BREAKING: Google Expands Use of Local Service Ad Data

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to this special live segment of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing with some breaking news that we just couldn’t help but to drop everything and talk about for a second five hours ago. According to my email here, I’ll be curious when you got this, Conrad, but five hours ago at 9:40 AM received an email from Google local services ads, headline, updating local services ads, additional terms for providers on 6/5/2025, and they outline some major changes in their terms for local services at Conrad. What is Google changing about local services, ads terms?

Conrad Saam:

Well, to me, you read the subject line and this feels like something you’re going to gloss over and not actually read, but holy crap, am I glad that we didn’t do that because this is big and you received your email about five minutes before I did. So maybe there’s some favoritism. There’s speed

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Of light over here. Speed takes a while to get across the country

Conrad Saam:

Speed of MailChimp at Google East

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Coast.

Conrad Saam:

So to get right into this, this is really, really fascinating and I find this extremely alarming. Google is changing the way they use the data that they record from local services ads, and to me changing in a very, very problematic way. So let me read the two most critical bullets to me. New provisions, allowing Google to modify, display and use content you provide to your local services profile such as blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in your local services ads and across other Google products and services. So they can now modify display and use content as they see fit across all of Google’s products and services, which is interesting in terms of what you think you can create from a content perspective. However, they go further and they say there are new provisions allowing Google to select modified display and use rich content, which includes information on, and they specifically call out special offers, pricing information, provider biographies, service descriptions, photographs, et cetera.

But they’re going to mine these and they call this out, they mine from your phone call and message conversations with local service and users, which means we know they’ve been recording calls in local service ads. We know they’ve been listening to them because they stopped the manual process for disputing whether or not the lead was good. And they’ve automated that. So we know they’ve been using this data already, but they are now going to expand the use of this data in what I consider to be extremely troubling on many of the different accounts. What do you Gyi, should we scream? And you know I’m sensational

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And you yes, scream, we

Conrad Saam:

Should scream calm, calm and measured.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We should scream. I hope we raise enough of a stink that they change. So here’s my view of this. First of all, so many lawyers are surprised to that are on LSAs are even surprised to learn that Google is using any of this intake data at all. Right? So let’s just put that to bed. If you’ve been using LSAs, they’ve been using it for some of the ways that Conrad has talked about. They’re using it in terms of all sorts of things behind the scenes. And that’s the thing, to me that’s the big change here is it’s one thing as we should discuss debate, hold Google accountable, yada, yada, yada for ways they’re using our data internally behind the scenes, whether it’s to serve ads, blah, blah, blah. But this is saying now that data, we can also use it to display so they can modify and display that underlying data.

And so then I start thinking about, okay, well that sounds problematic. Even if they were like, we’re going to do this somehow the right way. Doesn’t this create a huge risk of client confidences being violated here and how are they using it? And of course, and this is classic Google, so we’re not surprised by this. I reached out to the local services ad support people, at least the representative that I talked to, no one’s even brought this up with them. He’s like, I asked everybody in the room here with me. None of us have any idea. Could you

Conrad Saam:

Quote me that Google from Google?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I will.

Conrad Saam:

So I can see what you’re talking about.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s unbelievable, right? Exactly. And then again, there are people, and I hate to call people out, but literally there is a Google Ads liaison. The job is to be keeping us informed about what’s going on. Maybe I missed it. I’m looking through here some of the mains where looking for the name? No, I know what the name is.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This must be it. This is from six hours ago from Ginny Marvin. Well this is Google analytics users. So this isn’t even saying anything about, let’s see here.

Conrad Saam:

So there’s nothing going on except this email, which is another problem when you do something, I don’t see anything. Maybe this is it. Maybe I missed it. It’s me and you. Gyi, maybe part of me, I saw this and I was like, someone is punking me. I wonder if this is actually, this is so outrageous. It genuinely thought to myself, am I being puncture? Because that would be a good, I mean people with Scorp thought it’s thing sent me a thing. Really,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I thought the same thing. That’s why I went to support. Because I was like

Conrad Saam:

Maybe fake and support. Look, I looking at and you found

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Nothing. It looks like the emails are coming from legit places. Since we’ve seen this though, a couple other experts have corroborated. We’ve seen

Conrad Saam:

Places.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, multiple are corroborating

Conrad Saam:

That someone coordinated Punking, Gyi and Conrad, knowing that we would light this on fire and then have to retreat.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So again, and this is a, you either opt into this, you either accept these new terms or your LSAs down, let’s about opt in on six five.

