Both reps will call you. Both will describe leads, exclusivity, and a market where your competitors are already spending. The pitches sound similar enough that the choice feels like a preference.
It is not. These two products are structured so differently that the pitch is the least useful thing about either of them.
The LSA numbers are unusually well documented
Google Local Services Ads have a genuine benchmark behind them, which is rare in this space. SearchLight Digital's February 2026 dataset tracked $6.72 million in spend across 888 contractors and 126,650 leads.
Average cost per lead came in at $53, with a range from about $25 in lower-density suburbs to over $90 in competitive metros depending on trade. Book rate averaged 43.9%, producing a cost per paying customer of $233.
For comparison within the same body of work, blended Google Ads ran roughly $104 per lead and $472 per paying customer, though with a higher average ticket, $2,465 against $1,826. LSAs skew toward repair and service calls; search captures more of the large replacement jobs.
Those are real tracked numbers rather than a vendor's model, which is worth something.
The Yelp numbers are not
Published figures for Yelp Ads put cost per click at roughly $5 to $25 and cost per lead somewhere between $30 and $150, with most contractors spending $500 to $5,000 a month.
Notice how wide that is. A five-fold range on cost per lead is not a benchmark, it is a guess with error bars.
More telling: one 2026 comparison of the six platforms where contractors actually spend paid lead-generation money excluded Yelp Ads outright, on the grounds that the cost data for home service trades was too thin to benchmark fairly. When a channel has been running for well over a decade and still cannot produce a defensible cost per lead figure, that absence is itself information.
The structural difference that actually decides this
Everything above is secondary to one thing.
Local Services Ads have no contract. You set a weekly budget, you pause it, you resume it. If a month goes badly you stop. If your busy season arrives you increase it.
Yelp Ads are typically sold on a twelve month commitment. If you conclude in month two that it is not working, you owe ten more months.
That is the whole risk profile of the decision. One channel lets you find out cheaply and stop. The other requires you to be right at the point of signing, which is exactly when you know least.
Contractor reports about Yelp's sales process are consistent enough to mention: repeated calls, pressure to close, and lead volume projections that arrive at a fraction of what was described. Those reports come largely from sources with competing interests, so weigh them accordingly, but the contract term is a verifiable structural fact rather than an opinion.
Where the traffic is going
Yelp's share of local service discovery has been falling for years. Estimates put it near 45% of local service searches starting on Yelp around 2020, against roughly 15 to 20% nationally now.
The direction is not controversial even if the exact figures are. Google Business Profile absorbed most of that behaviour, and AI-generated answers are accelerating it, because when somebody asks an assistant for a contractor recommendation the response is assembled largely from profile data, structured web content, and aggregated reviews rather than from Yelp.
Meanwhile Local Services Ads now appear on around 31% of tracked local queries, up from about 11% at the start of 2025.
But LSAs have real constraints
Three, and they disqualify some businesses entirely.
Eligible categories only. Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, locksmith, garage door, appliance repair, cleaning, lawn care, pest control, plus several professional services. If your trade is not on the list, the decision is made for you.
Not every market. Smaller cities and rural areas frequently lack coverage.
Verification first. License, insurance with Google named as additional insured, background checks. Two to five weeks before a single ad runs, and that is not optional.
There is also a competitive squeeze worth knowing. LSA adoption among contractors rose from roughly 28% in 2022 to about 70% by late 2025, and more bidders means the $53 average has been climbing rather than falling.
And a change landing right now: Google began migrating Local Services Ads into Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals from August 2026 for selected US categories. The placement and the pay-per-lead model stay the same. The dashboard, weekly budget, and manual bidding do not. If your account changes shape in the next few months, that is why.
The number to actually compare
Not cost per lead. Cost per booked job.
The SearchLight data makes this concrete: a $53 lead at a 43.9% book rate is $233 per paying customer. Change the book rate and the whole picture moves. A $40 lead booked 30% of the time costs $133 per customer. A $60 lead booked 48% of the time costs $125. The cheaper lead is the more expensive customer.
Two businesses can share an identical cost per lead and sit in completely different profit positions once book rate and average ticket diverge. Any comparison that stops at cost per lead has stopped one step early.
The honest read
If your trade and market are eligible, start with Local Services Ads. The economics are better documented, the badge verification is genuinely rigorous, and above all you can stop whenever you like.
If you are considering Yelp Ads, treat the twelve month commitment as the actual product being sold and price the decision accordingly. Ask for the contract term in writing before anything else, and be sceptical of any lead volume projection that is not in the contract.
And if you are already in a Yelp contract, the useful move is not regret. Respond to messages fast, because Yelp tracks and displays response time, keep the profile and photographs current, and build your Google presence in parallel so that you have somewhere to go when the term ends.