Google Ads for local businesses: Business Profile, location assets, Maps and calls

A dental practice, a plumber, a restaurant, a bike shop: very different businesses with one problem in common. The customer is nearby, searching on a phone, and often wants to call or turn up straight away. Here Google Ads is not about product catalogues or ROAS but about being present at the right moment, in the right radius, with a listing that earns trust. Here we set out the tools that genuinely matter in 2026, and the ones to check before relying on them.

The starting point: Business Profile and location assets

Everything starts with your Google Business Profile. Once it is linked to Google Ads, the profile’s locations become location assets: ads can show your address, the distance from the user and a map, and a tap on the location opens a page with the details. According to Google’s documentation, creating location assets from the profile lets Google Ads use its data to build your ads: street address, phone number, opening hours, photos and videos.

Three things we often see go wrong:

• Who has access to the profile. Linking requires owner or manager access. If the profile was set up by a former employee or an old agency, recovering access is the first job, before any campaign goes live.
• Inconsistent data. Outdated hours, a phone number that differs from the website, a vague primary category. Ads inherit all of it: if the profile says "open" when you are closed, advertising amplifies the mistake.
• Businesses with no visible address. Many tradespeople run a service-area profile with no public address. That works for the listing, but it limits some Maps placements that depend on a physical point. Make that choice deliberately, not by accident.

Ads on Google Maps: what actually exists

"I want to be on Maps" is one of the most common requests we get. There is no "Maps campaign" to switch on: Maps is a surface on which several campaign types can be eligible. At the time of writing, the main routes are these.

• Search ads with location assets. With the profile linked, Search campaigns can also appear in Maps search results, labelled as sponsored. For most single-location businesses this is the simplest and most controllable way in.
• Performance Max with store goals. This is the successor to the old Local campaigns and can use promoted pins, the highlighted marker on the map. Google has also introduced a setting called Local Customer Optimization for these campaigns, designed to prioritise people who are nearby and ready to act straight away; availability varies by market.
• Demand Gen on Maps. At Google Marketing Live on 20 May 2026, Google announced Maps inventory as a selectable channel in Demand Gen campaigns, with promoted pins in browse, directions and place-details modes. The rollout is staged and availability varies by market and language: before planning it for an Italian business, check that the channel really shows up in your account.

The common requirement is a Business Profile linked as a location asset; and once the pin is tapped, it is the listing that does the persuading.

Local Services Ads: who they are for in Italy

Local Services Ads ("Annunci di Servizi Locali" in Italian) are a product separate from standard Google Ads: they appear at the top of results, carry a verification badge and are paid per lead (a call or a message) rather than per click. Google brought them to Italy, along with nine other European countries, in 2020.

The point to be honest about is coverage. At the time of writing, the official page for Italy lists categories concentrated on home services: plumbers, electricians, appliance repair, heating and air conditioning, removals, cleaning, pest control, carpenters, flooring, roofing and landscaping, among others. Some industry sources also report professional and healthcare categories, but we found no up-to-date official confirmation for Italy, and Google itself notes that not every category is active in every area. In practice:

• Restaurants and shops: they are not Local Services categories. The tool is Google Ads with location assets.
• Professional practices and clinics: check eligibility for your category and town in the official tool. If it is not listed as available, it is not: there are no shortcuts.
• Trades and home services: worth applying, but verification (documents, insurance and licences depending on the category) takes time.

One recent change to know about: according to Google’s announcement, from 20 October 2025 the old badges (Google Guaranteed, Google Screened and similar) were replaced by a single Google Verified badge, and the money-back guarantee tied to Google Guaranteed was withdrawn.

Measuring calls and visits without fooling yourself

This is where a local account is made or ruined. When you link the profile, Google Ads automatically creates local actions: directions requests, clicks to call, website visits from the listing and, for restaurants, menu views and orders, plus "other engagements". They are counted when a user takes that action on a Google surface after interacting with an ad, with a default conversion window of 30 days from the click.

They are useful signals, but weak ones. A directions request is not a visit, and a tap on "call" is not a call that connected. How we use them: they stay visible in reports, but as secondary conversions, until there is a concrete reason to let bidding optimise towards them. Otherwise the strategy learns to buy easy gestures rather than customers.

