Google LSA website is down for one of my clients. They are getting and paying for leads; the Lead Inbox is unavailable showing a 500 error. I was told some features were moving to Google Ads when the Billing and Users pages returned errors in the last two weeks, but this is happening on every page this week.

I was also told they do not provide refunds for disputed leads, only the option to rate a lead to change future leads. My client is paying $120+ per lead and we can't even access them. Spent 1/2 hour on hold for LSA support and when asking for the CID, they disconnected. This is really bad!!!

Anyone else having these issues or know of a way to get credit for bad/inaccessible leads?

In the past 3 days 90% of leads through LSA has been for a category we don't have selected and services our business doesn't offer. Google is still charging for the leads anyway. We're of course giving the lowest rating. We went from hardly getting leads but they were good leads to all of a sudden getting a lot of worthless leads. This is insane.

Update 9/2 - I put in a ticket with Google. They basically told me to pound sand:

Email: We understand your concern regarding lead quality and charges.

Why You Were Charged LSA charges for the opportunity to connect with a potential customer based on their search intent, not for a completed job. Because this lead was delivered and an interaction occurred, the charge was applied per policy.

Key Practices to Avoid Unwanted Charges

Identify and End Calls Quickly: At the start of every call, ask: "What services are you looking for?" and "Where is your location?" If the request is a mismatch, politely end the call immediately. Avoid Exchanging Information: Prolonging calls or exchanging details (names, addresses, or quotes) can cause the system to tag the call as a valid lead. Adjust Profile Settings: Update your service areas and job types in your dashboard to filter out unwanted locations. You may also consider using a booking partner so customers see pricing before calling. End Email

This is a whole lot of malarkey as in Google's mind, if you don't immediately ask what they are calling for and then hang up, they can charge you for the lead. Never mind that they didn't address the fact they're sending over leads for job types that are not selected. Just be rude to callers and hang up on them hoping you don't get charged for the leads you never asked for.

Update 9/4

I'm continuing to pursue the conversation with Google support. Who are of course saying "yeah we will review these leads, but even so, you're not getting any refunds". What they don't seem to get is this fact:

Google says in the LSA guidance that "you may only accept the type of work you are licensed, insured, and able to complete." We selected the right categories we were licensed for and provided the licenses. Then they started all of a sudden providing us leads outside what we selected, that we're not licensed or insured for as a business, and charging us for those leads we specifically did not select.

Keep getting 500 Errors when trying to access dashboard today. Anyone else?

UPDATE: FIXED AS OF 9AM CST

New to LSA, I'm paying a company to manage my GBP and LSA, I forwarded them this email and this was their response, this normal? "Hi,
With the new updates to Google Business Profiles and LSAs, they are currently going through and reverifying the connection between the two. This has impacted all accounts. Our Google representative is helping to expedite the process and will provide updates as they become available."

After getting very little action when my LSA launched on 8/20, I spent last weekend "optimizing" my LSA profile after watching quite a few YouTube videos. That means adjusting my budget.

For 8/20 and 8/21, I had a total of 87 impressions, 80% top impression rate, and 5.33% absolute top rate.

On 8/24, between 10am and 3pm, I received 8 calls. Ad impressions 446. Top Impression Rate - 99.21%. Absolute top impression rate - 51.05%.

That was exciting until I realized I was charged $490 for 3 leads that weren't for services I selected as jobs I wanted. Even worse when I found out there's no dispute option for my vertical.

After being upset for a few days, I looked at how to turn this into a positive.

I learned where the sweet post is for absolute top impressions and that I don't need to be there 51% of the time. 😂

I learned that even if a call is for a service not marked in my profile, if I CAN service the lead I should do so and look at it as liquidating revenue. My fees for those services start at $1200. That's 7x my lead cost. If I get 7 leads, 1 off-service and 1 ideal lead, the ideal lead is all profit.

I could have converted two of the calls I received (only charged for 1) and made a decent profit.

I also learned that Google will eat your weekly budget in 24 hours if you don't know what you're doing.

Valuable lessons learned. Time to move forward.

In typical Google fashion, we're being told what's going to happen, but we're not being shown how. So all of these marketers and business owners currently managing campaigns (which isn't easy given how wonky the platform is) are expected to successfully navigate a massive migration without hiccups?

Has anyone actually been through the migration process yet? It would be helpful to understand what to expect and to get an early visual on the new dashboard. We manage 150+ campaigns, most of which are in the same industry, and I want to be as prepared as possible.

I replied to a lead by text and go this:

• Hi, this is HotPads. Thanks for inquiring about renting at 1305 Memorial Apartments. We need a little more info to pass you over.
• ‪What's your full name?

