Google is retiring the Local Services Ads dashboard. Starting August 2026, LSAs move into the main Google Ads platform as Performance Max campaigns with a pay-per-lead goal, and the standalone interface you have been logging into goes away. Most of the coverage so far has focused on what stays the same. The part that actually deserves your attention is what does not survive the move — and the window to do anything about it closes the day your account migrates.
Export Your Historical Reports Before You Migrate
Campaign-level performance history does not transfer. Past impressions, clicks, weekly spend, and ad-level performance reports will not exist in Google Ads, and the old dashboard becomes inaccessible the moment your account moves.
Your lead history — contacts, message threads, call recordings — does carry over. Your performance benchmarks do not. If you ever want a year-over-year comparison, a client report, or proof of what your cost per lead used to be, download it now.
Google’s Ads Product Liaison, Ginny Marvin, put it plainly: advertisers should download their historical data ahead of their transition timing, and start “ASAP.”
Published July 22, 2026. Migration details come from Google’s official announcement and support documentation.
What Is Actually Happening
Local Services Ads have always been a walled garden. Separate dashboard, separate login, separate billing logic, a lead-based model that had nothing in common with the click auction running next door in Google Ads. For years that separation was the whole point.
Google is collapsing that wall. Your LSA campaigns become Performance Max campaigns inside your regular Google Ads account, configured for a pay-per-lead goal.
The name causes more panic than it should. Performance Max here does not mean what it means elsewhere. A normal Performance Max campaign sprays across YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. This one does not. These campaigns stay keywordless and continue serving only on Google Search and Google Maps — the same two surfaces LSAs run on today. Google is reusing the Performance Max infrastructure, not handing your service budget to the Display Network.
You are not being moved into a different auction. You are being moved into a different interface, with different bidding controls.
The Timeline
| Phase | When | Who moves |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 | August 2026 | A limited group of U.S. home and storefront service advertisers — plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving. |
| Phase 2 | Late 2026 | Broader advertiser groups, including service-area businesses without a physical storefront and accounts using custom bidding or booking configurations. |
| Phase 3 | 2027 | Non-U.S. accounts and all remaining business categories. |
Google has said migrations run through the end of 2027. Nobody gets to opt out; the only variable is when your turn comes.
Are You in the First Wave?
Phase 1 targets exactly the trades that spend the most on Local Services Ads. If your business is in one of these categories and you advertise in the U.S., assume you are early:
Being early is not automatically bad. It does mean you will be generating the performance data everyone else learns from — which is precisely why exporting your existing benchmarks matters more for you than for anyone migrating in 2027.
What Transfers, and What Doesn’t
Transfers automatically
- Targeted locations, service types, and business categories
- Budget limits and ad schedule
- Business photos
- Verification status and your Google Verified badge — no re-verification required
- Full lead history — contact details, message threads, and call recordings, now in a new Lead Manager
- Your pay-per-lead billing model
- Placement on Google Search and Google Maps
Does not transfer
- Campaign-level performance history — past impressions, clicks, and weekly spend
- Ad-level performance reports
- Access to the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard
- Manual cost-per-lead bidding, including maximum CPL
- Vertical-level Target CPA
- Better Business Bureau callouts, which are no longer supported
The Bidding Changes That Will Cost You Money
The reporting loss is the urgent problem. The bidding changes are the expensive one, and they get far less attention than they deserve.
1. Manual cost-per-lead is gone
You can no longer set a maximum cost per lead. That control disappears entirely, and bidding aligns with Google Ads automated models. If your account has been held together by a hard CPL ceiling, that guardrail is being removed.
2. One Target CPA for every service you offer
This is the change most likely to quietly damage performance. Today you can set different targets by vertical. After migration, a single campaign-level Target CPA applies across all of your categories.
Think about what that means for a plumbing company. A drain-cleaning lead and a full repipe lead do not carry remotely the same value, but one blended target treats them identically. You end up overpaying for the cheap leads and underbidding on the ones that actually pay for your year.
