Phil RisherPhlash Consulting · No. 1 Digital Marketing Consulting Company For $1m-10m Home Service Businesses 🚀

Your ad budget is now paying for calls you never answer

18 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:03

In this short advisory video, Phil Risher explains a recent change to Google Local Service Ads (LSA) that now charges advertisers when a prospect’s call is not answered within about 30 seconds. He warns that businesses are effectively paying for missed calls, wasting marketing spend when leads are not captured. Risher emphasizes that without the operational capacity to answer calls—whether via staff or an AI answering service—advertising dollars are lost to Google without generating jobs. He advises businesses to either ensure calls are answered promptly, implement an AI or automated answering system to capture lead information and possibly schedule appointments, or stop spending on ads until the necessary infrastructure is in place. The core message is aligning marketing spend with the ability to handle inbound leads to avoid frustration and wasted budget.

Chapters

There's a big change that just happened 2 weeks ago. Your marketing dollars should not be funding missed calls. Google came out and said for local service ads that if you miss a call from a prospect, goes 30 seconds and you don't answer that Google local service ads call, they are charging you. Your marketing dollars are literally paying Google, getting a lead, and then not answering the call. You are funding missed calls. Do not do that. You either spend money on marketing and answer the phone or have an AI assistant or something answer the phone to try to book an appointment. Or you don't spend the money because the worst thing you can do is throw money at the Google gods and get leads coming into your business and then not actually get them to turn into a job. This is the quickest way to get frustrated with marketing and spending money when you don't have the operations. You don't have the infrastructure in place to achieve the outcome. So, what can you do? If you're spending money on ads and you're not answering the phones, your CSR is busy, whatever it is, get an AI answering service to layer over top of it. I'm not saying it has to answer all your phones, but it's better than a voicemail. And it will at least allow you to capture the customer's information and maybe even schedule service or at least move the ball forward in their eyes.