Local Intent Has Changed. Are Your Campaigns Keeping Up?
Local search journeys are longer than most campaigns assume. Here's the three-layer funnel structure I use for local clients and why most campaigns miss the middle entirely.
What is happening
Google’s Local Services Ads have expanded significantly. More categories, more geographies, more prominence in search results. At the same time, Google’s own data shows that the path from local intent to local action has gotten longer. People are doing more research, across more sessions and more devices, before they walk into a business or pick up the phone.
The “someone needs a service, searches for it, clicks the nearest result” model still exists. It describes a smaller portion of actual local behaviour than it used to.
What I learned from this
When I was running digital strategy for Renault, one of the things that struck me early was how badly the campaigns misunderstood local intent. We assumed people searched for “car dealer near me.” They were actually searching for specific models, specific services, specific problems they needed to solve. The intent was local but the signal was specific.
That gap between assumed intent and actual intent is still where most local campaigns fail. And it is wider now.
The businesses I work with that struggle most with local campaigns almost all make the same mistake: they treat awareness and conversion as the same moment. They run one campaign, set it to a local radius, and wait for leads. But their potential customers saw the ad at the top of the funnel, went away to think about it, came back three days later with higher intent, and found nothing. No retargeting. No presence in the middle of the journey.
Most local campaigns skip the middle. They go from awareness to conversion with nothing in between and then wonder why conversion rates are low despite decent awareness numbers.
I also spend a significant amount of time just cleaning up local campaign inputs. Business profiles with missing hours or incomplete service descriptions. Conversion tracking that counts clicks instead of calls that led to bookings. Audience data built from broad geographic pools rather than people who actually live in the service area. The campaigns are only as good as the data behind them, and in local that data degrades faster than most other categories.
What I recommend for your business
Structure your local campaigns in three layers, not one.
Upper funnel: awareness campaigns that introduce your business to people in your area who do not know you yet. These do not need to convert. They need to capture. Set up your remarketing audiences here.
Middle funnel: retargeting that stays visible to the people who saw you but did not act. This is the layer most local businesses skip entirely. It is also the one that does the most work, because the customer was already considering you.
Lower funnel: Local Services Ads or high-intent search campaigns that are there when someone is ready to call or book. This is where you close.
Then clean up your inputs before you spend more. Check that your conversion tracking is firing on real actions (calls, form submissions, bookings) not page views. Make sure your Google Business Profile is complete and accurate. Build your audience signals from people who actually converted, not everyone who ever visited your site.
More spend on a broken structure does not fix the structure. Get the three layers in place first.