The fix is to split high-value services into their own campaigns so each can carry its own target. That is a restructure worth planning before you migrate, not something to improvise afterward while the numbers are moving.
3. Weekly budgets become daily averages
Your weekly budget converts to a daily average — the weekly amount divided by seven. Monthly spend is capped at that daily average multiplied by 30.4. The total is designed to be equivalent, but the pacing behaves differently, and businesses with sharp weekday and weekend demand swings should watch this closely in the first month.
Heads Up: “Google Guaranteed” Doesn’t Exist Anymore
If you are reading articles about this migration that still reference the Google Guaranteed badge, they are out of date — and that has nothing to do with the 2026 move.
On October 20, 2025, Google retired three separate badges — Google Guaranteed, Google Screened, and License Verified by Google — and consolidated them into a single blue Google Verified checkmark. Google’s consumer research found people could not tell the difference between them.
Two things came with that change. The green checkmark became blue, and the money-back guarantee attached to the old Google Guarantee was discontinued. Existing verified advertisers kept their badge automatically and rankings were unaffected.
So when the 2026 migration documentation says your badge transfers, the badge it means is Google Verified.
Does This Get Rid of the Background Check?
Short answer: no, and nothing suggests that is coming.
This is one of the most common questions about the migration, and the confusion is understandable — moving into a self-serve platform like Google Ads sounds like the gate is coming down. It is not. Screening is the entire basis of the Google Verified badge. It is the last thing Google would remove, because it is the only reason these ads carry more trust than a standard search ad.
What still applies, unchanged by the migration:
- Background checks on business owners, run by Google’s third-party screening partners — identity and criminal history, including sex offender and sanctions registry checks
- Field worker checks in the urgent categories — plumbing, HVAC, electrical, locksmiths, and garage door — covering employees, contractors, and subcontractors who enter customer properties. Office and admin staff who do not service customers are exempt.
- Business registration verification
- License and insurance checks, with annual renewal required to keep your badge
- Periodic re-screening — Google can ask you to repeat checks if your risk profile changes. Declining can cost you the badge, pause your ads, or suspend the account.
Requirements do vary by category. Some verticals are far lighter — the food and beverage pilot currently requires only a verified Google Business Profile, and yoga studios, dance instructors, and personal trainers need business and owner checks but no field worker screening. Professional services like law and real estate carry extra identity and state license verification instead.
The Good News, and One Trap
You do not re-verify because of the migration. Verification status and your Google Verified badge transfer automatically. There is no new paperwork and no repeat of the three-to-four week screening process.
The trap: changing your business name or address during migration can trigger a fresh review of your verification. If you have been meaning to correct either one, do it well before your migration window or wait until well after — not while your account is in motion.
Worth noting for anyone considering starting LSAs: new advertiser verification still takes about three to four weeks. That has not changed, and it is the slowest step in getting live.
How You’ll Be Notified
| 14 days out | Email to account administrators, plus a warning banner in your account |
|---|---|
| 7 days out | Final reminder email |
| Migration day | The Local Services Ads dashboard redirects into Google Ads; a completion email is sent |
| First 2 weeks after | Expect performance to fluctuate while the campaign stabilizes |
Fourteen days is not much time to pull a meaningful reporting archive, reconcile it, and plan a campaign restructure — especially if you manage multiple locations or multiple clients. Treat the notice as a deadline you already missed rather than a starting gun.
Your Migration Checklist
- Export every historical report you might ever wantPull performance data from the Local Services Ads dashboard now, not when the banner appears. At minimum: monthly spend, lead volume, and cost per lead going back as far as the dashboard allows. Save it somewhere permanent — a spreadsheet you own, not a screenshot in a chat thread.
- Record your baseline numbers in writingBefore anything moves, write down your current cost per lead, monthly lead volume, and close rate by service type. After migration you will have no way to reconstruct these, and you will need them to judge whether performance actually changed.
- Decide which services need their own campaignList your service categories and what a lead is genuinely worth for each. Anywhere the values diverge sharply, plan a separate campaign so each can hold its own Target CPA instead of being averaged into one.
