The 30-second version
Local Services Ads charge you per lead, not per click, and Google’s own system quietly acknowledges that a meaningful share of those leads are junk: wrong service, outside your area, spam, solicitors, people who already hired you. Those leads are creditable. Google will give the charge back. But credits are not automatic and not retroactive forever; they exist only for the contractor who reviews the lead inbox and disputes promptly. In the LSA accounts we look at, most contractors have never filed a single dispute. They’re paying full price for a lead stream everyone, including Google, agrees is partly garbage. Here’s the process, the categories, and the ten-minute weekly habit that fixes it.
Why a real share of LSA leads are junk
LSA sits at the top of the search results with a big green checkmark, which means it catches everyone, not just qualified buyers. A homeowner two counties away taps it. Someone looking for a service you don’t offer taps it. A marketing company “reaching out to local businesses” taps it. Your existing customer taps it instead of calling your cell.
None of that is your fault and none of it is a real lead, but the billing system doesn’t know that. Every connection generates a charge by default. Google built the dispute mechanism precisely because per-lead billing over-captures, and then made the mechanism opt-in, manual, and time-boxed. The economics of that design are not subtle: contractors who don’t dispute subsidize the system, and most contractors don’t dispute.
Which leads qualify for credit
Google’s creditable categories are narrower than “any lead I didn’t like,” and knowing the line matters, because frivolous disputes waste your time and get denied. The categories that consistently qualify:
Wrong service. The caller wanted work you don’t offer and haven’t listed. A roofer getting gutter-cleaning-only requests, an electrician getting appliance repair.
Out of area. The job address falls outside the service area configured in your account.
Spam and solicitation. Bots, robocalls, marketers selling you something, competitors poking around.
Not a customer inquiry. Wrong numbers, misdials, someone asking for a job application.
Existing customer on billable contact. Policy here has shifted over time, so check the current rules in your dashboard, but repeat contacts from the same customer have historically been creditable in many cases.
What doesn’t qualify: leads that didn’t answer your callback, leads that priced-shopped and went elsewhere, leads that ghosted after a good conversation. Those are real leads you didn’t close. Disputing them is a losing habit and it erodes your credibility for the disputes that matter.
The dispute process, start to finish
Everything runs through the LSA lead inbox. Each lead has a recording or message log attached, which is the evidence, and Google reviews it when you dispute.
The routine: open the lead, listen to the call recording or read the message thread, and if it fits a creditable category, use the dispute or feedback option on that lead and select the matching reason. Be accurate, not creative. A wrong-service call disputed as wrong-service, with the recording backing it up, gets credited routinely. Resolution typically lands within days and the credit appears against your account.
Two operational notes. First, the window matters: disputes are time-limited, so a lead from six weeks ago is usually gone for good. Second, keep your service area and service types tightly configured in the account, because “out of area” and “wrong service” disputes lean on what your account says you do. A sloppy account setup makes legitimate disputes harder to win. If you’re setting up LSA from scratch, our LSA guide for roofers covers the account configuration side in detail.
Make it a ten-minute weekly habit
Nobody needs a daily process for this. What kills contractors is having no process at all, because junk leads arrive on their own schedule and the dispute clock starts immediately.
The habit: one recurring slot per week, same day, same time. Open the lead inbox, review every lead from the past week, mark the real ones as booked or archived, dispute the junk with the correct category. Ten minutes for most accounts. Whoever answers your phones can own it; they already know which calls were nonsense.
The compounding effect is the point. A contractor who never disputes pays for every junk lead forever, and the junk share doesn’t announce itself on the invoice. It just inflates the effective price of every real job, month after month, silently. The dispute habit is one of the rare marketing tasks with a direct, mechanical, guaranteed payoff, and it’s the single most skipped task we find in home services accounts.
The hidden second lever: answer your phone
While you’re in the weekly review, look at your answer rate, because Google does. LSA ranking isn’t just review count and proximity; responsiveness is a ranking input. Contractors who let LSA calls roll to voicemail get shown less, which means the missed call costs you twice: the job you didn’t get and the future placement you traded away.
The fix is boring and absolute: every LSA call gets answered by a human during business hours, and message leads get replies within minutes, not days. Pair a clean answer rate with steady reviews and a tight profile, the same fundamentals that drive the map pack, and your cost per real lead drops from both directions at once: better placement bringing more leads, and disputes clearing out the junk.
Common questions
How big is the junk share really? It varies by trade and market, but it’s never zero, and emergency-heavy trades tend to see more spam and misdials. Your own lead inbox will tell you within two weeks of honest review.
Will heavy disputing get my account flagged? Accurate disputing won’t. The recordings back you up. What hurts is disputing real leads you simply failed to close, which gets denials and wastes everyone’s time.
Google auto-credits some leads now. Doesn’t that cover it? Automated detection catches some obvious spam, and it misses plenty. Treat auto-credits as a floor, not a substitute for reviewing your own inbox. Nobody at Google listens to your calls as carefully as you will.
Is LSA worth running at all with this much overhead? Ten minutes a week is not much overhead for an exclusive-lead channel at the top of the page. For most trades we work with, disputed-and-managed LSA is among the best paid channels available. Unmanaged LSA is a slow leak.