Call conversions for local services: what duration counts as a real lead?

The call duration threshold for local service accounts gets argued a lot, and I think both extremes cause problems. Short calls are full of wrong numbers, hang-ups, and people asking for opening hours. Say a plumber gets 40 calls a month and half run under 20 seconds. If all of those count as conversions, Smart Bidding learns to chase whoever dials fastest instead of whoever books a job.

But a 60 second cutoff isn't safe either, because it drops real emergency calls. A customer with a burst pipe often says three words, confirms the address, and hangs up.

My lean is a longer threshold, checked against booked jobs in the CRM, though it depends on volume. With thin conversion counts, one bad threshold can swing the whole bid model. Where do you set it, and do you check it against actual jobs?

I'd stop hunting for the perfect number, because any duration cutoff is going to misfire on those burst-pipe calls you mentioned. For a plumber I'd split it. Keep a call conversion with a low threshold as observation only, and import booked jobs back as offline conversions tied to the original call. That way Smart Bidding optimizes toward actual jobs, and the duration rule only decides what shows up in reporting. At 40 calls a month the job-level signal will be thin, but a thin signal that's right beats a thick one that's wrong.