There are a number of advertisers in the local space who are complaining that the lead quality has been worse than ever in the past few months. They blame the new automated ad credits system, which removed the method for advertisers to manually request lead credits for poor quality leads.
Correction: Darren doesn't necessarily blame the new automated credits for the lead quality drop...
Darren Shaw posted his concerns about this on LinkedIn and wrote this scathing post about Google Ads:
Google is definitely evil these days. You thought organic was bad, well now the ads are terrible too. About 7 months ago they removed the ability for advertisers to dispute irrelevant leads in Local Services Ads.Well, about 30 days ago, they started enshitifying all the leads with a ton of out-of-industry, out-of-city leads that are pure garbage. Like, a personal injury lawyer getting calls from a different city for a corporate law inquiry.
And the business now just has to pay for these leads with no recourse to dispute them.
This is an obvious money-grab, trying to squeeze every last cent they can out of ads before AI takes over.
Absolutely abhorrent behaviour from Google taking advantage of small businesses.
Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, defended Google saying that the new system results in more credits, not less. She wrote:
Hi Darren, I can follow up with you directly, and I’ve checked with the team. To share more on why we made the change to automate lead credits last year (https://support.google.com/localservices/answer/15100654), we actually credit more leads overall now than we did when advertisers had to manually dispute leads.Before this change, we found that manual disputes were underutilized by the majority of advertisers and overused by a few. That meant most advertisers weren't receiving credits for leads they should have. This felt inequitable and detrimental to SMBs, most of whom don’t have time to spend manually disputing leads.
The new system that launched last July automatically reviews all leads and proactively credits invalid ones -- including ones that advertisers might not have known were eligible for credit. Again, we now credit more leads overall than we did previously.
We also encourage advertisers and agencies to provide feedback on all leads in their accounts to help the system continue to learn, over time, what types of leads are best suited to each business.
Darren doesn't believe it. In fact, he said he reached out to "a few different agencies that manage LSAs for hundreds of businesses." He said, "they all say the same thing: lead quality has declined significantly in the past few months."
Ginny is following up with Darren and others in the thread privately to see the specific details and concerns. So that is a positive thing, but for now, it seems many LSA advertisers are indeed not too thrilled about lead quality from LSAs in the past few months.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
