How to dispute bad Local Services Ads leads

Not every lead you pay for is a lead. Wrong trade, wrong town, somebody selling you insurance — those can be disputed and credited. What changed is that Google stopped auto-refunding the category of bad lead that was really your setup’s fault.

What is still worth disputing

• Spam and sales calls — somebody selling to you, not buying from you.
• Silent or accidental calls with no enquiry in them.
• Duplicates — the same customer, the same job, charged twice.
• Work you genuinely don’t offer, where the job type was never selected.

What is no longer credited automatically

Leads from outside your service area, and leads for job types you didn’t want, are now treated as a setup problem rather than a billing error. The logic is hard to argue with: you chose the areas and the job types. So the money is saved before the call, in the settings — not afterwards, in an appeal.

The 30-day window

Charged leads can be reviewed for up to 30 days, and Google’s own models reassess validity in that period. Miss the window and the charge stands, which is why disputes belong in a weekly routine rather than a quarterly tidy-up. Ten minutes a week, every week.

Don’t become the boy who cried wolf

Disputing everything, including leads that simply didn’t convert, is a bad idea. A lead you answered, quoted and lost is a valid lead — that’s sales, not billing. Keep your disputes credible and they keep working.

For the wider picture on what you should expect to pay per lead, see what Local Services Ads cost in the UK.