Google announced on July 20 that Local Services Ads are moving into the Google Ads interface as a Performance Max campaign type built for pay-per-lead goals. Brooke Osmundson covered it at Search Engine Journal, and the details have since been filled in by Google's own migration documentation.
The standalone LSA dashboard is being retired. On your migration day, the URL you have been using redirects to Google Ads and that is that.
Under normal circumstances retiring the LSA dashboard would be a public service. It is a famously clumsy piece of software and roughly nobody will attend its funeral.
But there is one detail in this migration that deserves your attention this week rather than eventually.
The Urgent Part
Your historical performance reports do not transfer to Google Ads. Past impressions, clicks, weekly spend, and ad-level performance breakdowns do not migrate. After your account transitions, the old dashboard is inaccessible and there is no recovery mechanism.
Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Product Liaison, was blunt about it, telling advertisers to download their historical data ahead of their transition timing and to start that process immediately.
Worth being precise about what is and is not lost, because the two get muddled:
- Lead history transfers. Who contacted you, their details, message threads, call recordings. All of that comes across into the new Lead Manager.
- Performance reporting does not. The aggregate numbers describing how your campaigns actually performed over time. Gone.
So you keep the record of every customer and lose the record of what it cost to get them. If you have ever wanted to know whether this January was better than last January, that comparison has an expiration date on it now.
Notice is 14 days by email to the account administrator, plus banners in the dashboard, a reminder at 7 days, and a confirmation once it is done. Two weeks is enough time if you see the email. It is not enough time if the administrator on file is a former employee, an agency that stopped responding, or whoever set this up in 2021.
Phase one begins in August. That is not a distant deadline.
Who Goes First
The rollout is phased:
- August 2026: a small group of US advertisers. Home and storefront services, including plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving, along with storefront categories like pet care, wellness, and education.
- Late 2026: more US advertisers, including service area businesses without a storefront and accounts using custom bidding or booking setups.
- 2027: non-US accounts and every remaining category.
If you are a Miami plumber, roofer, HVAC company, or cleaning service, you are in the first group. Read the next section today.
What to Do Before You Migrate
This is the whole remediation plan. It is not complicated, it is just time sensitive.
1. Download every historical report you might ever want
Do this first and do it now, before the notification email arrives. At minimum pull the full available date range for spend, leads, cost per lead, and any ad-level or category-level breakdowns the dashboard will give you.
Think about what you would want a year from now: year-over-year comparisons, seasonality patterns, which service categories actually produced profitable leads, what your cost per lead did over time. Export it all. Storage is free and this data is about to become unobtainable.
If an agency manages this for you, ask them today whether the export is done. Not planned. Done.
2. Confirm who the account administrator actually is
The 14 day warning goes to the administrator on the profile. If that address is stale, your first indication of migration will be the dashboard redirecting one morning, with the data already gone.
3. Write down your current bidding setup before it changes
Specifically: your weekly budget, your maximum cost per lead if you set one manually, and any different Target CPA values you use across different service categories. You will need these numbers to rebuild, and the fields holding them are about to disappear.
4. Check your Google Business Profile now, not later
After migration, your business name, address, and standard hours become read-only in Google Ads and sync one way from Google Business Profile. So whatever is in your Business Profile is what your ads will say.
Important timing note: significant name or address changes trigger a verification review of roughly 24 to 48 hours, during which your campaign can pause. Fix any Business Profile problems well before your migration window, not during it. Pausing your lead flow to correct a typo is an avoidable way to lose a week.
5. Line up six callouts to replace BBB
Better Business Bureau callouts are being retired. Google recommends selecting at least six other structured callouts, such as business hours, specialties, or accepted payment methods. Decide what those are now so you are not picking them under pressure.
How to Replicate Your Current Setup in Google Ads
Most things transfer automatically. Here is the honest mapping of what you have today to what you will have after, including the three places where automatic is not the same as equivalent.
Transfers on its own, no action needed
- Campaign setup: locations, service types, budgets, ad schedules, business photos
- Your verified status and the Google Guaranteed badge, with no re-verification required
- Full lead history: contact details, message threads, call recordings
The LSA inbox becomes Lead Manager
Your inbox is replaced by Lead Manager inside Google Ads. Feature parity is reportedly close: lead status, lead type, feedback forms, CRM export, and a panel for replying to message leads directly. Different location, same job. This one is a rename more than a change.
