Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign that still charges per lead. It happens automatically. Select US home-service businesses started in August 2026, service-area businesses follow in late 2026, and Canada in 2027. Save your LSA reports first. They do not transfer.

On this page

• When will my Local Services Ads account move to Google Ads?
• What actually changes when my LSA account becomes a Performance Max campaign?
• What do I lose on migration day?
• What should I do before my migration date?
• What should I check in the first two weeks after it moves?
• What does Google still not say about the migration?

When will my Local Services Ads account move to Google Ads?

It depends on your country, your category and whether you have a storefront. Google runs it in three phases. You do not opt in, and there is no button to stay behind.

That second row matters more than the first for most trades. A lot of electricians and plumbers run as service-area businesses with no storefront, which puts them in late 2026, not August.

One data point from my own book: a US electrician I manage runs as a service-area business, and on 14 September 2026 its Local Services campaign was still standalone. Nothing had moved. That is what the schedule predicts.

You get warned. The account administrator on your profile receives an email 14 days before your date, a reminder 7 days later, and a banner inside the LSA dashboard.

What actually changes when my LSA account becomes a Performance Max campaign?

Less than the name suggests. It is Performance Max in name, but it does not behave like the Performance Max campaigns you already know.

In the new campaign, the Conversions column is your charged leads and Cost / conv. is your average cost per lead. Those are platform numbers. They are not your cost per booked job, and that is still the number to run the business on.

What do I lose on migration day?

Your historical performance reports. Google is explicit that past impressions, clicks, weekly spend and ad-level reports do not move to Google Ads. It says a download page is coming "soon". As of 14 September 2026 it still says soon, and its own advice is to take screenshots.

You also lose:

• The standalone LSA dashboard. Log in on or after your date and it redirects you into Google Ads.
• Manual bids. Max per lead is not supported after the move.
• Separate targets per trade. If you run plumbing and HVAC in one campaign with different targets, Google calculates one campaign-level target and applies it to both.
• BBB callouts. They are deprecated. Google asks you to add at least six structured callouts instead.

The report loss is the one that hurts. Two months after your migration someone will ask whether leads got more expensive. The only honest way to answer that is a before number, and Google is not carrying the before number across for you.

What should I do before my migration date?

1. Export your baseline now. Weekly spend, charged leads, cost per lead and leads by job type for at least the last 12 weeks. Screenshot what will not export.
2. Match it to booked jobs from your own records. Leads booked per week and revenue per booked job, same 12 weeks. This is the comparison that will still be true after the move.
3. Write down your current settings. Bid mode, bid or target, weekly budget, service types, service areas and ad schedule. They are supposed to transfer automatically. You want something to check them against.
4. Make sure the administrator email reaches a person. The 14-day and 7-day notices go there. If it is an old office manager's inbox, nobody sees the date coming.
5. If you run several trades with very different economics, split them before you move. After migration they share one target, and you cannot create new pay-per-lead campaigns inside Google Ads yet. Google says additional campaigns still go through the Local Services site.
6. Do not change your Business Profile name or address near your date. A significant edit triggers a verification review of 24 to 48 hours, and the campaign can pause during it.
7. Do not stack a bid change on top of the migration. If you are moving off manual bidding, do it weeks before, so you can read the bid change on its own.

What should I check in the first two weeks after it moves?

Google says to allow up to two weeks for the campaign to fully migrate and for performance to ramp back to stable. Treat that as a hold period. Do not judge lead cost in week one, and do not start changing targets because a few days look expensive.

What to check on the first login:

• Budget. Confirm the daily figure is your old weekly budget divided by 7.
• Service types and service areas. Compare them line by line with what you wrote down. These are now your main defence against bad leads, because Google no longer credits "job type not serviced" or "geo not serviced" leads.
• Ad schedule. The existing schedule should transfer. If nobody answers the phone at night, make sure the ads are not running at night.
• Bidding. Maximize Conversions by default. Google's own guidance is to set a Target CPA only if the campaign gets more than 15 leads a month, because a target can restrict delivery on a small campaign. I agree with that for most single-location trades.
• Callouts. Replace the BBB callout if you had one.

If you also run Search or standard Performance Max in the same Google Ads account, judge all of it together for those two weeks. Total booked jobs and total spend across every campaign. A move of calls from one campaign to another can look like a win or a loss when nothing changed for the business.

What does Google still not say about the migration?

Three things I could not confirm in any Google documentation as of 14 September 2026:

• What a Max per lead bid turns into on migration day. Google says manual bidding is not supported and the default is Maximize Conversions. It does not say whether your old cap becomes a Target CPA, or whether manual bidders are the "custom bidding" group that moves in late 2026.
• How the new campaign competes with your other campaigns in the same account. Google recommends running it alongside Search and Performance Max. It does not publish whether they compete for the same search, or which one wins.
• A month for Canada. Only "2027".

I will update this answer when any of those are published. Until then, anyone giving you a firm answer on those three is guessing.

Sources

• Google Ads Help: Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals
• Google Ads Help: Supported business verticals for Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals
• Google Ads Help: About pay-per-lead goals for Performance Max campaigns
• Google Ads Help: Best practices for pay-per-lead goals
• Local Services Help: About automated Local Services Ads lead credits
• Google blog: Google Verified replaces other Local Services Ads badges

Related questions

How does manual bidding work in Local Services Ads, and should I use it?

Max per lead is a hard cap. It protects your cost per lead and costs you volume, and it disappears when your account moves into Google Ads. Read the full answer.

I'm a plumber with $1,000 a month to spend — should it go to Local Services Ads or regular Google Ads?

At $1,000 a month, start with Local Services Ads. It is pay-per-lead rather than pay-per-click, the setup burden is lower, and a Search campaign at that budget usually cannot produce enough conversions for Smart Bidding to steer. Read the full answer.

Someone sees me in Local Services Ads, then goes to my website and calls — how do I know that lead came from LSA?

You mostly cannot, and any system that claims to close that gap completely is overstating it. What you can do is measure the size of the gap and stop making decisions that assume it is zero. Read the full answer.

Written by Usama Khan, who runs Google Ads for e-commerce brands and home-services companies at AdventurAds. Figures are from accounts under active management and are anonymised. Platform details checked against Google's documentation on 2026-09-14. Last reviewed 2026-09-14.