Beyond Search: LSAs, Display, Performance Max & YouTube for Lead-Gen

Search Ads are the foundation—that’s not changing. But once you have Search campaigns running profitably, there are other campaign types that can complement your strategy and help you capture more leads.

These aren’t replacements for Search Ads. They’re strategic additions. Each serves a different purpose, reaches people at different stages of the buying journey, and works best under specific conditions.

This article covers Local Service Ads, Display and Remarketing, Performance Max, YouTube, and Demand Gen—when to use each, how they work, and whether they’re worth your budget.

Local Service Ads (LSAs)

We covered the basics of Local Service Ads when setting up your Google Business Profile in Chapter 2. Now let’s talk about the strategy and whether LSAs should be part of your campaign mix.

Quick recap: Local Service Ads appear at the very top of Google search results, above even regular Search Ads. They show your business name, star rating, Google Guaranteed badge, and phone number. You pay per lead (when someone calls or messages), not per click. They’re only available for certain business categories—home services like plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, and legal services like personal injury and family law.

LSA vs. Search Ads: When Each Wins

LSAs win when:

You qualify for your business category
You have strong reviews (4.5+ stars with 50+ reviews)
You can respond to leads within minutes
The Google Guaranteed badge builds trust in your market

Search Ads win when:

You don’t qualify for LSAs (most businesses don’t)
You want more control over keywords and messaging
You need to drive traffic to your website for remarketing
Your service area or business type isn’t covered by LSAs

Why run both if you qualify? Because they complement each other. LSAs capture people who trust the Google Guaranteed badge and want to call immediately. Search Ads capture people who want to research your website first, compare options, and read more before contacting you. Different buying behaviors, same high-intent traffic.

How LSAs Actually Work

This confuses people because LSAs don’t work like Search Ads. There’s no keyword bidding. Instead, your ranking is determined by three factors:

Reviews are the #1 ranking factor. More reviews + higher average rating = better LSA placement. A business with 200 reviews at 4.8 stars will outrank a business with 50 reviews at 4.9 stars. Volume matters as much as quality.

Responsiveness is how quickly you respond to LSA leads. Google tracks this. If you answer calls within seconds and respond to messages within minutes, you rank higher. Let calls go to voicemail or ignore messages, and your ranking drops.

Proximity is how close you are to the searcher. If someone in Beverly Hills searches for a plumber, the plumber two miles away will rank higher than the one twenty miles away, all else being equal.

LSA Optimization Strategy

Constant review collection is critical. This is the most important thing you can do for LSA performance. Every completed job should result in a review request. We covered review collection systems in Chapter 2, but it bears repeating: LSAs live and die by review volume and recency. Get new reviews every week.

Respond to leads fast—within minutes if possible. Google is watching. Fast response improves your ranking, which gets you more leads, which gives you more opportunities to build reviews. It’s a flywheel.

Budget management in LSAs is different than Search. You set a weekly budget, and Google controls how many leads you get based on that budget and your ranking. If you’re ranking well, you can spend your budget quickly. If you’re ranking poorly, you might struggle to spend at all.

Dispute invalid leads immediately. LSAs charge per lead, but not every lead is valid. Someone asking if you serve an area you don’t, or a spam call, or a wrong number—dispute these in the LSA dashboard within 30 days. Google will credit you back for invalid leads.

The Reality Check on LSAs

Here’s what I need to be honest about: LSAs are sometimes not possible for your category, and even when they are, they’re very contingent on reviews and history.

If you’re a newer business without many reviews, LSAs are tough. You’ll rank low, which means you won’t get many leads, which means you can’t build more reviews quickly. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.

Sometimes businesses simply aren’t able to spend much money through LSAs without those review and history factors in place. You might set a $500/week budget and only spend $100 because you’re not ranking high enough to get volume.

However, if LSAs are possible for your category and you have decent reviews, they’re good to test. They generate calls directly—no landing page needed, no form to fill out, just click and call. That directness converts well when the searcher is ready to hire.

When to Add LSAs

If you qualify and have at least 20-30 reviews with a 4.5+ star average, add LSAs from day one alongside Search Ads. Allocate 20-30% of your budget to LSAs and 70-80% to Search initially, then adjust based on performance.

