How to Advertise Your Business on Google with Your Business Profile

Google My Business advertising gets you more local calls and direction requests by connecting your free Google Business Profile to a paid Google Ads account. Once the two are linked, location assets let your ads show your address, distance, hours, and a call button on Search and Google Maps. The profile costs nothing; you pay only for the ad clicks, or the leads, you buy. For service businesses trying to attract more local customers, that combination puts paid visibility where nearby buyers are already looking.

For a plumber, roofer, or HVAC contractor, the link puts a map pin and phone number in front of nearby searchers while they’re deciding who to call. Paid placement then runs alongside the organic work in your local search strategy, so you can show up in both the ads and the map results for the jobs you want most.

This guide covers prerequisites, five setup steps, campaign choices, costs and free credit, call and direction tracking, and fixes for linking errors.

TL;DR

• Your Business Profile itself costs nothing: Ads run through Google Ads, where you pay per click, or per valid lead with Local Services Ads. Google Ads doesn’t require a minimum budget.
• Location assets put your address in ads: After you link the profile inside Google Ads, your locations can show address, distance, hours, and a call button with your ads.
• Google is retiring call-only ads: February 2026 was the cutoff for creating new call-only ads, and existing ones stop receiving impressions in February 2027. Call assets in responsive search ads replace them.

Google Business Profile vs Google Ads: What You’re Actually Advertising

Every ad you start from your Business Profile runs through a Google Ads account. The profile is a free organic listing on Search and Maps. Paid placement is a separate purchase made in Google Ads.

Google’s Business Profile help page documents one starting point. In the Google Maps app, you tap Business, then Advertise, then Get started, and that flow creates a Google Ads account or opens your existing one. Service area businesses and businesses in sensitive categories aren’t eligible for this route, and the page describes no desktop version.

Search Engine Roundtable reported in June 2026 that a “Promote” option briefly appeared in the profile dashboard. It appeared to send users into Google Ads and was removed within hours.

Linking the profile to Google Ads changes what your ads can carry and where they can appear:

• Search and Maps visibility: Google’s Maps advertising guide names active, approved location assets as the primary requirement for advertising in Google Maps.
• Click-through: Google says assets make your ads more prominent, which generally translates to more clicks. It publishes no fixed percentage lift.
• Quality Score: Google’s ad quality documentation removes the influence of assets from expected click-through rate, so linking won’t raise your Quality Score. Ad Rank does factor in the impact of assets.
• Local conversion tracking: Local actions conversions, such as clicks to call and direction requests, are available to advertisers with active location assets.

Before You Start: Verify and Complete Your Google Business Profile

Google requires a verified Business Profile before you set up an ad campaign from it. If you haven’t verified your business yet, start there, because Google says verification reviews take up to five business days.

Next, check who holds access. Owners and managers can both manage Google Ads account links, so manager access is enough. Smart campaigns have a stricter rule: the same email must be an Administrator in Google Ads and an Owner or Manager on the profile.

Check email access first when something fails. If the Google account you use for Ads has no role on the profile, you can’t select it as a profile you manage. You’ll have to send an access request that the owner approves.

Before linking, fill in the fields your ads will borrow:

• Accurate hours, phone number and street address, which Google Ads pulls from the profile
• Services and photos, since merchant photos can appear in ads unless you opt out in Location manager
• Recent reviews, which shape how your profile looks to searchers who click through from an ad
• A business name of 80 characters or less and a website URL of 35 characters or less, the limits Google lists when locations don’t sync

Fix inconsistencies in your Google listings before linking. Google Ads displays whatever the profile holds.

How to Advertise Your Business Profile on Google: Step by Step

The setup has five stages: open a Google Ads account, link the profile, add location assets, pick a campaign type, then set radius and budget. Each stage depends on the one before it, so work through them in order rather than jumping straight to campaign creation.

The first three stages are setup work you do once. The last two decide what you spend and which searches you show up for, so they’re worth revisiting after your first few weeks of data.

Google revises these screens often. The click paths below follow Google’s current help articles, so if a label on your screen differs slightly, look for the closest match in the same menu.

Step 1: Open or Access a Google Ads Account

You can open a Google Ads account from the Google Maps app if your profile is eligible, or sign up directly at Google Ads. If you already have an active Ads account, the Maps-app flow takes you to your existing Google Ads overview page.

Sign in with the same Google account that holds owner or manager access on your Business Profile. Using one email for both avoids the most common linking failure later.

If you plan to claim a new-advertiser offer, settle your billing setup first. Google says changing your billing setup after you’ve entered a promotional offer invalidates the offer.