- Confirm who has admin access to the Google Ads accountNotifications go to account administrators. If your LSA account was set up years ago by someone who no longer works there, or by a former agency, fix that before the 14-day email lands in an inbox nobody checks.
- Check your Google Business Profile is accurate — then leave it aloneBusiness details now sync from your Google Business Profile, so errors there propagate into your ads. Verify your name, categories, service areas, hours, and phone number before migration. Then stop touching it: changing your business name or address while your account is migrating can trigger a fresh review of your verification. Fix it early, not mid-move.
- Verify every setting on your first loginOnce migrated, audit what came across: budget, Target CPA, service categories, targeted locations, ad schedule, call routing numbers, and photos. Automated migrations are usually fine. Usually is not always, and this is your money.
- Then leave it alone for two weeksThe campaign needs time to recalibrate. Reacting to day-three data is how you turn a temporary dip into a permanent one. Judge results after the stabilization window, against the baseline you wrote down in step two.
What This Actually Means
Strip away the announcement language and three things are true.
First, this is a consolidation play, not a product upgrade. Google is retiring a bespoke system and folding its function into infrastructure it already maintains. Advertisers get a unified interface and one less login. Google gets one less platform to run. Both of those can be true at once, and neither is sinister — but it does explain why the migration prioritizes Google’s architecture over your reporting continuity.
Second, you are trading control for automation. Manual CPL caps and per-vertical targets are being replaced with automated bidding against a blended target. For advertisers who were managing those levers well, that is a real loss. For the majority who never touched them, it will not matter much.
Third, the measurement burden shifts onto you. Pay-per-lead has always had a quality problem: Google bills you for a lead, not for a customer. Moving into Performance Max does not change that, and losing your historical baselines makes it harder to notice if quality slips. The advertisers who come through this well will be the ones tracking leads all the way to booked revenue in their own CRM — not the ones reading lead counts in a dashboard.
A platform that bills per lead will always report more leads than your bank account agrees with. Track to revenue, not to the interface.
Who Should Actually Be Concerned
Not everyone needs to treat this as an emergency. Be genuinely concerned if you:
- Offer services with sharply different lead values under one account — you have a real restructure to plan
- Report LSA performance to clients, partners, or a franchisor and need year-over-year continuity
- Have been actively managing manual CPL caps or per-vertical targets
- Run multiple locations, where a blended target flattens genuine market differences
You can relax somewhat if you run a single service line in a single market, have never adjusted bidding, and only care about the phone ringing. For you this is mostly a new login screen — though you should still export your reports, because that part is irreversible for everyone.
Want Someone to Handle This For You?
We manage Local Services Ads and Google Ads for home service businesses — including exporting your reporting archive before migration, restructuring campaigns around lead value, and tracking leads through to booked revenue instead of stopping at the dashboard.
Elevated Ideas • Jacksonville, IL • Serving home service businesses nationwide
Related Reading
If Local Services Ads are part of your lead mix, these are worth a look: Google Business Profile management (your GBP now feeds your ad details directly), lead generation, and attribution tracking with GBP and GA4 — which becomes considerably more useful once your historical ad reporting disappears.
Common Questions
Local Services Ads Migration FAQ
Are Local Services Ads going away?
No. Local Services Ads are not being shut down — they are being moved. Google is migrating them into the main Google Ads platform as Performance Max campaigns with a pay-per-lead goal. Your ads keep the same placements on Google Search and Google Maps, you still pay per lead rather than per click, and your Google Verified badge carries over. What goes away is the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard and the separate login you have been using.
When does the Local Services Ads migration start?
The first phase begins in August 2026 with a limited group of United States home and storefront service advertisers, including plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving. A second phase in late 2026 covers service-area businesses without a storefront and accounts using custom bidding or booking setups. Non-U.S. accounts and all remaining categories follow through 2027.
Will I lose my Local Services Ads data?