Weekly budget becomes a daily budget
Google divides your historical weekly budget by seven to set the daily average. Monthly spend is capped at that daily average multiplied by 30.4, and individual days can run above the daily average during busy periods without breaking the monthly ceiling.
The practical effect is mild, but if you have been mentally budgeting in weeks for years, expect the daily number to look wrong at a glance until you get used to it.
Manual bidding is gone, and this is the real one
Setting a maximum cost per lead is no longer supported. Industry-level and vertical-level Target CPA are deprecated. After migration, Google calculates a single campaign-level Target CPA that covers all of your service categories.
If you only do one thing, that is fine. If you do several things with genuinely different economics, it is not.
Take a contractor running both plumbing and HVAC. Those leads have different costs, different close rates, and different job values. Today you can target them separately. After migration, one blended number applies to both.
To replicate the old behavior, you split them into separate campaigns. That is the mechanism, and it works.
But do the math before you reflexively split everything, because separate campaigns also mean smaller pools of conversion data, and Smart Bidding on thin data behaves worse than a blended target on healthy data. Compare lead volume, lead cost, close rate, and actual customer value across your categories first. Split where the economics genuinely diverge. Leave the rest alone.
Business info goes read-only
Name, address, and standard hours are now edited in Google Business Profile and flow one way into Google Ads. Routine updates sync within about 24 hours. Your lead routing phone number stays editable directly in Google Ads in real time, which is the one you are most likely to need in a hurry.
Reporting looks completely different
You move to Google Ads reporting, with real-time conversions meaning total leads charged, total cost, and cost per conversion. It is more capable than the LSA dashboard once you know where things are. It also will not contain a single day of your history, which is the entire reason for step one above.
New campaigns are still created the old way, for now
A quirk worth knowing: during the initial rollout you cannot create new pay-per-lead campaigns inside Google Ads. Google directs you to g.co/localservices to set up new ones, with in-platform creation coming later. So for a while you will have one place to create and a different place to manage.
What to Check After You Migrate
Migration is automatic, which is not the same as correct. Once yours completes, verify six things:
- Daily budget, and whether it matches what your weekly budget actually was
- Campaign-level Target CPA, since this is the newly blended number
- Service categories and service areas
- Ad schedule
- Lead routing phone number, because a broken one means silence that looks exactly like slow business
- Photos and callouts, including your six BBB replacements
Google says some ads run immediately but to allow up to two weeks for full migration and performance stabilization. Which means the usual rule applies: if leads dip on day three, do not tear the campaign apart. Note it, wait out the window, then judge.
What This Means If You Pay an Agency
This migration is a clean test, because it has a deadline and a permanent consequence.
Ask exactly one question this week: have you downloaded our LSA historical reports yet, and where are they saved?
There is no sophisticated answer to that question. It is done or it is not. An agency that watches this stuff already did it the week the announcement landed. An agency that has to look into it has told you how closely your account is being followed.
Three more, once the first is handled:
- Who is the account administrator on the profile? If nobody knows, that is your 14 day warning going to an unread inbox.
- Do our service categories have different lead economics, and are we splitting campaigns? This requires knowing your close rates and job values. If they have never asked you for those, they cannot answer it.
- What are our six replacement callouts? Small thing, but it shows whether anyone read past the headline.
Fair warning in the other direction too: after migration there will be a stretch where numbers look different and comparisons are impossible because the history is gone. That is real, not an excuse. The distinction is whether your agency captured a baseline before it disappeared. If they did, they can tell you where you stand. If they did not, nobody can, including them.
How We Stay On Top Of This
The unglamorous answer again: we read the migration documentation rather than the headlines, because the headline said Local Services Ads are moving to Google Ads and the documentation said your historical data is about to be deleted permanently. Those are very different articles.
When a change has a hard date and an irreversible consequence, the work happens before the date. Export first, verify the administrator, record the current settings, then deal with the interface once it arrives. Everything else in this migration is recoverable. The reports are not.
Then afterward we check the six settings, wait out the two week stabilization window instead of reacting to day three, and compare against the baseline we saved. That last part only works if somebody saved one.
If you run Local Services Ads in Miami and you are not sure whether anyone has exported your history, that is a five minute question with a permanent answer. Miami Web Lab will check it with you, and if you are already covered we will tell you that and let you get back to work.