Roundup of Changes in the Marketing Industry That You Might Want to Know
Hi H Client!
A fair amount moved in the marketing world over the last few weeks. Here's a round up and what we're doing about it.
Google Ads
Starting October 1, Google charges you for calls you don't answer. This is about your Local Services Ads (LSAs), the pay-per-call ads that sit at the very top of a Google search, above everything else, with your star rating and the green checkmark next to your name. Today, if someone calls you from one of those and nobody picks up, that call is free. In October it won’t be the case anymore. If the caller holds on longer than twenty seconds during your business hours, you pay for it like any other opportunity, and you pay for the callback too. One useful wrinkle: if your phone answers with a menu, the twenty seconds doesn't start until they press a number, and if they give up before pressing anything, Google says they won’t charge you.
Your LSAs are also moving in the Google Ads platform. They've always run in their own separate system, off to the side of everything else we manage for you, and Google is folding them into the main Google Ads platform. Lawn care is in the first group to go (however as of today, they have not been moved yet and likely won't be be moved until later 2026). Almost all of that is our problem and not yours, same ads, different buttons on our end. The one part that is yours: the record of every call and message those ads have ever sent you does not come along for the ride!
This next one only matters to those clients that have this booking enabled/integrated (and eligible) in their GBP. Google expanded direct booking on those top-of-search ads from about twenty scheduling tools to more than five hundred, and booking buttons are coming to regular search ads too, so a homeowner can put an appointment straight on your calendar without ever calling. Standardized visits, maintenance, lawn care, a straightforward quote, and you're on Jobber or ServiceTitan, that's worth switching on and we'll check whether you're eligible. If you sell design-build, we'd rather not: a designer's afternoon is too expensive to hand to whoever clicks first, and we'd sooner anchor the budget before anyone reaches the calendar.
Meta Ads
Facebook is taking away placement controls at the ad set level. Meta doesn't only run your ads on Facebook and Instagram, it also spreads them across a grab bag of other apps and sites, and switching those off campaign by campaign is how we've kept the junk form fills down. Meta's notice in the account says that's going away: excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available on an individual ad set. What survives is an account-wide exclusion list, plus the ability to bid placements up or down and tailor creative for each one. So we're moving your exclusions up to the account level before the ad-set option disappears. There's no date on it yet, which is the annoying part of course, we are monitoring!
Lead Tracking
Your call tracking can now talk to your field software, and screen your calls. CallRail added two-way connections with Jobber, JobNimbus, JobTread and Workiz over the summer, so if you run one of those, a booked job can tie back to the marketing that produced the call. That's the difference between counting calls and counting revenue. Separately, CallRail's assistant can now qualify calls before they reach anyone, filter spam, and route by what the caller actually wants. For a business drowning in April that's worth a look. One caveat we'll handle: turning on screening changes what counts as a qualified opportunity, so we'd want to re-baseline your reporting before comparing months.
A revenue dashboard is one of the highest-return things you can put in place, and what it gives you is unglamorous but big: visibility from revenue back through your pipeline, open deals and closed ones in the same view, so you can see which marketing actually turned into signed work. Most companies are guessing at some part of that chain. If your CRM isn't talking to your call tracking yet, that's the gap, and it's an expensive one to leave sitting. Ask your Project Manager for time with Kelsey to put a plan together and check this off your list.
SEO and GEO
You can finally see whether you show up in Google's AI answers in Google Search Console. This one lives in Google Search Console, not your Google Business Profile. As of August 31, Google says they will report how often your site turns up inside the AI answers at the top of search. It tells you how often you appear, not whether anyone clicked. It doesn't replace the AI visibility reporting we already share with you across the other AI assistants, this is Google's own view of its own answers, which was the one place we couldn't see into. Google also added a button to pull your site out of AI answers completely. We aren't touching that one. Google Search Console has historically limited how much data it shares in the platform, so we will be monitoring to see what valuable insights we can find there from this update.
Those AI answers are getting bigger, too. Google confirmed in late August that an answer can now open all the way up on its own, without anyone clicking to see more, which shoves the regular list of websites further down the page. It hits research questions hardest, what does a pool cost, pavers or concrete. The searches where somebody actually wants to hire, the "near me" kind, are holding up much better.
Gemini and ChatGPT don't answer the same way. I think we all already knew this, but it's helpful to have validation. Somebody ran fourteen thousand of these questions across fifty cities. Gemini points at company websites about sixty percent of the time. ChatGPT leans much more on directories and third-party "best in your city" lists. The two named the same top company only four percent of the time, so they may as well be different search engines. Your own site is what wins you Gemini, and being present in the right third-party lists is what wins you ChatGPT. But that is how it works today, not necessarily tomorrow or next week, AI visibility algorithm is changing almost weekly!
Your Reporting Dashboard
Your H Client Reporting Dashboard is getting refreshed in the next couple of weeks. More on rankings, change in demand reporting, and a reorganization. Nothing for you to do, and your Project Manager will walk you through it once the updates are in.
Upcoming Client Insider Webinar: HubSpot
Kelsey, our Director of MarTech, is running a client exclusive session on seeing your whole revenue picture on Thursday, September 17 at 2:00 p.m. ET. Connecting the front end where a call comes in to the system where the job actually gets built and billed, so you can follow a marketing dollar all the way to signed work., free for clients. Registration is coming in its own email shortly, so watch for that one.
This is for you if:
You are tracking inquiries by memory, by spreadsheet, or by asking your team, and you already know it is not holding up
You are shopping for a (new) CRM and want a straight read on what matters versus what is a feature list
You are running Aspire and want to see what sits above it. Aspire runs your operations. It was never built to trace a marketing dollar to a signed contract, and that is the piece most companies are missing.
If any of this raises a question about your own account, your Project Manager is the fastest way to an answer.
Until Tuesday,
Anna Halstead
Co-Owner, Halstead Media Grou