Calls

For phone-led businesses the right measurement is calls from ads via call assets and a Google forwarding number (available in Italy), with a minimum call length that turns a call into a conversion: the default is 60 seconds, and it should be adjusted to what a genuine enquiry looks like in your sector. On top of that come calls to the number shown on the website after a click. With call-only ads being retired, responsive search ads plus call assets become the standard route; we cover it in our guide to the end of call-only ads.

Store visits

Store visit conversions are estimates modelled by Google on aggregated, anonymised data. They require location assets, verified locations, enough clicks and foot traffic to pass privacy thresholds, and they are not available for locations deemed sensitive, including some related to health. For a single location they rarely switch on. It is also worth knowing that Google has tested, with a limited number of advertisers, automatically enabling store visits as a primary conversion with a preset value: if you see them among your primary conversions, ask whether that was your decision.

Radius or towns? Location targeting

There are two options and they do different jobs.

• A radius around an address makes sense when the customer comes to you, as with a practice, a restaurant or a shop. The distance a customer is willing to travel is the real boundary.
• A list of towns or postcodes makes sense when you go to the customer and your area follows administrative boundaries, or when a circle would include areas you do not serve, such as the far side of a lake or a district that is unreachable at rush hour.

After a few weeks, the distance report available with location assets shows how far away your clicks and conversions really come from: that is the data to tighten or widen the radius with. And there is a setting that matters more than the radius itself: presence versus presence or interest. For a local business you almost always want people who are in the area, not people elsewhere "showing interest" in your town. We explain it in detail in our guide to presence and interest in location targeting.

Ad scheduling and opening hours

Ad scheduling follows the account’s time zone and should be planned around the goal, not copied from the shop’s opening hours.

• If the conversion is a call, ads with call assets need to run when someone picks up. A call missed at 9pm is a cost you paid for and a customer handed to the competitor who rings back.
• If the conversion is a form or an online booking, switching off in the evening is often a mistake: plenty of people choose their dentist or restaurant from the sofa, after closing time.

With automated bid strategies, hour-of-day bid adjustments matter little because the algorithm already takes the time into account: the practical lever is deciding when ads run and which assets they show.

The role of reviews

Reviews are not a Google Ads setting, but they weigh on almost everything a local ad does. On Maps, the user who taps a pin sees the listing, with its rating and comments, before calling or setting off. In Local Services Ads, ratings and reviews are among the ranking factors Google cites. Paying for clicks to a 3.6-star listing full of unanswered reviews is a paradox we see often.

What to do in practice: ask for a review systematically after the job, reply to all of them (to negative ones calmly and specifically), and never buy or incentivise them. Google’s rules prohibit fake or incentivised reviews, and the risks far outweigh any benefit.

A realistic budget for a single location

The right question is not "how much should I spend" but "how much demand is there in my radius". A purely illustrative example: if the cost per click on relevant searches in your area is €2, €20 a day buys roughly 300 clicks a month. If 10% turn into a call or an enquiry, that is around thirty contacts, some of whom will become customers. Redo the sum with your own numbers: estimated cost per click, contact rate, close rate and the lifetime value of a customer.

Two constraints typical of local businesses:

• The demand ceiling. Within a radius of a few kilometres, searches are finite. Doubling the budget often does not double the contacts: it buys more expensive or more distant clicks.
• The landing page. For a single location, a fast page with a tappable phone number, address, hours, indicative prices and reviews is worth more than any bidding optimisation. We cover it in our guide to landing page experience.

To size the budget with a method rather than a hunch, see our Google Ads budget guide.

Checklist for a local business

1. Business Profile access as owner or manager, with consistent data: name, category, address, phone, hours, photos.
2. Profile linked to Google Ads and location assets live, with filters if you have more than one location.
3. Call assets with a Google forwarding number and a minimum call length suited to your sector.
4. Local actions as secondary conversions until you have a documented reason to bid on them; check that store visits have not become primary without your knowledge.
5. Presence-based targeting, radius or list of towns depending on your service model, reviewed after a few weeks with the distance report.
6. Scheduling that matches who answers: calls in staffed hours, forms around the clock.
7. Local Services Ads eligibility checked for your category and town, if you provide home services.
8. A review routine: ask after every job and reply to every review.
9. A local landing page that is fast, with a tappable number, address and hours.

If you want to know how much of the demand in your radius you are already capturing, and how much you are leaving to competitors, our free audit starts right there: profile, targeting, calls and conversions. You will find our services for local businesses and our way of working on the site.