Message leads, not phone calls
Local Services Ads sends you two kinds of lead, and only one of them is a conversation. That single fact shapes everything about how FirstQuote works with Google.
Calls still ring your own phone. Calls and messages come from the same ads and land in the same dashboard, but they're different jobs. FirstQuote answers the message leads. It doesn't answer your phone, doesn't put anything on your calendar, and doesn't touch your call leads at all. A call rings through to you exactly as it does today.
Replies land in the customer's own Google thread. The homeowner doesn't get a text from a number they don't recognize or an email from an address they've never seen. They get a reply where they wrote, from your business, which is why a fast answer reads as a responsive company rather than as software.
Being responsive is part of how you rank. Google looks at how well you handle the leads it sends you when it decides where to show your business. Answering every message lead, at every hour, isn't only about the job in front of you. It's about the placement that brings you next month's leads.
New message leads are picked up within minutes. Google doesn't hand new Local Services messages over the instant they're created, so FirstQuote checks for them continuously instead. That's why this page says minutes and not seconds. In practice the thing that decides the job isn't whether you answered in ten seconds or four minutes; it's whether you answered before morning.
Linking happens inside your own account. No password changes hands. FirstQuote sends a link request, you accept it from inside Google Ads, and the connection sits in your own Google Ads account where you can see it. It's your account, and it stays that way.
Disputes stay with Google. A lead that was garbage is still disputed in your Local Services dashboard, the way you do it now. What FirstQuote changes is that the bad ones get a polite decline instead of your evening, and they don't count toward what you pay us.
Each business links separately. Two locations, two brands, two service areas: each one links on its own and keeps its own instructions and settings, so the emergency-plumbing side doesn't answer like the remodel side. They all live in one account.
What an unanswered Local Services lead costs
You already paid for it. That's what makes an unanswered Local Services lead hurt in a way an unanswered Yelp message doesn't quite: the ad spend went out whether you replied or not. And message leads are the easy ones to miss, because a call insists and a message just sits there. It arrives at 7:40 on a Tuesday evening while you're finishing a job, you'll get to it, the day happens, and you get to it Wednesday afternoon. The homeowner booked someone Tuesday night, and Google took a small note of how long you took. The general case for speed is in speed to lead. The Google-specific part is that a slow reply costs the job and a little of your placement for the next one.
Linking your Google Ads account
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Send the link request. There's no password sharing and nothing to install. FirstQuote sends a link request to your Google Ads account; you sign in to your own account, accept it, and come back and click "I've accepted." The step-by-step is in connecting Google Local Services Ads.
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New message leads are picked up around the clock. FirstQuote checks on a short cycle all day and all night, so a lead that lands at 11pm is picked up at 11pm, whether you're asleep, on a roof, or three towns away.
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The reply appears in the customer's Google messages thread. It goes out as a message from your business, in the same place the customer was already looking.
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Bad leads get a decline, and the dispute stays yours. Outside your service area, a job you don't take, someone shopping for something you don't sell: FirstQuote sends a polite decline and doesn't charge you. If you want to dispute it with Google, that's still done in your Local Services dashboard.
From there it's the conversation FirstQuote runs on every lead source. It writes from your instructions (what you do, what you don't take, roughly what you charge, how you talk to customers), asks the one or two questions you'd need to quote, follows up on the schedule you set if the homeowner goes quiet so the lead you paid for doesn't die of silence, and gets you by text, email, or a call you take by pressing 1 once the job is ready. If you'd rather take a conversation yourself, reply from the FirstQuote dashboard or from Google's own app and FirstQuote steps back from that lead for good. The features page covers all of it, and automated follow-up explains the schedule.
Answering the leads you already paid for
The fastest way to find out whether this works is to let it answer a handful of real Local Services message leads and read what it said. Your first 5 qualified leads are free, no card required. After that you pay per qualified lead, billed weekly. There's no monthly subscription, and leads that weren't a fit don't count. That's separate from what you pay Google for the ads.
The only question worth asking is whether the message that comes in at 9pm on a Saturday gets a real answer from your business that night, or on Monday. The homeowner isn't waiting until Monday, and neither is Google.
How it compares
| FirstQuote | Replying yourself | |
|---|---|---|
| A message lead at 11pm | Answered within minutes | Answered in the morning |
| Phone-call leads | Still ring your own phone | Still ring your own phone |
| The responsiveness Google measures | Every message lead answered, every hour | Depends how the day went |
| Where the reply lands | The customer's Google thread, from your business | The same thread, hours later |
| Ad money on an unanswered lead | Spent on a lead that got an answer | Spent anyway |
| A lead you'd dispute | Politely declined, not charged by us, disputed by you | Your evening, then your dispute |