On August 1, 2026, Google started moving Local Services Ads out of its own dashboard and into Google Ads, as a Performance Max campaign with a pay-per-lead goal. Phase 1 covers a limited set of United States home and storefront service advertisers. If you run LSA and nothing has happened to your account yet, you are in phase 2 or phase 3, and you have time to prepare that the first wave did not.
Most of what has been written about this was published before August, framed as advance warning. A month in, the useful questions have changed. What actually moved. What the migrated crowd can no longer get back. And which of the changes are genuinely worth worrying about, because several of the loudest ones are not.
The short version
Your ads appear in the same places, cost the same way, and bill the same way. You still pay per lead, not per click. The dashboard is gone, historical performance reports do not come with you, and the ability to set different lead prices for different services inside one account is gone. That last one is the change that matters.
What is the LSA migration to Google Ads?
Google is retiring the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard and rebuilding LSA as a campaign type inside Google Ads: Performance Max with a pay-per-lead goal. The campaign keeps the things that make LSA what it is. It stays keywordless, it draws business details from your Google Business Profile, it appears only on Search and Maps, and you are charged for valid leads such as phone calls and messages rather than for clicks.
What changes is where you manage it and how much control you have over bidding. After your migration date, logging into the old dashboard redirects you to your campaign overview in Google Ads. There is no parallel period where both exist.
Does "Performance Max" mean my LSA budget will run on YouTube now?
No, and this is the single biggest misunderstanding about the migration.
Standard Performance Max is the campaign type that spreads a budget across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and Maps, which is exactly why contractors are warned to be careful with it. We have written a whole guide on Performance Max for contractors covering those risks.
Pay-per-lead Performance Max is not that campaign type. It shares a name and almost nothing else. It does not run on YouTube, Display, Gmail or Discover. It has no asset groups, no audience signals, no keywords, and no headlines or sitelinks in the way a normal Performance Max campaign does. Google's documentation is explicit that placement stays on Search and Maps.
If you take one thing from this article
Nobody is about to start spending your LSA budget on YouTube pre-roll. The naming is confusing and the panic it caused is understandable, but the placements did not change.
When does my account migrate?
Three phases, and which one you are in depends on your business type and country.
You get an email to the account administrator 14 days before your migration date, plus a banner in the dashboard, then a reminder email at 7 days, then a confirmation once it is done. There is no way to opt out and no way to choose your date.
The notification goes to the account administrator, not to you
If an agency or a former employee is the administrator on your LSA account, that is where both emails land. This is the most common way a contractor finds out about the migration by logging in one morning and finding the dashboard gone. Check who holds admin on your account this week, not the week you get the notice.
What do you actually lose in the migration?
Worth separating honestly, because the list of losses is longer than the list of things that will change your results.
Gone, and it matters
- Vertical-level Target CPA. One campaign now carries one target, not a different lead price per service category.
- Manual cost-per-lead bidding. Deprecated in favour of automated bidding.
- Historical performance reports. They do not transfer, and after your migration date the dashboard that holds them is unreachable.
Gone, and almost nobody will notice
- Weekly budgets. Converted to a daily average, your weekly figure divided by 7, with monthly spend capped near that daily figure times 30.4.
- BBB callouts. No longer supported, replaced by at least six other structured callouts.
- The separate lead inbox. Leads now live under Goals, then Conversions, then Leads inside Google Ads, with charge status, lead type and CRM download.
Lead history does come with you. Google confirms that past customer lead history transfers, including contact details, message threads and older call recordings. It is the aggregate performance reporting, your cost per lead trend, your spend history, your impression and call volume over time, that does not.
If you were in phase 1, this window has already closed
The advice everywhere was to export your reports before migration day. For accounts that migrated in early August, that day has passed. If you did not export, those historical reports are not recoverable, and you are rebuilding your benchmarks from whatever your call tracking, your CRM and your invoices can tell you.
If you have not migrated yet, this is the one task on the list with a hard deadline attached. Do it now rather than when the 14 day email arrives, because that email goes to whoever holds admin and you may not be the one who reads it.
