A pile of metrics you look at occasionally is not analytics — it is anxiety. The fix is a weekly LSA KPI dashboard: a small, fixed set of numbers you record on the same day every week so patterns become visible and decisions become routine. This guide walks through which KPIs belong on it, how to lay it out, and how to make it a habit that actually changes what you do.
Why weekly, and why few
Monthly is too slow — a whole month of a slipping answer rate or a budget pacing problem is a lot of wasted spend before you notice. Daily is too noisy — one quiet Tuesday will tempt you into changes that a full week would have shown were normal. Weekly is the sweet spot for Local Services Ads. And the dashboard should be short: eight or nine KPIs, not thirty. A dashboard you can read in two minutes gets read every week; a sprawling one gets abandoned.
The KPIs that belong on it
Group them so each answers a different question — what did I pay, did we respond, and what did we get?
- Volume & cost: leads, charged leads, spend, cost per lead.
- Responsiveness: answer rate, median response time.
- Outcome: booking rate, cost per booked job.
- Recovery: recovered spend from credits (industry estimates put recoverable spend around 6–7%).
That set spans the whole funnel: demand at the top, your response in the middle, booked jobs at the bottom, and money clawed back on the side. Anything you add beyond it should earn its place by driving a decision.
A layout that reads at a glance
The simplest effective format is one row per week, one column per KPI, most recent week on top. That structure turns every number into a trend automatically — you are always seeing this week next to the last several.
| Week | Leads | Charged | Spend | CPL | Answer % | Book % | Cost/job |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wk of Jun 15 | 46 | 39 | $1,980 | $51 | 82% | 27% | $188 |
| Wk of Jun 8 | 41 | 36 | $1,840 | $51 | 79% | 24% | $204 |
| Wk of Jun 1 | 44 | 38 | $1,910 | $50 | 85% | 29% | $176 |
Add a target next to the ones you manage to — an answer-rate floor, a cost-per-booked-job ceiling — so a breach is obvious without interpretation.
The part that makes it work: the review
Recording numbers is not the point; acting on them is. Each week, run the same three-question review:
- What moved, and is it real? A one-week wobble may be noise; a three-week drift is a signal.
- Did anything breach a target? Answer rate below floor or cost per booked job above ceiling gets a named action this week.
- What's one thing to change? Pick a single lever, not five. Next week's dashboard tells you if it worked.
This is what separates a dashboard from a diary. The numbers exist to produce one decision a week, and to check last week's decision against reality.
Reconcile carefully across the billing boundary
One caution specific to LSA: credits post on a delay — typically assessed within about 72 hours and credited within roughly 30 days. So spend and recovered-spend figures for the most recent week are provisional and will settle later. Keep the current week marked as preliminary, and only treat spend numbers as final once the billing period closes. Otherwise you will chase discrepancies that resolve themselves.
Start simple, tighten later
Do not wait for perfect tooling. A spreadsheet with these columns, filled in every Monday, beats an elaborate system you never finish building. Once the habit holds and volume grows, automate the parts that are painful to gather by hand — especially the outcome metrics like booking rate that require capturing what happened after each lead. The tool can get fancier over time. The weekly rhythm is what actually moves the account.
Frequently asked questions
What KPIs should be on a weekly LSA dashboard?
Include leads, charged leads, spend, cost per lead, answer rate, response time, booking rate, and cost per booked job, plus recovered spend from credits. Together they cover volume, cost, responsiveness, and the outcome that matters, so you see both what you paid and what you got in one view.
How often should I review LSA metrics?
Weekly is the practical cadence for most accounts. It is frequent enough to catch a slipping answer rate or a pacing problem before a month of budget is wasted, but not so frequent that daily noise drives overreaction. Review on a fixed day so the numbers become a trend line rather than an occasional snapshot.
Do I need special software for an LSA dashboard?
No. A simple spreadsheet with one row per week and a column per KPI is enough to start, since the discipline matters more than the tool. Software helps once volume grows or when you want outcomes like booking rate captured automatically instead of typed in by hand each week.