At Justia, we are committed to keeping lawyers in the know about legal marketing, including the continuous updates we receive as a Google Partner about Google Local Services Ads (LSAs). If you are a lawyer or a law firm leveraging paid search engine marketing solutions to grow your practice or are considering trying out search ads as a new way to market your firm, then it is important to stay up to date on the latest news, including new LSAs info.

Keep reading for some of the key points that matter to lawyers in Google’s latest partner newsletter for LSA providers.

Reminder: Google Is Enforcing Its Policies Around Duplicate Accounts and Overlapping Service Areas

In our March update on LSAs, we shared an important enforcement alert. Google would be more strictly enforcing its LSA policies designed to prevent companies from utilizing multiple accounts to run more LSAs or otherwise take advantage of the system to advertise in overlapping service areas for businesses with multiple locations. While the policy against duplicate accounts and overlapping service areas had been inconsistently enforced in the past, Google was clear that a crackdown was coming.

This month, Google has indicated it is continuing to ramp up enforcement of its prohibition on duplicate accounts and overlapping service areas. If you have multiple accounts with LSAs, you can only have one account and job type active within a specific zip code at any given time. Failure to comply with this policy can result in warnings, temporary suspensions of your LSAs, and even permanent removal of your ads.

In order to avoid inadvertent violations if you have multiple accounts, Google recommends double-checking that they are properly linked to the corresponding Google Business Profile.

Alert: New CIDs Will Default to Automated Bidding Intended to Maximize Leads

All Google LSA accounts are assigned a customer identification number (CID). Google has announced that all newly created CIDs – new accounts – for LSAs will automatically default to maximize leads bidding, a strategy that is intended to help maximize new leads (conversions) for the advertiser’s budget.

If your law firm sets up a new LSA account and prefers to bid using the max per lead strategy (i.e. set a maximum amount you are willing to bid per lead), rather than the default automated bidding strategy, you can manually switch your bid settings within your LSAs account.

Final Thoughts: Why Do You Care?

As they say, knowledge is power. Keeping up to date on the latest information about LSAs can help you more effectively leverage Google Local Services Ads as part of your well-rounded legal marketing plans.

If you need someone to stay informed about the changing trends for you or want expert help in optimizing your LSAs, we can help. Our Justia Amplify team monitors the changing trends for Google Ads PPC and Google LSAs and is always prepared to optimize your campaigns to help you achieve your law firm’s goals. Contact us to learn more.