How to dispute bad LSA leads

Can you still dispute a bad LSA lead?

Local Services Ads (LSA) are Google's pay-per-lead ads. You pay for a call, message or booking request from a customer, not for a click. Google's How leads work page puts it simply: "you pay for valid leads." For how LSA fits with Search and Meta, start with our carpet cleaning paid ads guide.

Google's current billing page describes a process with no dispute form. It says leads are first assessed when the customer makes initial contact, and leads "determined to be invalid or low quality are not charged." After that, charged leads "get reassessed by our models over time" and may be credited automatically.

You still have a way to speak up. Google says, "If you believe the lead you received is poor quality, you can let us know in the Feedback Survey for that lead." One Google troubleshooter page still says you can "immediately dispute a lead," so the help center is not fully consistent. Go by the pages that explain billing and automated credits, and use the options your own Leads page shows you.

Which LSA leads does Google charge for?

Before you can spot a bad charge, you need to know what Google counts as a lead. These rules come from Google's How leads work page.

The missed-call rule matters most when you're on a job and can't reach the phone. If you're on a pet urine job and a caller waits more than 20 seconds during your business hours, you pay for that lead even though nobody talked. Call forwarding or an answering service turns those charges into conversations.

The 15-day rule keeps you from paying twice for one customer. Google says follow-up calls or messages are not charged again, "provided there is interaction within 15 days and the contact comes from the same phone number or email address." A customer who calls three times about one move-out clean in a week should be one charge.

Which bad LSA leads can still get a credit?

Google's automated lead credits page says charged leads "may be issued credits automatically if later determined to be low quality." Google makes that call, not you. The page also names two kinds of bad lead Google will no longer credit.

For a carpet cleaner, that covers a caller who wants carpet installed, and a property manager in a county you don't drive to. You now prevent those calls with your settings instead of getting them refunded. Here is how to handle the bad leads you're likely to run into.

Google also says lead credits "aren't available for health care verticals, tax specialists, or advertisers in EMEA." A carpet cleaning company in the US is not in any of those groups.

How to rate a bad lead in Local Services Ads

Rating a lead is how you flag it to Google today. Google's automated credits page gives these steps:

1. Sign in to your Local Services Ads account.
2. Select the menu in the top left.
3. Select Leads.
4. In the top right corner of the page, select Rate this lead. A survey opens. Select Open and submit your feedback.

Google says it may "occasionally credit leads you report as poor quality through this survey." It also says it collects this feedback "to improve models and processes over time." Neither is a promise of money back, so rate the bad leads anyway and don't count on a credit for each one.

What the charge status tells you

Google says you can track each lead's billing status under the Charge Status column on the Leads page in Google Ads. The automated credits page defines four statuses:

• Not charged: Google sent you the lead and didn't charge for it from the start.
• Charged: Google charged for the lead from the start.
• In review: Google is reviewing the lead. "If the lead isn't a good match for your business, a credit will be applied."
• Credited: You were charged and then credited, "either through autocrediting or as a bonus credit for leaving feedback."

The time limits that matter

A weekly LSA lead review checklist

Google keeps reassessing leads for 30 days, so a weekly review looks at each lead while it is still inside that window. Pick a fixed time, such as Monday morning before the first job, and run the same steps every week.

1. Open the Leads page and look at the leads from the past week.
2. Listen to short or odd calls. Google's lead inbox lets you listen to phone lead recordings in the US.
3. Rate every bad lead with Rate this lead, even the ones you expect Google to catch.
4. Mark booked leads as booked. Google's lead reports help page says you can add job type and customer name under Add details for tracking, and only you can see those details.
5. Check Charge Status on leads from the past 30 days and note which ones moved to Credited.
6. Tag every lead in your log, using the tags in the next section.
7. Pick one settings change, or none, based on what the tags show.

Keep the log in a spreadsheet or in your CRM, the customer system where you book jobs. A simple layout works:

Tag lead quality so your LSA account improves

Credits only recover money. Tags tell you why the money went to the wrong calls, and that is what fixes the account. Use the same short set of tags every week so patterns stand out after a month.

Google points the same way. Its automated credits page says, "If you're receiving unwanted leads, revisit your service areas, job types, and categories." Google also warns that changing these settings could reduce the number of leads you receive. When Wrong job or Wrong area tags keep showing up for the same job types or towns, that is the change to make that week.

Judge the account by cost per booked job

Add up a month's LSA spend and divide it by the jobs you booked from LSA leads. In two LSA accounts we run, a lead has cost about $28 to $32 on average over the periods shown in our case studies, and a lead is not a booked job. Your tags show how much of that spend reached good-fit customers. For more on turning calls into jobs, see our lead generation guide, or let our paid ads service run the review for you.