In my experience working with home services clients at Pixelocity, LSAs either work really well or struggle to spend. There’s not much middle ground. Test them, give them 30-60 days, and if they’re generating quality leads profitably, scale them up. If not, focus your budget on Search.

Display & Remarketing

Display Ads are banner ads—images, not text—that appear across millions of websites in Google’s Display Network. YouTube, news sites, blogs, apps—anywhere that shows Google ads.

There are two very different ways to use Display: cold traffic and remarketing.

Cold Display means showing ads to strangers who’ve never heard of you. You target based on demographics, interests, or websites they visit. For lead generation, cold Display rarely works. Click-through rates are low (0.1-0.3%), and the traffic that does click usually isn’t ready to hire. They were reading an article about kitchen remodeling and happened to see your ad. That’s not high intent.

Remarketing means showing ads to people who already visited your website but didn’t convert. This works incredibly well.

Why Remarketing Works for Lead-Gen

Most service-based businesses have longer sales cycles. People don’t hire a contractor or lawyer or accountant on their first visit to your website. They research multiple options, compare pricing, think about it, talk to their spouse, and come back a week or two later when they’re ready to decide.

Remarketing keeps you top of mind during that consideration period. Someone visits your site after clicking a Search Ad, browses your services, and leaves without calling. For the next 30-60 days, they see your ads as they browse other sites. When they’re finally ready to hire, they remember you and come back.

Remarketing traffic converts at 2-3× the rate of cold traffic because you’re targeting warm leads who already know who you are.

How to Set Up Remarketing

Build audience lists based on website behavior. “All website visitors” is the basic list. More advanced: “People who visited the quote request page but didn’t submit the form” or “People who spent 2+ minutes on the site.”

Use frequency capping to avoid annoying people. Showing your ad 20 times per day to the same person is overkill. Cap it at 3-5 impressions per day.

Set duration based on your sales cycle. If people hire within 30 days, use a 30-day remarketing window. If it’s a longer consideration (remodeling, legal), extend to 60-90 days.

Keep creative simple and clear. “Still looking for a plumber? We’re here to help. Call now for a free quote.” Include your phone number and call-to-action.

Layering Remarketing Beyond Google

Here’s something I did in my furniture business that worked incredibly well: layer retargeting across multiple platforms.

Display and remarketing on Google’s Display Network is effective, but you can also layer in retargeting to social networks like Meta (Facebook and Instagram). We’d get high-intent traffic from Google Search Ads, and then we’d remarket to those same people through both the Google Display Network and Meta.

Why? Because people spend time in different places online. Some people browse Instagram constantly but rarely visit other websites. Some people read news sites but never check social media. By remarketing across both Google and Meta, we reached people wherever they spent their time.

The result was a constant presence. Someone would search “contemporary sectional sofa,” click our Google ad, browse our site, and then see our ads on Google Display Network sites, Facebook, and Instagram for the next month. We stayed top of mind, and when they were ready to buy, we were the first business they thought of.

When to Add Remarketing

Wait until you have at least 500 monthly website visitors. Below that, your remarketing audience is too small to generate meaningful volume.

Budget 15-20% of your total ad spend on remarketing after your Search campaigns are profitable. Don’t add remarketing on day one—you need traffic to remarket to first.

Skip cold Display almost entirely. The only exception is highly targeted B2B campaigns where you’re targeting specific industries or companies. For most lead-gen businesses, cold Display wastes money.

Performance Max

Performance Max is Google’s newest campaign type, and it’s controversial. Some businesses love it. Others think it’s a budget-burning black box. Here’s my honest take.

What Performance Max is: It’s an automated campaign that runs across all Google properties—Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover. You provide creative assets (images, headlines, descriptions, videos), set a budget and conversion goal, and Google’s AI decides where and when to show your ads.

The promise: Google says Performance Max uses AI to optimize placements automatically, delivering better results than manual campaigns.

The reality: You have very limited control. You can’t see exactly which placements are working. You can’t exclude bad placements easily. Google will spend your entire budget fast, and you won’t always know where it went.

