One of the first questions I get after a home service company moves from Local Services Ads to Performance Max pay-per-lead is a practical one: what happens when a lead is junk? On Local Services Ads there was a familiar routine. You opened the lead, hit dispute, picked a reason, and a credit either showed up or it didn’t. The new setup handles the same problem, but the buttons live somewhere else and the habits that make it work are a little different.
So here’s how I’d think about bad leads on pay-per-lead now: what actually qualifies, where to request the credit, what to write down so the request gets approved, and the quieter work that reduces how many bad leads you get in the first place. That last part is where most of the money is.
What counts as a bad lead
The categories haven’t really changed, because they describe real situations rather than platform features. A lead is generally creditable when:
- It’s spam or a bot, with no real person behind it.
- It’s for a service you don’t offer. Somebody looking for fence repair when you do foundation work.
- It’s outside the area you serve, sometimes well outside it.
- It’s a duplicate of a lead you were already charged for.
- It’s a solicitation, a job seeker, or another business selling you something.
- The contact details are unusable. Wrong number, dead email, nothing to reply to.
What generally does not count: a real person, in your area, asking about work you do, who then didn’t book. That’s not a bad lead, that’s a lost sale, and it belongs in a different conversation. I know that distinction is frustrating when the caller was rude or price-shopping, but mixing the two together is what makes lead quality arguments go nowhere. Keep them in separate piles.
Where the credit request lives now
In Google Ads, pay-per-lead leads show up in their own lead view rather than in the old Local Services Ads dashboard. Click the tools icon, look for the leads or lead form section, open the individual lead, and you’ll find the option to report it along with a reason list that mirrors the categories above. If your account was migrated, the menu wording may differ slightly depending on what’s rolled out to you, so if you can’t find it, the fastest route is to ask your Google rep or your agency to show you the exact path in your account and then screenshot it for your own notes.
Two timing details matter more than the clicks. First, there’s a window, so credits have to be requested within a limited number of days of the lead arriving, not at the end of the month when you review the invoice. Second, credits show up as an adjustment on a later bill rather than as a refund, so your spend and your cost per lead for the original month will keep showing the pre-credit number unless you adjust it yourself. Neither of those is announced anywhere in the interface. They’re just how it works.
The habit that makes this work: report as they arrive
The single biggest reason companies lose credit money isn’t a rejected request. It’s a request never filed. Leads come in during a busy week, somebody notices the bad ones but is on a roof or under a house, and by the time anyone sits down with the numbers the window has closed.
So I’d make it a five-minute daily job for whoever answers the phone. Open the lead list, mark the obvious junk, done. If that person isn’t in the ad account, have them keep a simple shared note instead: date, name or number, and one word for why. Then someone files them once a week. A plain spreadsheet is enough. The point is that the record exists while the details are still fresh.
What to write down so the request gets approved
Requests get approved on specifics. When you report a lead, the free-text box is worth using, and short beats long:
- For out-of-area: the city or ZIP the caller gave, and the fact that it’s outside your service area.
- For wrong service: the exact words the caller used for what they wanted.
- For unusable contact: the number of attempts and how they failed. Disconnected, no answer over three calls, bounced email.
- For duplicates: the date of the original lead you were already charged for.
- For spam: whatever gave it away. Nonsense text, a submit time of 3am, an obviously fake name.
You don’t need a paragraph. You need one line that a reviewer can verify without guessing.
The number to watch, and what good looks like
Track two things monthly: your bad lead rate, and your cost per lead both before and after credits.
Here’s the math worked out. Say you get 60 leads in a month at $95 each, so $5,700 in ad cost. Twelve are genuinely bad and you get credit for nine of them. That’s $855 back, and your real cost per lead across 48 usable leads is about $101, not $95. That $101 is the number to compare against your Local Services Ads history and the number to use when you work out cost per booked job.
On what’s normal: in the trades, a bad lead rate somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent range is common, and most of it is people looking for an adjacent service. Under 10 percent and your targeting is in good shape. Persistently over 25 or 30 percent and the answer usually isn’t more credit requests, it’s a targeting fix.
The better fix: fewer bad leads to report
Credits recover money. Targeting prevents the loss. Every bad lead you report is also a free piece of information about the account, and I’d use it that way:
- Adjacent trades showing up repeatedly? Add them as negative keywords so you stop paying for those searches at all. It’s the cheapest change available in most accounts.
- Out-of-area calls clustering in one direction? Tighten the radius or drop the locations where drive time eats the job anyway.
- Lots of tiny-job requests? Your ad copy and landing page can set expectations. Saying what you specialize in filters more than people expect.
- Spam through a form? A simple required phone field and basic bot protection cut most of it.
Do that for a month or two and the credit routine gets shorter on its own, which is the actual goal.
Where this fits in the bigger picture
Lead quality work is satisfying because it’s visible, so it’s worth keeping it in proportion. Bad leads at a 15 percent rate cost you roughly 15 percent of your media budget. A booking rate that slips from two thirds of leads reaching a scheduled appointment down to half can cost far more than that. I’ve seen a company add close to 50 appointments a month without spending another dollar on ads, just by handling the leads they already had more consistently. So file the credits, and keep an eye on the phone.
If you want the short version of which numbers deserve your attention each month, I wrote that up in cost per lead vs cost per booked job, and there’s a week-by-week walkthrough of the transition in your first 60 days on Performance Max pay-per-lead.
And if you’ve made the move and you’re not sure whether your leads, tracking and targeting are set up the way they should be, I’m happy to look. My free account audit covers the lead reporting path, your negative keywords, your service area settings and whether your conversions are counting what you think they’re counting. You’ll get a plain-language summary either way, whether or not we work together.