If you run Google Local Services Ads, export your performance reports this week. Google is retiring the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard and folding those campaigns into Google Ads, and your historical performance data does not come with you. Google’s own help documentation states that previous campaign-level metrics, including past impressions, clicks, weekly spend and ad-level performance reports, will not migrate.
The first accounts move this month.
What Google is actually changing
According to the Google Ads Help article “Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals,” existing Local Services Ads campaigns are being automatically migrated into a new Performance Max campaign type built specifically for pay-per-lead goals. Search Engine Land reported the change on July 20, 2026.
Ignore the Performance Max branding for a second. These campaigns do not spread across YouTube, Gmail or the Display Network. Google’s documentation says ads “will continue to show exclusively on Google Search and Google Maps in the same ad positions as before.” Campaigns stay keywordless and keep pulling targeting from your Google Business Profile. You still pay only for valid leads such as calls, messages and bookings, not clicks.
The product is not changing. The control panel is. And the control panel is where your records live.
The migration timeline, in Google’s own words
Google published a three-phase rollout:
- August 2026: the first phase covers select home and storefront service advertisers in the United States, including plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving.
- Late 2026: expands to service-area businesses without a physical storefront, plus accounts with custom bidding or booking configurations.
- 2027: non-U.S. accounts and every remaining business category.
Search Engine Land’s July 20 report added that the transition starts with a small group of U.S. advertisers across pet care, home services, wellness and education in early August 2026.
Notice comes 14 days ahead by email to the account administrator listed on your profile, with banners inside the dashboard and a reminder seven days later. Fourteen days is not much runway if the person on that email left the company two years ago.
What to do: check who is listed as account administrator today. If that address is dead, you will never see the warning at all.
The data you lose, and the data you keep
Your leads are safe. Google says past customer lead history, including contact details, back-and-forth message history and older call recordings, transfers automatically into the new Lead Manager inside Google Ads.
Performance reporting is not safe. Impressions, clicks, weekly spend and ad-level reports stay behind in a dashboard you can no longer open. On migration day, logging into the old Local Services Ads dashboard simply redirects you to Google Ads.
What to do: export now, not when the email lands. Google points advertisers to its “View reports on Local Services Ads” help page and says the files must be saved manually. Pull at least 24 months so you keep a full seasonality curve. Save cost per lead by month, lead volume by service category, and spend by service area. Without that baseline you will have no way to prove whether the new automated bidding helped or hurt.
Advertisers already learned a version of this lesson when tracking data started disappearing elsewhere. As we covered in why affiliate clicks vanished while the revenue stayed put, losing the measurement is not the same as losing the money, but try explaining that to a client without a baseline.
Manual bidding is being switched off
Two bidding changes apply automatically on transition day, per Google’s documentation:
- Manual bidding, including setting a maximum cost per lead, is no longer supported.
- Vertical-level Target CPA is gone. If you ran different Target CPA values for separate verticals inside one campaign, Google calculates a single campaign-level Target CPA and applies it to every category.
That second change is the expensive one. If your plumbing leads are worth three times your gutter-cleaning leads, a blended target will overpay for the cheap category and starve the profitable one.
What to do: split multi-vertical campaigns into separate campaigns so each keeps its own target. Google names this as the supported approach, giving the example of separate plumbing and HVAC campaigns.
Weekly budgets become daily budgets
Your historical average weekly budget gets divided by 7 to produce a daily average budget. Google says monthly spend is still capped, at the daily average multiplied by 30.4, so the monthly total should hold. Daily spend can swing on high-demand days.
What to do: if your cash flow assumes steady weekly spend, watch the first two weeks closely. Google also warns to allow up to two weeks for migration to complete and for performance to ramp back to stable levels. Do not judge the new setup on week-one numbers, and do not let anyone else judge it that way either.
Three smaller changes that will catch people out
Better Business Bureau callouts are deprecated. Google’s instruction is to open your campaign’s assets tab and select at least six other structured callouts, such as business hours, specialties or accepted payment methods. If BBB accreditation was a differentiator in your ads, you need a replacement message ready.
You cannot create new pay-per-lead campaigns inside Google Ads yet. Google says new campaigns still have to be set up at g.co/localservices for now, with in-platform creation coming later.
Your Google Business Profile carries more weight than before. Business name, address and hours sync one direction from your profile into Google Ads on a daily cycle. Significant changes to business name, storefront address or primary category trigger a verification review that typically takes 24 to 48 hours, during which the campaign may pause. That is the kind of profile dependency we flagged in our look at how Google’s Knowledge Graph signals now override keyword signals: your structured business data is the input, whether you maintain it or not.
What to do: finish any pending Google Business Profile edits before your migration window, not during it. If a rebrand or address change is on the roadmap, do it now or wait until the dust settles.
Why this is more than a UI refresh
Google keeps collapsing separate ad products into one automated surface. Universal Cart did it to product listings. This does it to local lead generation. The pattern repeats: fewer manual levers, more reliance on Google’s models, and history that does not travel with you.
Fighting the direction is a waste of energy. Keeping your own copy of the numbers is not.
A 20-minute checklist for this week
- Confirm the account administrator email on your Local Services Ads profile is one someone actually reads.
- Export every available performance report, ideally 24 months, and store it somewhere outside Google.
- Write down your current weekly budget and any manual maximum cost per lead you set.
- Record your per-vertical Target CPA values before they get blended into one.
- Choose six structured callouts to replace BBB accreditation.
- Finish outstanding Google Business Profile edits now.
Google is not taking your ads away. It is taking your receipts. Twenty minutes of exporting this week buys you the ability to answer “did this get better or worse?” for the rest of the year.
Sources
- Google Ads Help, “Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals” — support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17213585
- Anu Adegbola, “Local Services Ads come to Google Ads via Performance Max,” Search Engine Land, July 20, 2026 — searchengineland.com
- Google Local Services Ads Help, “View reports on Local Services Ads” — support.google.com/localservices/answer/6226265
Last reviewed: August 2, 2026
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