Conrad Saam:

So there’s problems with the opt-in. And so if you don’t opt in, it says it doesn’t specifically say LSAs, it says it does. Oh, I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thought it did.

Conrad Saam:

It doesn’t say LSAs. It says your ads may no longer be eligible. It doesn’t say which ads is this? All of your ads? Is this LSA ads? Is this pay-per-click ads? I don’t know because there’s no specificity in that. Can you imagine if they took everyone’s ads down who didn’t opt in on 6.5?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But the other problem with the optin, hold on. They’re not going to do that. Read it.

Conrad Saam:

They’re not going

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To do that.

Conrad Saam:

So the other problem that I have with the opt-in, and they’re very specific on this, is your agency can opt you in on your behalf. So you may opt into this through your agency and you have no idea, right? You have absolutely no idea that you have opt-in because you have an agency that hasn’t bothered to tell you and they’ve taken the easy route here. So I have problems with the opt-in. I have problems with launching these major changes. Whenever you see these major changes that are launched only by email, I always have a problem with that because it’s easy

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To skip. So I clicked into the thing here. I clicked the link

Conrad Saam:

To, oh, the review and accept thing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I did. So it takes you to

Conrad Saam:

A,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hold on, it takes you to a review. The terms of service. We have updated the local services, additional terms for providers. So this is specific to local services ads,

Conrad Saam:

Okay?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There’s no way they’re taking down people’s ads that aren’t opting into this. It’s unclear. Let me read to you. It’s clear. Email might not be clear. The email might not be

Conrad Saam:

Clear to you. The email is very unclear.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

When you read the terms, would you actually click in and look at the language? It’s local services.

Conrad Saam:

I wasn’t going to click on that at all. For all I know it’s going to download and

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, again, you’re either clicking on it or you’re not surfacing local services ads anymore.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so there you go. Question for you. I’m going to put you on the spot.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

It’s a real problem. You have to make a decision today. We’re going to play

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Theoretical. You have to make a decision by six five.

Conrad Saam:

Well, right now let’s pretend it is June 4th, 1130 pm You have to make a call for your clients with all of the information we currently have opt in or do, how do you not? How about with only the information that I have, with only the information that you currently have. Do you opt your clients in or

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not me sitting as a lawyer or me sitting as attorney sink?

Conrad Saam:

You are the CEO of attorney sink. You have to

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Make attorney a

Conrad Saam:

Bold decision for your clients’.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Your fault. No, first of all, I’m not making the decision for my clients. I’m going to my clients and saying, Hey, you’re

Conrad Saam:

Taking my,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is going, yeah, this is what’s going on. In fact, we just emailed everybody that we’re currently managing LSAs for and gave ’em an update. But I’ll say this, ask me the harder question, which is what if it’s your law firm? What if it’s your law firm? Gyi, would you opt into it? Based on what I know right now, I think my answer is probably no. Now, I tend to be a little bit more on the risk averse side of this, especially when it comes to client data. But if I’m a criminal defense lawyer, I’m a hundred percent not opting into this. A hundred percent. In

Conrad Saam:

Fact, so this was brought up with criminal defense early on with LSAs, right? And that was like the recording people had an issue with that. And I think that is a fair concern.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What do you think about, how do you distinguish that from CallRail?

Conrad Saam:

Yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are you like CallRail? Okay, but Google not okay for

Conrad Saam:

Transcription. I think it’s different because you have a different third party on the end. Having said that, I do tell, and we’re going off a tangent here, but if you’re a criminal defense attorney and you don’t do dynamic call tracking with recording, I’m kind of okay with that. I would rather have funny

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Information. What about not recording, but still opting into an LSAI am sorry, an SLA service level agreement with a third party that is still collecting that transcript data, even if they’re not recording it. Because again, CallRail, we’d have to look at what the options are, but even if you’re not transcribing, I believe you’re opting in for them to use the transcription data. I

Conrad Saam:

Think if you have on a pure marketing front, and then we got to get back to this craziness from Mountain View.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it matters though, because I think the answer is that you trust CallRail. You don’t trust Google. I think that’s what you’re saying.

