Nobody with a leak is filling out a contact form
Picture someone standing in their kitchen with water coming through the ceiling. They're not sitting down to carefully compose a message through a contact form and wait for a reply tomorrow. They're searching "emergency plumber near me" on their phone and calling whoever looks like they can turn up fastest. That's not a hypothetical, it's how most local, urgent service searches actually play out, and a lot of Google Ads accounts for trades and local services are still built as though the goal is a form submission first and a phone call second.
For plumbers, locksmiths, electricians, roofers and anyone else dealing with jobs people need sorted now rather than eventually, the phone call usually is the conversion. Everything about the ad and the landing page should be built around making that call as easy as possible, because every extra step between the click and the phone ringing is a chance for someone to bail and ring the next name on the list instead. Getting this right is the core of local lead gen on Google Ads.
Call assets in Google Ads
Call assets let a phone number appear directly on your search ad, with a tap-to-call button on mobile. Someone can ring you straight from the search results page without ever landing on your website at all. For urgent, high-intent searches, that's often exactly what they want, the fastest possible route to speaking to a real person. If call assets aren't switched on, you're relying entirely on someone clicking through to a landing page and then finding a way to call from there, which is one more step than needs to exist.
A number your website actually surfaces properly
Assuming someone does land on your site, the phone number needs to be genuinely obvious, not squeezed into a footer in small text. On mobile, that usually means a tap-to-call button sitting in the header, visible without scrolling, on every single page, not just the homepage. If someone lands on a specific service page from an ad and has to hunt around to find how to actually contact you, that's friction you didn't need to add.
Why the tracking number matters as much as the button
A call button is only half the job. Without a dedicated tracking number tied to your Google Ads traffic, separate from the number on your Google Business Profile or printed on your van, you've got no real way of knowing how many calls your ad spend is actually generating. Call tracking through Google Ads, or a third-party tool feeding data back into it, lets those calls count as proper conversions, which also means your bidding strategy has accurate data to work with rather than a partial picture that quietly undercounts how well the campaign is doing.
Worth checking: Load your own landing page on your phone using mobile data, not wifi, and time how long it takes before the call button is visible and tappable. If that feels slow to you on a decent connection, it's worse for someone standing in a draughty hallway with one bar of signal. If it is slow, here's what actually fixes a slow website.
When a call-only campaign makes sense
For genuinely urgent services, emergency callouts especially, a call-only campaign format is worth considering. These skip the landing page altogether and go straight from the ad to a phone call, which suits searches where nobody's going to browse a website anyway. They won't fit every part of an account, someone comparing quotes for a kitchen extension probably does want to look at a portfolio first, but for the urgent end of a trades business, cutting out every unnecessary step between the search and the phone ringing tends to pay off.
What this looks like in practice
A well set up account for a local trades business usually has three things working together: call assets live on the ads themselves, a fast, mobile-first landing page with a genuinely obvious call button, and a dedicated tracking number so those calls actually count toward performance. Miss any one of the three and you're either losing calls outright, or losing the ability to see how many you're actually getting, which makes it hard to know whether the campaign is working at all. Whether you're a trade in Bromley, Croydon or anywhere else, the same three things apply.
The bottom line
If your business lives or dies on people calling rather than filling out a form, build the whole experience around that fact, starting with the ad itself and continuing all the way through to the number on the page. A missed call because the button was hard to find, or slow to load, never shows up as a lost lead in any report. It just quietly shows up as a lower conversion rate that's genuinely hard to diagnose unless you go looking for it directly.