Partly, and this is the most urgent issue. Your lead history transfers — contact details, message threads, and call recordings move into a new Lead Manager inside Google Ads. But campaign-level historical performance data does not transfer. Past impressions, clicks, weekly spend, and ad-level performance reports will not appear in Google Ads, and you lose access to the old dashboard once you migrate. Export those reports before your migration date or they are gone.
What is a Performance Max pay-per-lead campaign?
It is a Performance Max campaign configured for lead generation where you are billed per qualified lead instead of per click. Despite carrying the Performance Max name, these campaigns do not get full Performance Max inventory. They remain keywordless and continue serving only on Google Search and Google Maps, exactly where Local Services Ads run today.
What happens to my Google Guaranteed badge?
The Google Guaranteed badge no longer exists, and that change already happened. On October 20, 2025, Google retired the Google Guaranteed, Google Screened, and License Verified by Google badges and consolidated all three into a single blue Google Verified checkmark. Google also discontinued the money-back guarantee that came with the old Google Guarantee. Your verification status and Google Verified badge transfer to Google Ads during the migration.
Do I have to redo my background check or verification after migrating?
No. Verification status transfers automatically and badges carry over without re-verification, so you do not repeat the screening process because of the migration. One caution: changing your business name or address during migration can trigger a brief review, so avoid making those edits while your account is moving. Separately, screening was never a one-time event — Google may ask you to repeat checks periodically if your risk profile changes, and licenses and insurance still require annual renewal to keep your badge.
Is the migration getting rid of Local Services Ads background checks?
No, and there is no indication that is planned. Screening remains required to run these ads: background checks, business registration, license verification, and insurance checks, depending on your category and location. Background checks cover business owners and, in categories like plumbing, HVAC, electrical, locksmiths, and garage door, the field workers who enter customer properties too. Office and administrative staff who do not service customers are exempt. Google also refreshed the underlying policies on July 6, 2026, renaming “Local Services platform policies” to “Local Services Ads requirements” and removing outdated rules — a clarification, not a loosening. The screening is the entire basis of the Google Verified badge, so it is the last thing Google would remove.
How long does Local Services Ads verification take for a new advertiser?
Roughly three to four weeks after you submit documents, covering background, licensing, and insurance checks. That timeline has not changed with the migration. If you are considering starting Local Services Ads, that lead time is worth planning around — it is the slowest part of getting live.
How much notice will I get before my account migrates?
Account administrators receive an email and an in-account banner 14 days before the migration date, then a final reminder email 7 days out. On migration day the Local Services Ads dashboard redirects into Google Ads and Google sends a completion email. Do not wait for the 14-day notice to export your data — start now.
What is changing about bidding?
Three things. Manual bidding for cost-per-lead is deprecated, so you can no longer set a maximum cost per lead. Vertical-level Target CPA is being replaced by a single campaign-level Target CPA that applies across all of your service categories. And weekly budgets convert to daily averages, calculated as your weekly amount divided by seven, with a monthly cap of the daily average multiplied by 30.4.
What if my services have very different lead values?
This is the real strategic problem with a single campaign-level Target CPA. If you run a business where a drain cleaning lead and a full system replacement lead are worth wildly different amounts, one blended target will overpay for cheap leads and underbid on valuable ones. The fix is to split those services into separate campaigns so each can carry its own target. Plan that restructure before migration rather than after.
Do I need to do anything to migrate?
The migration itself is automatic — Google transfers your locations, service types, business categories, budget, ad schedule, and business photos for you. Your job is the work around it: export historical reports beforehand, verify every transferred setting on your first login, plan any campaign splits, and leave performance alone for about two weeks while the campaign stabilizes.
Should I expect my lead volume or cost to change?
Expect roughly two weeks of instability after migration while the campaign recalibrates, and judge results after that window rather than during it. Beyond that, the honest answer is that nobody has long-run data yet because the first accounts do not move until August 2026. The advertisers migrating in the first phase will effectively be the test group, which is a good reason to have your historical benchmarks exported so you can actually tell whether performance changed.
Sources: Google Ads Help — Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max, Google — About the Google Verified badge, Search Engine Journal, PPC Land.