How do you run Local Services Ads across multiple locations?
Each location needs its own verification, license and insurance documentation, its own Business Profile, and its own review base — reviews and ranking do not pool across locations. Budgets are managed per business, so a shared pot is not available and locations can compete for the same searcher in overlapping territory. Rolled-up reporting has to be built outside the Local Services interface, because it reports leads per account and nothing about revenue.
What does not scale automatically
Every one of these is per location, and each one is a recurring obligation rather than a setup task.
- Verification and documents. License and insurance per entity and jurisdiction, with independent expiration dates.
- Background checks. Tied to the people at that location, so turnover creates gaps location by location.
- Reviews. A profile with a deep review history does not lend any of it to a new sister location.
- Proximity. The whole reason to open locations. It only works if the address Google has is the address that serves the area.
Overlapping territory is a real cost
Two of your locations selecting the same ZIP means you are competing with yourself for a searcher there, and paying either way. This is defensible when the overlap is a genuine shared-coverage zone and wasteful when it is just nobody having drawn the boundary.
Draw the boundaries explicitly, and revisit them when a location's crew count changes. A location that lost two technicians should not be holding territory it cannot serve — see service area tuning for how the geography analysis works per branch.
The reporting problem is the one that actually hurts
The Local Services interface will show you leads per account. It will not show you cost per completed job by location, revenue by location against spend by location, or which branch is converting the leads it is paying for. Owners of multi-location operations end up with a monthly spreadsheet somebody rebuilds by hand, and it is always late and usually contested.
The rollup has to be assembled outside Google: lead records from each account, joined to jobs and invoices per location, normalized to one set of definitions. Once that exists, the comparison across branches becomes routine — rollup dashboards and per-branch briefs are the usual delivery, because a regional manager needs their location's numbers, not the company total.
The comparison that pays for the whole exercise
When the same channel runs at every location under similar market conditions, differences in booking rate between branches are almost never about lead quality. They are about who answers the phone and how. That is the most valuable output of multi-location LSA reporting: a clean, defensible view of which branch converts its leads and which does not.
From there the work moves to coaching rather than to the ad account, and the numbers give the regional conversation something concrete to start from.
Topics: multi-location · account structure · rollup reporting · operations
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.