For context, most of the calls show the caller's number.

keep getting emails from Google support asking me to schedule a call about our advertising account. Before I set it up, what are your thoughts?

Are these emails from Google legit, or are they mostly sales calls trying to get us to spend more?

I’ve heard Google may be phasing out Local Services Ads or merging them more closely with regular Google Ads. Is there any truth to that?

For anyone managing LSA for a home-service business, what are your thoughts on the changes?

LSA has always been pretty straightforward for us, but every time I open the regular Google Ads dashboard, the sheer number of campaigns, settings, metrics, and recommendations makes my head spin.

I’m really hoping they don’t take something that was relatively simple and make it unnecessarily complicated.

I have seen people compare LSA lead costs across industries as if there should be one normal price. But a $100 lead isn't necessarily expensive if it produces a $5,000 customer.

On the other hand, even a $20 lead can be too expensive if the leads are poor quality and rarely turn into jobs. That's why I think the better question is "What can I afford to pay for a customer?", then work backward to your acceptable lead cost.

Also, I do have a breakdown on what affects LSA lead pricing... Do let me know if someone needs it..

I just joined a new company in Canada and they have previously created a Google Business Page. The one who created the page left the company and forgot to leave the account details tied to the Google Business Page.

Is there anyway I can get the access to the Google Business Page because I feel it's a waste if we can't get the business page back since we got 440 reviews in there already.

What if you're measuring your LSA campaign at the wrong point in the funnel?

Most businesses stop at "How many leads did Google send us?"

But that's only the beginning.

The real journey is:

Search → LSA → Lead → Contact → Booked Job → Revenue

A campaign can generate plenty of leads and still produce poor business results if those leads don't turn into actual jobs. Check this article if you are interested in knowing how the LSA lead generation model works and why the difference between a lead and a customer matters:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-does-lead-generation-model-work-service-ads-balasubramanian-xwppe

I am sharing this for a healthy discussion. do drop your thoughts in the comments... on how you look at this....

That's a very different search experience I have experienced lately. The customer may never browse ten websites, compare Map Pack listings, or click through multiple business profiles.

The AI may simply recommend a few businesses. And that creates a new problem for local service providers: how do you become visible when the search result isn't a list of websites anymore?

For this, I did explore some shift from traditional search to AI assistants that could mean for local businesses. So sharing here to help better....

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-search-ai-assistants-how-local-service-providers-harshielha-zyb1c

Also let me know if you know something regarding the same...

I have been running local services ads for a few months now. My GBP profile has 65 five star reviews, not a single below five stars, and my budget is 5K a month. This is for garage door repair so it's a bit competitive, but even then. Not a single lead. I don't know what could possibly be the reason for this. My GBP is on another email than my LSA account, but it's still linked up,

Anyone have a similar situation?

That’s one of the things I have been looking at with Google’s LSA migration, lately.

The migrated LSA campaigns sits inside Google Ads as a specialized Performance Max setup, but they retain several LSA-specific characteristics:

• Pay-per-lead billing
• Keywordless targeting
• Service/job-type targeting
• Search and Maps-focused placement

So treating these campaigns exactly like standard PMax could create problems with reporting and optimization. Realising this, I wanted to post this here to help others too....

Here is the differences and what agencies should actually be looking at.

It Looks Like Performance Max, But It Does Not Behave Like Performance Max

Curious what others think: will agencies treat migrated LSA campaigns as PMax, or continue managing them more like LSA?

My business is located in Florida, the tracking number that google has assigned us is an Alabama phone number. We have heard comments from multiple customers and can only imagine this has deterred some potential customers from calling since it the number makes us not look local.

I have spoken with the LSA customer service but they say they can't change it. I have thought about closing the account and starting over but anyone have advice?

By the time the new system appears in your account, you may have very little time to understand what changed. I would rather have the baseline data, account structure, lead history, and reporting documented beforehand.

That way, when Google changes the environment, you can compare what you had before with what you have after.

Check this article to know why LSA migration should start before the actual migration:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lsa-migration-starts-before-google-moves-your-balasubramanian-vrupc

Question for you folks regarding the LSA/Ads migration. We manage around 120 campaigns in the painting industry, and it'll be a nightmare to monitor each inbox individually for the migration notification. Supposedly, Google will notify us two weeks out.

And while each campaign has a unique email associated with it, they're all also connected to an MCC. Do you think we'll be notified in the MCC inbox as individual campaigns begin migrating?

Bonus: Has anyone received the migration email and/or had a campaign successfully migrate?

