Search "pest control near me" on a phone and three different Google products answer on one screen. A row of Local Services Ads at the top, with stars, a badge and a call button. Below that, sponsored search ads. Below those, the map pack, which is your Google Business Profile and costs nothing.

One homeowner, one problem, one call to give. You can pay for that call per lead, pay for it per click, or get it free. Most owners compare the first two on cost per lead, decide LSA is cheaper, and move money toward it. That comparison leaves out the thing that decides the answer: which searchers each surface reaches, and whether you would have gotten the call anyway.

What each one sells you

Local Services Ads sell a phone call or a message. You are charged per lead, booked or not. You choose job types, a service area, your hours and a weekly budget. Google chooses the rest. Its own published ranking factors are your distance from the searcher, your review score and review count, how responsive you are to calls and messages, your business hours, whether it has received serious complaints about you, and your bid. There is no landing page and no ad copy. Your stars, your badge and your name are the whole ad.

Search ads sell a click. You choose the words you show up for, the words you refuse, the page the click lands on, the ZIP codes, the hours and the price you will pay. The searcher can read before calling, which matters for anything a homeowner wants explained: a termite inspection, a mosquito season program, a crawlspace job, a commercial account.

The map pack is free. Google says it ranks local listings on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence leans heavily on reviews. You cannot buy position there.

Two of the three rank you on distance from your office

This is the mechanic that decides most of the strategy. LSA and the map pack both weigh how close your business is to the person searching. Search ads do not rank you on it. A search ad can show to a homeowner thirty minutes from your shop as easily as one around the corner, as long as the ZIP is in your targeting and your ad wins the auction.

So the two proximity surfaces are strongest in the same place: the ZIPs nearest your office. And they are weakest in the same place: the edge of your territory, the suburb you just started running a truck into, the town you want next year.

The practical consequence: a new territory is a search ads job. LSA and the map listing will reward you there slowly, as you add customers and reviews from that area. Search is the one surface where money can put you in front of a homeowner who has never seen your trucks, starting this week.

Most of your LSA position is set at the front desk

Look at that list of ranking factors again. Of the six, only the bid is money. Distance is fixed by your address. Reviews, responsiveness and hours are operations.

That means a shop that lets LSA calls roll to voicemail at 5:15, or takes a day to answer a message, is paying for a worse position on every lead it gets, and raising the budget does not fix it. On search ads, more money will usually buy more clicks. On LSA, a missed call costs you the customer and then counts against your responsiveness on the searches after it.

Before anyone touches the LSA budget, pull last month's LSA lead list and count the calls that were not answered and the messages that waited more than an hour. If that number is more than a handful, the budget is not the problem to work on first.

A worked month

Take the illustrative shop from the lead tracking post: 120 new recurring customers in May, separate tracking on each paid surface, and 24 of the measured customers traced to LSA and 14 to paid search on last contact.

Say LSA spent $3,000 for the month and was charged for 75 leads, $40 each. Paid search spent $6,000 and produced 75 calls and forms, $80 each. On cost per lead, LSA is half the price. That is the comparison most owners stop at.

Now match the 75 LSA leads against the customer file by phone number:

  • 11 were already customers. They searched for pest control, saw your name at the top of the page with a call button, and tapped it instead of finding your number. Google has no way to know they were already yours. That is $440 of the month, 15% of the LSA spend, paid to connect your own customers to your own office.
  • 7 were outside the service area or wanted a service you do not offer.
  • 24 did not book.
  • 9 booked a one-time service.
  • 24 signed a recurring plan.

$3,000 divided by 24 recurring customers is $125 per customer. Paid search, at $6,000 for 14, is $429. On cost per lead LSA looked twice as cheap. On cost per customer it looks more than three times as cheap.

Neither ratio is the one you need, and the next section explains why the $125 is too low.

The existing-customer leak is worth fixing on its own. Put your office number in the places current customers look first: the invoice, the reminder text, the service ticket, the contact card your CSR texts after the first visit. Every current customer who saves your number is one less $40 lead.

The cheapest LSA customers are the ones your map listing was already winning

Split the shop's 24 LSA customers by where they live. Say 15 are in the four ZIPs nearest the office, where the shop's own listing already sits in the map pack, and 9 are farther out.