Step 2: Link Your Business Profile to Google Ads

Linking happens inside Google Ads, under the Campaigns menu. Google’s product linking help page gives this path for a profile you manage:

1. Go to Assets within the Campaigns menu.
2. Select the plus button, then select Location.
3. Choose Our locations, then select Continue.
4. Select “Link to a Business Profile Manager account I know.”
5. Choose “Select a Business Profile that I manage” and pick the account from the dropdown.
6. Select Continue, apply business name or label filters if needed, and select Save.

If you don’t manage the profile, the same menu lets you enter your domain, pick the matching profile and send a request to the profile’s email. Once the request is approved, that account’s locations become eligible for your ads.

To confirm the link, open the Tools menu, select Data manager, and find Google Business Profile under Connected products. Select Manage & link to see linked Business Profiles and pending invitations. Google’s troubleshooting guide says changes can take 24–48 hours to sync.

Step 3: Add Location Assets

Location assets, formerly called location extensions, carry your Business Profile details into an ad. On a phone, a Search ad can show the distance to your location, its city, and a Call button. On a computer, it shows the street address, and a click opens details such as business hours, phone number, photos, and directions.

Google’s location assets help page says video ads on YouTube also show your business location information unless you opt out, so a linked profile reaches beyond Search.

You can apply location assets at three levels:

• Account level: Google recommends linking your Business Profile here and narrowing it per campaign or ad group with location groups.
• Campaign or ad group level: Choose all locations or a location group. Campaign settings override account settings.
• Display inventory: Location assets on Display run only through Local campaigns or Performance Max with store goals.

Because location assets pull from your profile, edit the address in your Google Business Profile rather than in Google Ads. Locations marked temporarily or permanently closed stop showing in ads.

Step 4: Choose a Campaign Type

Match the campaign type to the action you want from a searcher:

• Search with location assets: This fits owners who want keyword control. Your ads can carry address and distance details, and you can bid on direction requests in Search campaigns.
• Search with call assets: This fits businesses that run on phone calls. Google’s call ads announcement says the option to create new call-only ads was removed in February 2026 and existing call-only ads stop receiving impressions in February 2027, with call assets in responsive search ads as the replacement.
• Performance Max with store goals: This fits businesses that want calls, direction requests or visits from one campaign. It optimizes toward store visits, store sales or local actions and can serve across Search, Google Maps, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Waze.

To build a Performance Max store-goals campaign, choose “Local store visits and promotions” as the objective and Performance Max as the type. Single-location owners should know that Google’s store goals optimization guide recommends at least five business locations for campaigns optimizing to local actions and ten for store visits or store sales.

Older guides often recommend Smart campaigns. Google’s Ads API deprecation schedule shows that new Smart campaigns can’t be created through the Google Ads API as of September 23, 2026, and Google recommends Performance Max, Search or Demand Gen campaigns instead.

Step 5: Set Your Local Radius and Budget

Set geography to match how far you’ll travel for a job. In Search campaigns, target a radius around your shop or service area. For Performance Max with store goals, Google infers geographic targeting from your linked business locations and doesn’t recommend adding radius targets when location assets are applied.

Google Ads doesn’t require a minimum budget, and Google’s online marketing guide recommends new advertisers start with an average budget of $5 to $50 per day.

Under Google’s average daily budget rules, a campaign can spend up to twice its daily budget on a busy day, but no more than 30.4 times the daily budget across the month. A $20 daily budget therefore means a $608 monthly ceiling.

WordStream puts the average starting budget for small and midsize businesses at $1,000 to $2,500 a month, which works out to roughly $33 to $82 per day.

Campaign Type Comparison for Local Businesses

Each option suits a different goal. Local Services Ads get a single row here because they have their own guide.

The table compares all four options on the same three criteria:

Campaign type	Best for	Primary strength	Limitation
Search with location assets	Owners who want to pick keywords and show address and distance	Keyword control and direction-request bidding	You build and manage keywords and ads yourself
Search with call assets	Phone-first trades such as plumbing and HVAC	Call button with the ad, plus call reporting	Billed per click, so not every charged click becomes a call
Performance Max for store goals	Multi-location businesses wanting calls, directions and visits from one campaign	Serves Search, Maps, Waze, YouTube, Gmail and Display and optimizes to local actions	Google recommends at least five locations for local actions, and ads can’t run only in Maps
Local Services Ads	Eligible categories such as plumbers, electricians and lawyers	Pay per valid lead rather than per click	Limited to eligible business categories

Local Services Ads work differently from the other three: you pay per lead rather than per click, and eligibility depends on your business category. Our Google Local Services Ads guide covers them in full.

Search Engine Journal reports that Google is bringing Local Services Ads into Google Ads through Performance Max campaigns built for pay-per-lead goals, starting with a small group of U.S. advertisers in August 2026 and continuing in phases through 2027.

Search Engine Roundtable reports that from October 1, 2026, a missed call during business hours can be charged as a valid lead when the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds. If your phone system asks callers to press a key, the 20 seconds start after the key press.

