Google Local Services Ads have been a headache for the last few weeks, and the trouble has been in the two places you would least expect a company this size to have any: signing up, and changing the budget.
Signing up is where it starts
Setting up an LSA account should be a form-filling exercise and not much else. Instead the forms kept resetting. You work through the details, get to what looks like the end of the data entry, and find yourself back at the start with the fields empty again. We had this happen more than once, and not on an unusual setup — it happened in Chrome and it happened in Firefox.
What eventually worked was Brave. That is not a recommendation so much as an observation: after enough attempts in the two most common browsers on the internet, the third one we tried let the form complete.
Then the budget screen
Getting through sign-up did not end it. Updating the budget turned out to be the harder of the two. The screen would sit and spin without ever saving the change, and it did it regardless of which browser we came back in. For a while the platform was close to unusable for the one setting an advertiser most needs to be able to reach.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Local Services Ads are aimed squarely at small businesses, and they are a good idea: you pay per lead rather than per click, and the panel sits above everything else on the page. That is a real advantage for a plumber or an electrician who does not have anybody running their advertising.
Which is exactly why basic reliability problems at sign-up hurt. The businesses this product is built for are the ones least likely to have somebody who will try a third browser, and most likely to conclude they have done something wrong and give up. If you are stuck on one of these screens right now, it is worth knowing that you probably have not.
It is a surprising state for a product from a company of Google’s size to be in, and it is a fixable one. The programme has plenty going for it once you are inside it.