When Performance Max Works vs. When It Struggles

Performance Max is often successful for e-commerce where you have lots of products, lots of conversion data, and budgets large enough for the AI to optimize effectively. It also works for businesses with very large budgets (think $10K+/month) where you can truly leverage all Google channels together.

For lead generation, particularly business-to-business, Performance Max is a big shotgun approach with limited control. It’s often hard to tailor the budget to go precisely where you want it. You might want 80% of your budget on Search and 20% on Display, but Performance Max decides the split based on what the AI thinks will work.

Performance Max also overlaps with your Search campaigns, which creates redundancies and can make controlling your Search difficult. You end up bidding against yourself in some cases.

When It Struggles

Small budgets and limited conversion data kill Performance Max. If you’re spending $1,000/month with 10 conversions, the AI doesn’t have enough data to learn. It guesses, and guessing wastes money.

Lead-gen businesses with longer sales cycles also struggle with Performance Max because Google optimizes for immediate conversions, not leads that close 30-60 days later.

Honest Assessment

Don’t start with Performance Max. Get Search Ads profitable first. Then, if you want to test, allocate 5-10% of your budget to a Performance Max campaign. Give it at least 30-50 conversions to learn. Monitor it closely—check what asset combinations are working, watch your conversion quality, and be ready to kill it if ROI isn’t there.

At Pixelocity, we’ve had mixed results. Some clients see Performance Max deliver leads at a similar cost to Search with less management time required. Others find it burns budget on junk placements. It’s not consistent enough yet for me to recommend it broadly.

YouTube & Demand Gen

YouTube and Demand Gen are both awareness and reminder channels. They’re often good networks for lead-gen businesses to show ads at a lower CPM (cost per thousand impressions) compared to Search.

YouTube Ads

YouTube works when your service is visual and trust-building matters. Home remodeling companies showing before-and-after projects, cosmetic surgeons explaining procedures, landscapers showcasing designs—these services benefit from video.

YouTube also works for longer sales cycles where education is part of the buying process. Someone researching estate planning might watch videos about different trust structures. A lawyer running YouTube ads educating viewers builds credibility.

Requirements: You need video creative, which means production costs. You need larger budgets because YouTube is expensive per conversion compared to Search—you might pay $200-$500 per lead on YouTube versus $50-$100 on Search.

When to test YouTube: After Search and Remarketing are profitable, if you have good video content, and if your budget is at least $5K/month total so you can allocate 5-10% to testing without starving your Search campaigns.

When to skip YouTube: Emergency services (people don’t watch videos during plumbing emergencies), most B2B, and small budgets.

Demand Gen

Demand Gen is a newer campaign type that runs image and video ads across YouTube, Gmail, and Google Discover. It’s similar to Display but with more placements and better targeting options.

The jury is still out on Demand Gen for lead generation. Some early adopters report good results, but it’s not proven enough yet for me to recommend it as a core strategy. If you want to test it, treat it like Performance Max—5-10% of budget after everything else is working.

How to Layer Campaign Types & Budget Split

Here’s the timeline I recommend:

Months 1-3: Search Ads (and LSAs if you qualify). 100% of budget. Get profitable on one or two channels before expanding.

Months 4-6: Add Remarketing. Shift to 70% Search/LSA, 20% Remarketing, 10% testing (Display or Performance Max if you want to experiment).

Months 7+: Test YouTube, Demand Gen, or expand Performance Max if your budget supports it and other channels are hitting diminishing returns.

Mature budget split:

60-70% Search Ads
20-30% LSAs (if qualifying and performing well)
10-15% Remarketing
5% Testing new channels

Don’t spread too thin. It’s better to dominate one or two channels than to be mediocre across five.

Search Remains the Foundation

No matter which other campaign types you layer in, Search Ads remain the foundation. They deliver the highest-intent traffic, they’re controllable, and they scale predictably.

Local Service Ads complement Search if you qualify. Remarketing extends the value of your Search traffic. Performance Max, YouTube, and Demand Gen can work in specific situations, but they’re not core strategies for most lead-gen businesses.

Add campaign types strategically based on performance, not because they exist. Test methodically, measure results, and double down on what works.

Next, we’ll dive into keyword strategy—how to choose the right keywords for your Search campaigns, which match types to use, and how to build keyword lists that actually generate customers instead of just traffic.