How Much It Costs, and Whether Advertising on Google Can Be Free

The Business Profile is free and ads are paid. Search ads bill per click and Local Services Ads bill per valid lead, so the useful comparison is what a lead costs you, not just the cost per click (CPC).

Your trade sets the price range. Competitive categories such as legal and home services pay far more per click than restaurants, so the same daily budget buys very different volumes depending on what you do.

New-advertiser promotional credits can offset early spend, but they come with conditions worth reading before you count on them. Both topics are covered below.

Typical Click Costs by Industry

WordStream’s 2026 Google Ads benchmark report covers 13,474 U.S. search campaigns running from April 2025 through March 2026 and reports these figures:

Industry	Average CPC	Average cost per lead
Home & Home Improvement	$8.33	$90.92
Attorneys & Legal Services	$9.87	$131.63
Dentists & Dental Services	$8.00	$72.97
Physicians & Surgeons	$4.76	$40.04
Health & Fitness	$6.17	$67.36
Restaurants & Food	$2.05	$30.57
All industries	$5.42	$66.69

WordStream labels these figures averages but calculates them as medians to account for outliers, so treat them as market ranges rather than quotes for your area. At $8.33 a click, a $25 daily budget buys about three home-services clicks a day.

Claiming Google’s New-Advertiser Credit

Google offers new advertisers a promotional credit, and each offer sets its own amount. Google’s promotional offers help page uses “Spend $500 USD, get $500 USD” as its example of an introductory offer.

Google’s U.S. promotional terms and help pages attach these conditions:

• Your account must be less than 14 days old when you redeem the offer, and the offer is valid only for customers with a U.S. billing address.
• Only spend after you redeem the offer counts toward it.
• The credit can take up to 35 days to appear, and advertisers normally have 60 days to spend it after it’s added.
• Each customer gets one promotional credit, and Google doesn’t refund an unused balance.

Most offers apply automatically after sign-up. For a code you receive later, Google’s redemption steps say to go to Promotions in the Billing menu, select the blue plus button, enter the offer and select Submit.

Google doesn’t guarantee the credit. Search Engine Roundtable reported in September 2026 that some advertisers had promotional credits invalidated after they had already spent the required amount, including one advertiser who spent $3,200 expecting a matching credit.

Track Calls, Directions and Store Visits From Your Ads

Google Ads measures calls, direction requests and store visits from location-asset ads. Each one uses a different mechanism, and only some can drive bidding.

Set up tracking before you judge a campaign. Without it, a campaign that fills your calendar with phone calls can look like it’s failing because the conversions column stays empty.

The sections below cover what to turn on, which actions Google can optimize toward, and where to check results by location.

Set Up Conversions for Calls and Directions

Local actions conversions are available to all advertisers with active location assets. Google’s local actions help page lists goals such as “Clicks to call” and “Local actions – Directions,” which become available once your account receives at least one conversion of that type, and reports them in the All conversions column.

Directions can drive bidding in Search, Performance Max and Shopping campaigns. Clicks to call can drive bidding only in Performance Max. Website visits from a location show in reports but can’t be used for bidding.

To measure completed phone calls, turn on call reporting, which uses Google forwarding numbers. When both phone numbers are in the U.S. or Canada, Google can record calls and use AI to qualify leads; calls that can’t be recorded count as conversions if they last a duration you set.

Calls from your Business Profile that Google can attribute to an ad interaction are reported under “Calls from ads” too. Google’s requirements are that the profile is linked to Google Ads, call history is enabled on the profile, call reporting is on, and the listing is in a supported country.

Store visits need no setup but have entry requirements. Google starts reporting store visits automatically once your account meets its eligibility requirements, including enough ad clicks or impressions and enough foot traffic to pass privacy thresholds. Google says those numbers vary by advertiser.

Confirm Your Profile Appears in Ads

The Ad preview and diagnosis tool, under Troubleshooting in the Tools menu, shows whether assets display with your ad for a given keyword without accumulating impressions. In Location manager, the Status column marks any disapproved location “Not eligible.”

For results, go to Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then the Stores report. It lists local reach impressions, call clicks, driving directions, website visits and store visits by location.

If you run ads on Google Maps, segment your results by Click type to separate direction requests, click-to-call and location detail clicks.