The vertical Target CPA problem, and the trap in the obvious fix
This is the change with real money attached, and it only affects you if you sell more than one kind of job.
In the old dashboard you could set different maximum lead prices for different service categories. A plumbing lead and a drain cleaning lead did not have to be worth the same to you. After migration, Google Ads calculates a single campaign-level Target CPA. Every service in that campaign is bid against the same number.
Google's documented workaround is to split the verticals into separate campaigns, each with its own target. That is the correct answer for some contractors and an expensive mistake for others, and the deciding factor is lead volume.
Why splitting can backfire
Smart Bidding needs conversion data to work. Google's own guidance is to have at least 30 conversions in the past 30 days for Target CPA to perform, and published practitioner analysis puts the practical comfort zone higher, around 50 to 80, with the observation that below roughly 15 conversions a month Target CPA tends to underperform simpler strategies because the algorithm lacks the data to bid accurately.
Splitting one campaign into three does not create more leads. It divides the same leads across three learning problems.
The arithmetic, worked
Take a plumbing and drain company at 45 LSA leads a month across two verticals. Kept together: one campaign, 45 conversions, comfortably above the threshold. Split in two: roughly 22 and 23, both below Google's stated minimum of 30 and inside the band where automated bidding gets unreliable.
Now take an HVAC company at 160 leads a month across three verticals. Kept together: one target across service calls and installs that are worth very different amounts. Split in three: roughly 53 each, all comfortably above threshold. That company should split. The plumbing company should not.
The rough test: divide your monthly lead volume by the number of campaigns you are considering. If any of them lands under 30, do not split it out. You would be trading a bid target that is slightly wrong for a bidding algorithm that does not have enough data to function, which is the worse of the two problems.
If you are below the threshold and your services genuinely have very different economics, the honest answer is that the single blended target will overpay for your cheap work and underbid your profitable work, and the fix is on the intake and job-type side rather than the bidding side. Tightening which job types you accept is a blunter instrument than a bid, but it is the one you still have.
What stays exactly the same?
- Pay per lead, not per click. You are charged for valid calls and messages.
- Where your ads show. Search and Maps, in the same placements as before.
- Keywordless targeting. Service categories and geography, not keywords.
- The Google Verified badge. Still available for eligible businesses in eligible verticals after verification.
- Your reviews and your ranking factors. Nothing in the migration changes how you rank. Review count, review velocity, responsiveness and proximity carry on mattering exactly as much as they did, which we cover in the LSA ranking factors guide.
- Lead disputes. The criteria did not change. See below.
What happens to lead disputes and credits?
Disputes move into Google Ads along with everything else, and the criteria for what qualifies did not change in this migration.
The important context is that the dispute system most contractors remember was already gone before any of this. In mid-2024 Google replaced manual dispute filing with an automated credit system, where machine review examines leads after they are charged and applies credits it judges valid, and separately narrowed what is creditable at all. If you are still expecting to flag a lead and argue your case, that has not been the system for two years. We covered the specific categories Google stopped crediting in the two lead types Google will not credit, and the broader mechanics in why LSA leads get disputed.
The migration does not make this better or worse. It changes where you look at it.
Is anything actually better after the migration?
Two things, and both are more useful than they sound.
Verification got substantially lighter. Insurance and licence reverification are no longer required, with business verification handled through registration checks instead. Anyone who has watched an LSA account sit dormant for weeks waiting on a document review will understand why this matters. It removes the slowest, most frustrating step in LSA onboarding. If you have been putting off getting Google Verified because of the paperwork, the paperwork got smaller.
Business details sync from Google Business Profile in one direction. Name, address and hours flow from GBP into Google Ads automatically, with a daily sync for minor edits. No more maintaining the same details in two systems and wondering which one is authoritative. Note the catch: a significant name or address change triggers a verification review that can pause serving for 24 to 48 hours, so do not casually edit your GBP name during your busy season. Your GBP hygiene now feeds your paid campaign directly.
