You’ve probably heard the term. Local Services Ads, or “Google Guaranteed,” the ones with the green checkmark and your rating built right into the search result, sitting above everything else on the page.
Maybe someone’s pitched you on setting one up. Maybe you’ve just wondered why you don’t have one and a competitor overseas seems to.
Here’s the answer: you can’t get them in New Zealand. Or not yet, anyway.
What Local Services Ads actually are
Local Services Ads (LSAs) are Google’s pay-per-lead advertising format for local service businesses.
Instead of paying per click, you only pay when someone actually calls or messages you through the ad.
To run an LSA, a business has to pass Google’s screening process, background checks, licence verification, insurance confirmation, depending on the trade. Pass, and you get what’s now called the Google Verified badge, which replaced the old Google Guaranteed and Google Screened badges in October 2025.
It’s a genuinely strong trust signal.
But unfortunately for us New Zealand businesses, it is also currently out of reach.
Here’s the eligibility list for LSA
Google runs LSAs in a specific, limited list of countries.
As of 2026, that list is Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. New Zealand isn’t on it. Neither, notably, is Australia, a much larger market than ours, which hasn’t made the list either.
So unfortunately for New Zealand businesses, we are not yet able to “set up LSA campaigns” or “get you Google Guaranteed”.
A quick but important update
Since we first wrote this, Google has started migrating Local Services Ads, moving it out of its own separate dashboard and into the regular Google Ads interface, as a new, specific Performance Max campaign type built for pay-per-lead goals. The rollout began in August 2026, starting with select US trade categories, expanding to more US advertisers through the rest of 2026, then reaching other eligible countries in 2027.
This is a change to how eligible businesses manage LSA, not a change to who’s eligible.
It’s the same program, same pay-per-lead billing, same Google Verified badge, same country list, just living inside the regular Google Ads dashboard instead of its own separate one.
New Zealand still isn’t on that list, and this migration doesn’t add it.
The Google Ads Campaigns we Can run in NZ
In New Zealand, the closest product we can run to an LSA is a Performance Max campaign, with a local goal.
Google used to run this as a standalone ad type called Local Campaigns, built specifically to drive calls, direction requests, and store visits off the back of your Google Business Profile.
In 2023, Google folded it into Performance Max, so today it’s a PMX campaign with “store visits and local actions” set as the goal. Same underlying idea, newer engine.
A few differences from LSA worth knowing:
- No pay-per-lead, no badge. This runs on standard PMax bidding, optimising toward calls, direction clicks, and visits, not a guaranteed-lead model with a green checkmark attached.
- It needs a real address to do its best work. Google’s own eligibility rules split this into two tiers: full “store visits” tracking requires an eligible physical location linked to your Business Profile, and Google recommends a reasonable number of locations so it has enough data to optimise against. A business running purely as a service area, no public storefront, isn’t eligible for that tier and instead runs on “local actions” only, calls and direction clicks, which don’t carry the same location requirement.
- Broader reach, different placement. It runs across Search, Maps, YouTube, and Display, a wider footprint than LSA’s single top-of-page slot, and without that guaranteed premium position.
How we run PMX ad campaigns
Here at Innovate Digital, we don’t run these PMX campaigns by themselves.
We run them alongside a Search campaign, and deliberately give PMX the smaller share of the total budget.
The reasoning: PMX is genuinely good at the wide, unglamorous groundwork, reaching people across all those extra surfaces at a lower cost per result than Search typically manages on its own.
Search, run properly, tends to be the sharper, more controllable performer for high-intent local queries, and having PMX running alongside it in the same account gives Google more signal to work with overall, which in our experience helps Search perform better than it would running in isolation.
It’s not a documented Google mechanism so much as a pattern we’ve seen consistently across client accounts: PMX does the wide, cheaper groundwork, driving volume at a lower cost per lead. Search gets sharper because of that data, and drives the higher cost but better value leads.
So if you’ve been told you need “Google Guaranteed” to compete, or you are wondering how to get that – you can’t yet in New Zealand and you don’t need it to drive successful leads to your business from your ads.
What you need is a properly built Search and PMX combination doing the job LSA can’t yet do in this market.