent, and the only type where handling quality is visible
A call is a customer choosing to talk right now. It is also the only lead type that produces a recording, which makes it the only type where you can audit what actually happened. If your booking rate on calls is weak, the reason is on the tape — no diagnosis by inference required.
Message leads: a different clock entirely
A message lead is a customer who filled out a short request without committing to a conversation. Most of them contacted more than one business in the same session. The practical consequence is that response latency is not a nice-to-have, it is the entire conversion mechanic. A reply in minutes and a reply in hours are different products.
Message leads also tend to arrive with less information than a call — a job type, a ZIP, sometimes a sentence. Treat the first reply as a qualification step, not a quote. Businesses that route these into the same queue as voicemail lose most of them, which is why message routing usually belongs in an operational automation path rather than a shared inbox someone checks between jobs.
Booking leads: the best economics, the most plumbing
When a customer picks a time slot inside Google, you have skipped the entire back-and-forth. The catch is that this requires your scheduling availability to be exposed to Google through a booking integration, which in turn requires your field service system to expose accurate capacity. Businesses whose dispatch board is fiction will produce booked appointments they cannot serve.
If you run ServiceTitan or Jobber, the question to answer before enabling booking is whether your availability rules reflect real crew capacity by job type and by area. If they do not, fix that first.
Report them separately or you will misread the channel
- Blended booking rate hides the story. A shift in mix toward message leads will look like a decline in lead quality when it is a change in lead type.
- Cost per lead is not comparable across types. Charge amounts and conversion behavior both differ.
- Response time only means something per type. Median seconds-to-answer for calls and median minutes-to-first-reply for messages are two different operational metrics.
Topics: lead types · message leads · booking leads · response time
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.