We Found a Dead Phone Number in a Live LSA Campaign. The Agency Never Noticed.

A contractor had their LSA running. Google Guaranteed badge active. Budget spending every week. They were getting Google Guaranteed leads. Every single one was going to a phone number that nobody answered.

The agency managing the account had never called the number to check. They were monitoring impressions, clicks, lead volume. Everything looked fine in the dashboard. The number in the LSA profile was wrong, or had been changed, or was a line nobody was watching anymore. The leads were real. The phone was dead.

What LSA Leads Actually Represent

These aren’t clicks or impressions. These are people who saw the Google Guaranteed badge, trusted it enough to call, and got nothing. Google charges for those leads. The contractor paid for them. Nobody received them.

That’s the part that should land hard. The Google Guaranteed badge exists specifically to signal trust. A homeowner with an urgent need sees that badge and picks up the phone because it carries weight. When that call goes nowhere, the trust Google built for the contractor gets burned on a dead line.

How This Gets Missed

Agencies manage LSA from the dashboard. They see lead volume go up and down. They optimize bids. They dispute bad leads. What they don’t do is call the phone number. That’s not in their process. That’s not in their SLA.

It seems too obvious to check, so nobody checks it. The assumption is that the contractor set up the account correctly and maintains it. The agency’s job, as they understand it, is to optimize the campaign. Phone infrastructure is outside that scope.

Which is exactly the problem.

What We Do Differently

The first thing we verify in any LSA audit is the phone number. We call it. We make sure it routes correctly, goes to a human or a voicemail that sounds professional, and that the business name matches. It takes 90 seconds. We have found this problem more than once.

We also check whether call recording is enabled and whether disputed leads are being reviewed with actual attention, not just auto-disputed. We look at whether the business categories match what the contractor actually books, and whether the service area reflects where they want to operate. The basics that nobody checks because everyone assumes someone else already did.

The Broader Problem with Agency Reporting

Your marketing agency has a very specific job. They’re optimizing the ad platform. They’re not checking whether the phone rings. They’re not reading your appointment notes. They’re not asking why revenue didn’t move even though lead volume held steady.

Those are operator questions. Marketing agencies don’t ask operator questions. They report on the metrics inside their platform and call that a win. When the dashboard is green, the report is green. Whether the leads actually converted into booked jobs is a different column, in a different system, that nobody connected.

A dead phone number in a live campaign is an extreme example of this gap. But the same gap exists everywhere. Conversion definitions that count page scrolls as leads. SEO deliverables that don’t include indexing verification. Ad budgets running to cities the contractor doesn’t serve. The agency dashboard shows green. The operator wonders why the phone isn’t ringing.

If You’re Running LSA Right Now

Call the phone number in your LSA profile today. Not the number on your website, the number that is specifically in your Local Service Ads account. Log in at ads.google.com/local-services-ads, go to your business profile, and find the number listed there. Call it from a cell phone that is not connected to your account.

If it rings through to a human or a professional voicemail, you’re fine. If it goes nowhere, or rings a number nobody monitors, you now know what has been happening to your leads.

If you want someone to go through the full setup end to end, that’s what the 30-day engagement is. The dead phone number is usually not the only thing we find. Start here.