Local Services Ads or regular Search for emergency plumbing: which wins?

Local Services Ads keep coming up in our local services threads, and I still can't decide whether they beat regular Search for a plumber. The pitch is pay per lead instead of pay per click, plus a Google guarantee badge on the listing. But lead quality varies a lot by trade and by how fast someone answers the phone. For emergency plumbing I'd lean LSA, because the person searching at 11 pm will call whoever picks up first, and a per-lead price is easier to live with than a bad CPC. For a law firm, where people compare three firms before calling, I'd keep Search, since you control the ad copy, the keywords and the landing page. Has anyone run both in the same area without them stealing each other's leads?

I'd worry less about the two channels stealing leads from each other and more about whether you can tell which one brought the call. LSA leads and Search calls often land on the same business number, so unless you split them with separate tracking numbers, you're comparing a per-lead price against a CPC without knowing which channel produced which call. For emergency work, count answered calls per channel rather than raw calls, since a missed 11 pm call is what ends up deciding the winner. Are you splitting the numbers by channel yet?

LSA calls usually don't come in on your main business number. Google assigns its own forwarding number to LSA leads, so the LSA dashboard already keeps the two channels separate. The gap is on the billing side, because that dashboard shows what you were charged, not whether anyone picked up. Pull answered calls from your phone system for both channels and compare cost per answered call. An LSA lead that rings out at 11 pm still costs the same as one you answered.

Same trap as Meta lead forms: cost per lead looks great until you match it against who actually picked up. Google's dispute credits generally cover spam or out-of-area leads, not a call that rang out, so the cost of a missed call stays with you.