Fixing Common Linking Problems

When a profile won’t link, or locations still haven’t appeared 48 hours after linking, check these causes:

• Email mismatch: Your Google Ads email has no role on the profile. Ask the owner to add it as an owner or manager, then accept the invitation sent to that email.
• Unverified or inactive profile: Google advises making sure every location is fully verified and active in your Business Profile. Finish verification before you relink.
• Suspended profile: Owners and managers can’t act on a suspended profile. Google tells owners to submit an appeal backed by evidence such as a business license, notes that an appeal can only be submitted once, and says not to create a new profile.
• Duplicate profile: Google allows one profile per business, and a duplicate won’t show on Search or Maps. Resolve it before linking; this walkthrough shows how to merge your Google accounts.
• Removing the wrong listing: Google says removing a duplicate also removes its content and linked managers. Confirm which copy is the extra one before you delete your Google Business Profile duplicate.
• Multi-location filters: An Ads account links to all locations or to a filtered set. Location groups filter by up to three Business Profile labels, and a location with any of those labels syncs, so add the labels in the profile first. Changing an account-level filter deletes any feed items that don’t match it.
• Business name filter: The name in the filter must match the profile exactly, so a filter for “Bob’s” won’t sync “Bob’s Barbecue.”

If none of those fixes works, unlink and relink the profile. Google says relinking removes any applied filters but preserves your data, such as stats and location links to campaigns.

Capture the Leads Your Ads Generate

Google bills for the click whether or not anyone answers, and Local Services Ads can now bill for some missed calls too. A plumber under a sink or an HVAC tech on a roof can’t pick up every call an ad produces, and a missed call is a missed job. Vendasta AI Receptionist answers calls, web chats and texts 24/7, qualifies each lead using your business information, and books the appointment on your calendar.

AI Receptionist is one of the AI Employees in Vendasta’s AI Workforce. Most AI Employees deploy in under 30 minutes after learning from your website and Business Profile, and every conversation is logged so you can see exactly what the AI handled. In one Elite Web Professionals case study, AI Receptionist handled 1,017 calls and qualified 778 leads for Choice Signature Luxury Car Rental, with a 76% conversion rate over four months.

Answering every ad-driven call means more of your ad budget turns into booked work. To see how Vendasta AI Receptionist can handle this for your business, book a Vendasta demo.

Google My Business Advertising FAQs

1. Can I run ads directly from my Google Business Profile dashboard?

Google offers no separate profile ad product. Its help documentation describes one route that starts from your profile: in the Google Maps app, tap Business, then Advertise, then Get started. That flow creates a Google Ads account or opens your existing one, so every campaign still runs in Google Ads. Service area businesses can’t use the Maps-app route.

2. What permissions do I need to link my Business Profile to Google Ads?

Owner or manager access on the profile is enough, because both roles can manage Google Ads account links. Smart campaigns add one rule: the same email must be an Administrator in Google Ads and an Owner or Manager on the profile. Without access, you can send a link request to the profile’s email for approval.

3. Which campaign type should a local service business start with?

If you run a phone-first trade, Search ads with call and location assets usually fit, since Google is retiring call-only ads. If you have five or more locations and want calls and direction requests from one campaign, test Performance Max for store goals. If you are in an eligible category such as plumbers, electricians or lawyers, compare Local Services Ads, which bill per lead.

4. How much does Google My Business advertising cost?

The profile is free and the ads are paid. WordStream’s 2026 benchmark puts the average cost per click at $8.33 for home and home improvement, $9.87 for legal services and $8.00 for dental practices. Google Ads doesn’t require a minimum budget, and Google recommends new advertisers start with an average budget of $5 to $50 per day.

5. Is advertising on Google free if I have a Business Profile?

Your Business Profile listing is free and can appear in organic Search and Maps results without any ad spend. Paid placements, including location-asset ads and Local Services Ads, cost money. A new-advertiser promotional credit can offset early spend, but you have to spend first, and the credit can take up to 35 days to appear.

6. How does Google’s free ad credit for new advertisers work?

Google sets the amount in each offer, and its help center uses “Spend $500 USD, get $500 USD” as the example. Under the U.S. terms, the account must be less than 14 days old when you redeem, either at sign-up or under Promotions in the Billing menu. Only spend after redemption counts, and advertisers normally have 60 days to use the credit after it’s added.

7. What should I add to my Business Profile before advertising?

Verify the profile first, because Google requires verification before you set up ads from it and advises keeping every location verified and active. Then confirm hours, phone number, street address, services and photos, since Google Ads pulls these fields from the profile. Keep the business name to 80 characters or less and the website URL to 35 characters or less so locations sync.

8. How do I confirm my Business Profile shows in my ads?

Open Data manager in the Tools menu and check that Google Business Profile appears under Connected products, then allow 24 to 48 hours for locations to sync. Run the Ad preview and diagnosis tool to see whether location assets display. Location manager also flags any disapproved location as Not eligible.

9. Can I still create call-only ads in Google Ads?

Google’s published schedule says no. February 2026 was the cutoff for creating new call-only ads, and existing call-only ads stop receiving impressions in February 2027. The replacement is call assets within responsive search ads, which add a call button to your Search ads.

10. Do location assets improve my Quality Score?

No. Google removes the influence of assets from expected click-through rate, so adding location assets won’t raise Quality Score. Ad Rank does factor in the impact of assets, and Google says assets make ads more prominent, which generally translates to more clicks.