👋 Hey, Jon here!
I’m excited to dig into GLSA performance for January 2026, and I’ve included additional Google channels (from the same sample for an apples-to-apples comparison) to provide more context (like, for instance, the % of revenue opportunity GLSA drove compared to other Google channels).
Note: To obtain a year-over-year analysis, brands in this sample needed to be on the SearchLight platform for at least 1 year. In practice, having attribution data for this length of time tends to increase confidence in scaling digital spend.
As a result, this subset naturally skews toward higher-performing brands with higher budgets.
That context matters when interpreting the results below.
In this sample, the average spend per business on GLSA was $10,300 per month.
If you aren’t as concerned by year-over-year data, and want to look at a much larger sample set with medians and top/bottom quartile performers, you can read this Q4 2025 Google Local Service Ads Analysis.
With that, let’s dive into the data!
Unique Leads from GLSA Increased by 9% Year-over-Year
January 2026 GLSA spend was up 3% year-over-year, and unique leads were up 9% year-over-year, which drove a:
19% increase in booked customers year-over-year (raw book rate increased from 41.1% to 43.7% from January 2025 to January 2026)
18% more run jobs year-over-year
20% more paying customers year-over-year
$19,805 in more closed revenue in January 2026 than January 2025 (+27%) per business in this sample
The YoY growth isn’t as pronounced as December (largely, January was a slower month across the board), but it’s also useful to compare GLSA performance to other digital channels within this sample to put this growth in context 👇
How GLSA Stacks Up Against Other Google Channels
While it can be useful to analyze channel performance in isolation, I wanted to add a new section that compared available Google channels for a more comprehensive overview:
In aggregate across Google channels for the businesses in this sample, unique lead volume increased 4%, booked customers increased 4%, and closed revenue increased 11%, all year-over-year.
It’s reasonable to wonder if paid channels cannibalize organic channels and what the incrementality of your channel mix looks like.
In this case, demand across the sample's Google channels rose YoY, but that growth was largely concentrated in paid channels: Google Ads and Google LSA.
Paid Google channels drove 64% of the total revenue opportunity, a big chunk!
YoY lead volume, booked customers, and closed revenue were down for both Google Business Profiles and Google Organic (although the YoY revenue opportunity increased, likely due to a 13% YoY increase in average ticket for GBPs and a 4% increase in average ticket for Google Organic).
Unsurprisingly, Google Business Profile sourced revenue opportunity converted to closed revenue at the highest rate, followed by Google LSAs:
One last look at the channel comparison shows that Google Local Service Ads by far drove a higher percentage of new customers compared to other channels:
This means 60% of paying customers from GLSA were new, but only 33% of paying customers from Google Business Profile were new.
Google LSA Cost Breakdown From Conversion to Paying Customer
Cost per unique lead from GLSA dropped slightly YoY from $58.76 in January 2025 to $55.27 in January 2026:
The consistency of GLSA unique lead costs is expected since the channel is on a pay-per-lead model, different than Google Ads, which had a higher cost per unique lead in January 2026 for this sample at $105.92.
The rest of the GLSA cost funnel also remained consistent with a customer acquisition cost (CAC) of $241.28 and an average (blended) ticket of $2,632:
The CAC for Google Ads in this sample was $489.65, while CAC for organic channels hovered around $50 (using SEO management fees as the cost-basis).
GLSA has shown strong performance overall compared to its other Google counterparts, but it did generate less revenue opportunity volume than Google Ads and the Google Business Profile.
Google LSAs Drove an 19.1x Return on Ad Spend Potential in December
For every $1 spent on GLSA in January ‘26, $19.10 of revenue opportunity was generated (up from $17.40 in January ‘25).
Revenue opportunity comprises estimates, sold jobs, and closed jobs of leads that originated from GLSA (note that we only take one estimate per customer, and a customer can exist in just one of those buckets at a given time period to avoid double-counting).
To make this more tangible, in January 2025, across this sample of businesses, $196,301in revenue opportunity from GLSA was generated per business, on average.
Google LSAs Drove a 9.2x Return on Ad Spend (Closed Revenue) in December
GLSAs drove $9.20 in closed revenue for every $1 spent in January ‘26, up from $7.50 in January ‘25.
That equated to $94,977 in closed revenue per business for January ‘26, converted by GLSA.
In comparison, Google Ads generated a closed ROAS of 5.5x producing an average $134,390 in closed revenue per business in this sample.
Until next time…
-Jon