Conrad Saam:

I trust CallRail more than I trust Google. I’ll say that 100% at this point in

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Time is gross. I think that’s how you’re concluding there.

Conrad Saam:

I think for a criminal defense attorney, wherever you have a barrier to signing up a client, which would be anything that notifies them that this may be recorded as an intake, I think that’s a problem. And I think that’s fair. Having said that to your second question, do I trust CallRail over Google 100% at this point? Yes. And I’ll tell you why. One of the things that they, I’ll read this. This is their own words. This is not me making shit up. They specifically call out new provisions, allowing Google to select, modify, display, and use rich content including special offers and pricing information and discounts. So this is applicable outside of the legal industry, but think about them building a map of pricing information for law firms based on intake calls. Why would you hand that information over? That’s insane. That is insane. And you can’t tell me that they’re going to do this with the best intentions for you. Additionally, think about now you’re on the side of Google, put yourself in an evil hat on. You’re on the side of Google. You have pricing information for law firms, right? Okay, there’s your evil hat. You have price information for law firms. Now think about how you would use that or could use that or are incented to use that to change their pay-per-click bidding strategies, which you automagically are doing anyway because you’ve opted them in to your automagic pay-per-click strategy.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not just their strategies. Not just their strategies. Why don’t we just price fix? Yeah, why don’t we just price fix off of the leads, right? You know, have you ever seen this happen before? Have you ever seen an ad platform use?

Conrad Saam:

Oh my god,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Data to price are stretching up my ugly past Jesus. Well, listeners already know listeners. Listeners already

Conrad Saam:

Know they don’t. No, I walked right into this trap. Gyi, masterfully set a trap for me. Well, it’s not

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Live. It’s not live.

Conrad Saam:

It is live. We’re streaming this live. Dude, you want to tell the fix it in post. Fix it in post, fix it. We can’t fix it in post when we’re doing a, alright, dear listener, I would like to have, Gyi, describe the trap that he just had me walk into and I’ll tell you why I’m so adamant about this. Go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Many advertising platforms do this many legal now he’s being legal directory advertising platforms do this. Or at least could do this again, how about this? They are doing this. We know they all are. They’re all using the data. They’re all

Conrad Saam:

Using it. Okay, let’s explain. What do you mean by this? How they’re all using the data. And then let’s extrapolate to what Google is doing with deeper data on

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Internet. Yeah, let’s use the obvious surface level one. Add inventory is based on the traffic to a page on a directory site, right? So cost per eyeballs, right? So we’re going to say, hey, presumably, I mean, again, this is very super right? This is very super basic. I was trying to give an example.

Conrad Saam:

If you want to say avo, you can say avo. I won’t cringe.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m not saying I just saying that a lot of ad platforms use the data of the visibility of their ads in order to make decisions about pricing and distribution because we know some of them do the round robin thing or send it out to a couple people, a couple firms. Everybody knows that. I think that people accept that they don’t like it. And again, when we call this out, no one likes this, but this is this on steroids.

Conrad Saam:

Lemme go deeper into that because having sat on the other side of the desk and the use of data, right? We’re talking about ad inventory and impressions, but ultimately, and I can talk you through the way we did this at AVO and geese being nice to not kind of flame this, but one of the things that we went way out of our way to do is get an understanding of when you have those ad impressions, how many phone, this is old hat at this point in time, but how many phone calls are they generating? There’s so much data that we were able to develop early on in AVO by doing phone tracking. And we was very, very simplistic at the time, but we were able to assess how many phone calls we were generating for Murphy Jones and Smith in Chattanooga. And then we could be like, oh wow, they paid us $200 and we generated 17 phone calls. That seems really cheap. Let’s jack up the price. That’s what happens. But that is at a very, very rudimentary level and a high level compared to using the pricing information for a specific firm, how a firm prices themselves. Now, am I that Google is going to do this? No. Am I saying they’re not going to do this? No. Could they do this?

