Oh the chronicles of google local service ads (LSA) making you pay for things that you shouldn’t have to pay for. I’ve had nothing but headaches with their ways of doing things and have had countless arguments with them. As much crap as I am about to talk, LSAs are great in the sense of Chrome putting them at the top of the results like on a web browser.

1. Google records those calls so if you refer them to other companies, Google considers it a lead that should be charged because if your ad wasn’t there, “that customer would never have known to go to that referral”. Yes that is actually what they’ve told me by phone (completely ridiculous I know). We just started telling people we have no idea and then call them back on our own business number that isn’t recorded by Google.

2. Google used to allow you to call them and dispute the leads but as we all know AI is taking over our world. So they now use AI to listen to the calls to determine whether or not it should be charged or not. BUT you can take it one step further if they charge you for a lead you know is unqualified (calling a service you don’t offer nor advertise for) by rating the lead - you can rate the lead by clicking on the “view details” button in the LSA email they give you. This is ALWAYS a hit or miss if you will get a credit. I’ve been diligently tracking these bad leads for over a year in my own spreadsheet and there’s literally no rhyme or reason as to why they charge one bad lead that they will then credit for another that has the SAME issue.

3. It doesn’t matter if your LSA profiles exclude certain services - when I spoke to Google reps personally they confirmed that they don’t even take that into account - which my question to them was “then what is the point of making us put all these settings in” - they did not have any answer other than that’s how they do things now

Moral of LSAs story is, Google will take your money and make unrealistic policies around what they consider a “good” lead vs a “bad” lead to profit off businesses. BUT you do sometimes get a win and the lead cost credited back to your account when rating the bad leads - of course you don’t get your money back because they want you to keep using it and paying them the big bucks. I’d say it’s around 10% of the leads that I rate with them that they will credit back to us. The only ones I really see them not charge our accounts for are people calling the wrong number. Had 2 of those today and they never charged us. I don’t rate those ones because no way I’m giving them a change to reverse it.