My Local Services Ads leads dropped off a cliff. What do I check first?
Check eligibility before you touch anything else: expired license or insurance, a lapsed background check, a suspended Business Profile, or an average rating that fell under the threshold will stop your listing entirely. Then check budget exhaustion, recent edits to service area or job types, business hours, and answer rate. Market-level causes — seasonality, a new competitor, a Google category change — come last because you cannot fix them.
Work the list in order of reversibility
Diagnose cheapest and most fixable first. Nearly every sudden drop is one of these, and the first group can be resolved the same day.
- Documents. License expired, insurance certificate lapsed, background check gone stale. This is the number one cause of an overnight drop to zero.
- Rating floor. A couple of bad reviews against a small denominator can push you under the eligibility minimum.
- Budget. Exhausted for the period, or someone paused it, or a card declined.
- Configuration edits. Somebody trimmed the service area, deselected job types, or narrowed business hours. Check who touched the account and when.
- Business Profile. A suspension or a pending edit on the linked profile can cascade into the ads.
Then look at the shape of the decline
A drop to zero is almost always eligibility. A drop to half is almost always budget, hours, or competition. A slow slide over weeks is usually review recency or answer rate degrading, not an event.
That distinction saves hours. People spend a week investigating a competitor when the pattern of the decline says the problem is internal, or vice versa. Plot leads by day before you form a theory.
The causes that are real but not actionable
Seasonality in home services is enormous and it is not evenly distributed across job types — a mild week suppresses demand more than any account setting you could change. A well-funded competitor entering your metro moves everyone's volume. Google periodically restructures categories and job types, which can silently change what you are eligible for.
You cannot fix these, but you can distinguish them from things you can fix by comparing against a market baseline: your own search impression volume, your organic call volume, and your inbound total across all channels. If every channel dipped together, the market moved.
Make the next drop detectable in a day, not a month
Most of these are caught late because nobody looks at LSA daily. A threshold alert on leads per day against a trailing baseline, plus a calendar of document expiration dates, converts a three-week outage into a one-day one.
That is precisely what daily intelligence briefs are for — surfacing the anomaly and the likely cause to a person who can act, rather than waiting for someone to open a dashboard.
Topics: troubleshooting · diagnostics · eligibility · lead volume
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