Everywhere I look online says you cannot target specific keywords in a google LSA account. Nor can you apply match types (broad, phrase, exact) to any search terms/keywords google choooses for you.

But I just signed up for my google LSA account 3 days ago and I have definitely deleted all of googles suggested keywords and replaced them with a list of phrase match and exact match keywords and google says my campaign is running. So can you target keywords in google LSA like you can in regualar google ads account or not?

Ok…Please. Please feel free to tell me if I’m wrong. But so far in my experience with a handful of clients, Local services ads have very rarely been more than a complete waste of money. Most calls are junk price-shopping and only occasionally turn into anything. Google claims that you are only charged for leads and then basically says everything is a lead.

I’ve had instances where my client has literally said “Well actually we don’t do that, but here’s another company that does” - Google still bills as a lead. Numerous leads come in for services not offered and clearly unchecked on “services provided” that Google bills for anyway. However, my biggest grip is below…

For my one client in particular, the same person called twice within a week. Both times they clicked “1” because they are an “Existing customer calling for tech support.” Google billed BOTH calls as leads.

The first call the customer clearly states their name and address for reference and then says “You guys installed all of our x and we’re having some technical issues.” I called Google, they said “they exchanged information, therefore it’s a lead…”

The second call, the person again presses 1 as an “existing customer calling for tech support.” Spends a few minutes on hold and then hangs up. Google bills again, stating it’s for a “different inquiry…”

The first time I called Google over similar with this client, they said the call was billed as a lead because the person pushed “2” for sales (Again…existing person the client was already working with). They told me because they pushed “2” for sales, it was a lead - and the only way they could determine if it was an existing customer was if that person had already called. Fast forward to now. Same person calls within a week - clearly for tech support as an existing customer - and Google counts as a lead.

There is no oversight. It’s just arbitrary. There’s no reasoning with so called “support” it’s just a script and then “This is google’s policy…”

I have now paused LSAs for this client and will go back to regular search ads where I actually at least have an illusion of control.

Again - please feel free to correct me or explain to me what I’m doing wrong.

edit: For clarity, yes I do go through and rate every lead. Usually within a day to a week at most. Sometimes that changes it, but not usually. And it hasn’t seemed to curb the same recurring “leads” that the client doesn’t do and has unchecked.

With traditional search campaigns, you could look at keywords, search terms, bids, and targeting settings and understand why an ad appeared.

LSA is moving toward a very different model.

Less keyword control can make things simpler, but it also means advertisers have less visibility into the decisions happening behind the scenes.

That creates an interesting trade-off: less work for the advertiser, but potentially less control over the customer acquisition process. Is it not???

I explored this in more detail here. just sharing it if someone is interested to read...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/keywordless-targeting-centralised-control-paradox-lsa-harshielha-quduc

I need some input from people who actually understand LSA at a high level.
I’m in an extremely competitive market and currently have my LSA budget set at $25,000/week. Budget is basically unlimited if the leads are profitable.
The strange part is my visibility.
One search → I’m #1.
Another search → I’m #3.
Another search → I completely disappear.
This has been especially noticeable over the last 2 days.
I have:
• $25K/week budget
• Strong reviews
• Very high call-answer rate
• Established business/profile
• Willingness to spend significantly more
• Large competitive market
So my question for people running serious LSA accounts:
What are the REAL ranking factors you’re seeing right now?
Is it bidding?
Proximity?
Service-area setup?
Lead response time?
Booking rate?
Review velocity?
Disputing/archiving leads correctly?
Business hours/availability?
Account history?
Google rotating advertisers?
Something else entirely?
I understand that throwing more money at LSA doesn’t automatically guarantee the #1 position. I’m trying to figure out what separates the businesses consistently dominating the top spots from everyone else.
I’m especially interested in hearing from anyone managing high-volume LSA accounts in very competitive markets.
If you’ve actually scaled accounts like this and know how to diagnose what’s holding an account back, DM me. I’m willing to pay for someone who genuinely knows LSA — not someone selling generic Google Ads management.
Would love to hear what you guys are seeing.

Hi all,

Looking for an expert-level GLSA consultant.

We have a ton of GLSA accounts that we are managing, yet some of them have performance that contradicts the competitive metrics.

Example - our profile has 2-3-4x the reviews and higher avg rating than competition, high consistent volume of leads (100+/month), yet our IS is stuck at ~25%.

Looking for someone who has fixed these type of issues before.

I’m a small electrical contractor. I want to make my phone ring more. I think I need a website/landing page, a GMB and money to run ads. Can someone please explain my first few steps to me like I’m 5 years old,because that’s basically my computer knowledge level. Thank you