Yes, that’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The problem. They could. You’ve got no control over it. They’re making it table stakes to participate. And again, my view is if they made this a, hey, in order to realize this additional benefit by opting into this, we’re going to help you improve ad performance or blah blah, blah. And you have a choice to opt in, but you don’t have to. Totally different ball game. But this forced opt-in, and then I’m reading some of this too. You agree that Google may sublease these rights to its affiliates and contractors to perform services for Google. Basically Google can use this data however it wants contractors, they can sell it,

Conrad Saam:

They can make new ads for it. They can build pricing structure structures for the legal

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Market. That’s the one that gets me is, is this idea of using the data to create actual ad creative. They’re going to take your intake data and make an ad out of it.

Conrad Saam:

I mean, there you go. That’s the right

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Answer. So tell us what you think. If you’ve seen this lawyers, Google’s giving you notice, right? You’re all on notice. You’ve got until June 5th to decide whether you can participate in LSAs moving forward. And by the way, Anthony Higman, I think put on LinkedIn some very interesting ideas. Maybe we can get a link to that. But this is currently for LSAs to Conrad’s point, is this rolling out for Google ads altogether? Is this the new policy language?

Conrad Saam:

No, it is, and I deliberately haven’t clicked through, but this is very, very clear that this is about extending to the network. Let me read this. Google may link your local service ads accounts to your profile accounts across other Google services. It talks about products and services across other Google platforms, in your local service ads and across other Google products and services. This is taking a piece of data out of LSA and extending it across the universe.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Now let me ask you this now, and this is the one, this is the thing. This is it. This is the double-edged sword,

Conrad Saam:

Okay?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They’re going to use this data to train Gemini,

Conrad Saam:

Okay?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You want to show up in aios?

Conrad Saam:

They want a lot of information and you want to show up in

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Aios,

Conrad Saam:

Right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s say you’re like, don’t take any of this data. Who do you think they’re going to show you think they’re going to show the firms that are restricting access to their data? How about Google Maps? You want to show up on Google Maps in the future?

Conrad Saam:

The vice president of Google ethics and accommodation at the American Bar Association. I would love to have that person weigh in on what lawyers do with this. I mean, it is problematic from an ethics perspective. It’s problematic from a privacy perspective. Those issues you’ve raised have been issues for a while, but this takes it to another level. It’s like they’re

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Daring us to turn off the ads.

Conrad Saam:

I hate this. I’ve hated local service ads from the beginning. This is,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, again, because of the catchall here, just to give some other horror stories here, they can use this data to make determines about whether or not your firm ranks in the organic local PAC

Conrad Saam:

Period. Of course,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hey, we want to show in the organic results firms that are X, Y, and Z data. And we’re using their local services ad data to help inform that decision, whether it’s prominence or relevance or whatever factors they want to put it into

Conrad Saam:

That intake data to determine whether or not you are expensive or cost effective.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And here I’m going to Dom, going to do the’re going to opposite. I’m going to do the put on my do no evil cap for a second. My do no evil cap where my do no evil cap. Google might say, Hey look, we want to show businesses who are delivering great customer experiences to people who call the firm

Conrad Saam:

Fair. So let me, this is the problem with there being history here. What’s up? No, listen, if this had rolled out five years ago, Gyi, I would’ve defended this. I would’ve

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Honestly, or let it be opt in, let it be opt-in. Not mandatory.

Conrad Saam:

So the fact that they didn’t do an opt-in is problematic, but really what’s problematic to me is the shenanigans that they’ve pulled recently to make pay-per-click less efficient so they make more money. Right? And that is not a question. That is a fact. And if they had not done that, maybe I stay the Google cheerleader here, but no longer. No longer. Alright. It’s a lot. Tough question. You had a meeting, I believe I got to go. I got to go get the, you got to go. So I don’t mean to kick you out, but I know you had to go. Stay tuned. Listen to the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We’re going to be talking about this some more. We have an episode coming out tomorrow, which will not cover this, but we’ll certainly be covering this on the subsequent one. Stay tuned and check your email

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Guys and send this stuff to your vendors. Send this stuff to your partners. Send this stuff to your marketing leads because should talk,

Conrad Saam:

Everybody should be talking about this. I would not send this stuff to your vendor, your agency. I would wait to see if they bring it to you and if they don’t find a different agency.

Announcer:

Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legal talk network.com. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts and RSS. Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Continue Reading