The 15 near customers are the cheapest leads LSA produces, because distance is working in your favor. They are also the ones most likely to have called you anyway, from the free listing a few inches lower on the same screen. The LSA row sits above the map pack. When it takes the call, the map pack does not get it.

No report can tell you how many of the 15 would have called anyway. You can say what the range does to the number:

  • If none of them would have found you without LSA, the cost is the $125 the report shows.
  • If half would have called the free listing, LSA really bought 16.5 customers, and the cost is $182.
  • If all 15 would have, LSA bought the 9 far customers, and the cost is $333.

At a $115 quarterly ticket and a 55% gross margin, the top of the healthy range for a pest operation per NPMA industry data and PCO Bookkeepers guidance, a recurring account produces $253 of gross profit a year, or $63.25 a visit. At $125 a customer pays back on the second visit. At $182, the third. At $333, the sixth, about fifteen months out. That is a wide range for one line on a report that shows a single number.

This does not make LSA a bad buy. In the example it can still come out cheaper than search ads per customer at the top of the range. It means the LSA dollars are doing their real work at the edge of your territory, and the dollars spent near your office are partly buying calls you would have taken for free. If the goal is growth, move LSA weight outward rather than cutting it.

You can test it, carefully. Pick a shoulder month, take the nearest ZIPs out of your LSA service area, and watch the calls to your map listing's tracking number from those ZIPs against the same month last year. If the map line picks up most of what LSA was taking, you were paying for those calls. At one shop's volume the result points a direction and will not prove anything. A test like this belongs in March or October, never in the weeks your phones are busiest.

The same logic applies to the brand campaign on the search side, which mostly collects customers other marketing already reached. The last-click post works through that one.

When each one wins

LSA wins when the call is urgent, the job type is simple, the searcher is close to your office, and your desk answers every call. Wasps on the porch, mice in the kitchen. It loses when your answer rate slips, and it pays for calls the map pack would have delivered near your office.

Search ads win at the edge of your territory, in a new market, on the services a homeowner wants explained before calling, and anywhere you need to choose exactly which searches you pay for. They lose on cost per lead almost every time, which is the wrong test.

The map listing feeds on the same reviews and responsiveness as LSA, so the work you do for one helps the other. Give it its own tracking number, as the lead tracking post describes, or its calls disappear into the untracked pile and the free surface gets no credit for anything.

There is no cost-per-lead benchmark worth having

Agencies and software vendors publish LSA and search cost-per-lead figures for pest control. They do not hold up as a yardstick for your account.

LSA lead prices are set by an auction among the shops in your area, for each job type, and they move with the season. A cost per lead from another metro, or from January, says nothing about yours in May. The leads themselves are not the same unit: one shop's LSA count includes its existing customers and out-of-area calls, another's has been cleaned. Search ads add a second problem, because a lead can be a call, a form, or both from the same person. And the published figures come from the accounts of whoever published them, a population that skews toward shops already working with that agency or vendor.

The number worth comparing is your own cost per booked recurring customer by surface, measured, against the same month last year.

How to run it on one closed month

  1. Export your LSA lead list for one finished month, with the caller's phone number, and your search ads calls and forms for the same month.
  2. Match every lead against your customer file by phone. Mark each as an existing customer, a new recurring customer, a new one-time customer, or no sale.
  3. Count the existing customers on the LSA list and multiply by your average lead price. That is the leak.
  4. Count unanswered LSA calls and slow messages. If the count is more than a handful, fix the desk before the budget.
  5. Compute cost per new recurring customer for LSA and for search ads. Ignore cost per lead from here on.
  6. Split each surface's customers by ZIP: the ones near your office where your listing already wins the map pack, and the rest.
  7. Write the LSA number as a range, from all customers counted to far customers only. Decide on the high end, the far-customers-only cost. If LSA still beats your other surfaces there, it has earned the budget.

Every step after the first depends on matching real customers to real calls and forms. That matching is what the Almanac does. It reads the customer report your CRM already emails, matches new customers to calls and forms deterministically on phone and email, and keeps measured and estimated in separate columns that sum to your actual customer count. It never claims to know which click drove a sale, because at local volume no one can, and it never touches your bids or connects to your bank.