You can also customise service areas and ad schedules independently of the business profile, adjust phone routing in real time, and upload up to 100 additional business photos.
What should you do the week you migrate?
- Do not touch anything for two weeks. Google says performance takes up to two weeks to stabilise. Every significant change restarts a learning period, so panic-adjusting in week one is the most reliable way to make a rocky transition worse.
- Check the budget conversion. Your weekly budget was divided by 7. Confirm the daily figure and the implied monthly ceiling, daily times 30.4, are what you actually intend to spend.
- Check the Target CPA Google assigned you. It is now one number for the whole campaign. Decide whether it is defensible across every service in it.
- Find the leads. Goals, then Conversions, then Leads. Confirm your team knows where the inbox went before a lead sits unanswered for a day.
- Verify your Google Business Profile is correct before migration, because it is now the source of truth for your business details.
- Re-establish your benchmarks. Your historical cost per lead trend did not come with you. Start the new baseline deliberately rather than discovering in November that you cannot compare anything to last year.
What should you watch for next?
Nothing below has been announced. These are the things that would materially change the deal, and they are worth checking rather than assuming.
- Placement expansion. Today it is Search and Maps only. The campaign type it now lives inside is capable of far more. If that ever changes, it changes the economics completely.
- The pay-per-lead model itself. Paying per lead rather than per click is the entire reason LSA is attractive to contractors. It is intact and Google has restated it repeatedly.
- Phase 2 scope. Service-area businesses are the bulk of home services and they are explicitly in the late 2026 group. If you have no storefront, assume you are in that wave.
The honest summary
This is an administrative migration with one substantive change buried in it. The dashboard moving is an inconvenience. The reports not transferring is a one-time loss you can prevent if you have not migrated yet. The single campaign-level Target CPA is the part that will quietly cost multi-service contractors money, and the obvious fix makes things worse for anyone under about 30 leads a month per campaign.
If you were profitable on LSA in July, nothing here changes why. Ranking still comes from reviews, responsiveness and proximity. Profit still comes from what a booked job is worth against what the lead cost.
Sources
Migration phases, dates, budget conversion, bidding deprecations, Google Business Profile sync, BBB callout removal, notification schedule, dashboard shutdown, lead history transfer, the two week stabilisation period and the removal of insurance and licence reverification are from Google Ads Help, Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. Rollout detail and the multi-service Target CPA concern are corroborated by Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal. The 30 conversions in 30 days guidance for Target CPA is Google's own Smart Bidding documentation; the observation that Target CPA underperforms below roughly 15 conversions a month, and that 50 to 80 is the practical comfort zone, comes from published 2026 practitioner analysis. The 2024 replacement of manual disputes with automated credits predates this migration and is unchanged by it. Last verified August 31, 2026.
LSA migration FAQ
When is the LSA migration to Google Ads happening?
It began August 1, 2026 with phase 1, a select group of United States home and storefront service advertisers including plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving. Phase 2 follows in late 2026 and explicitly includes service-area businesses without a physical storefront, which is most home service contractors. Phase 3 in 2027 covers non-United States accounts and all remaining categories. Account administrators get an email 14 days before their migration date and a reminder at 7 days.
Will my LSA budget start running on YouTube or Display now?
No. Despite the Performance Max name, pay-per-lead Performance Max campaigns appear only on Google Search and Google Maps, exactly as Local Services Ads did. They are a different campaign type from standard Performance Max, which does run across Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover. Pay-per-lead campaigns have no asset groups, no audience signals and no keywords, and Google's documentation states placement is unchanged.
What happens to my Local Services Ads dashboard?
It goes away on your migration date. Logging in afterwards automatically redirects you to your campaign overview in Google Ads. There is no overlap period where both are available, and there is no way to opt out or choose your migration date.
Do my LSA historical reports transfer to Google Ads?
No. Past customer lead history transfers, including contact details, message threads and older call recordings, but aggregate performance reports do not. Your cost per lead trend, spend history and campaign metrics stay behind in a dashboard you will no longer be able to reach. Export or screenshot them before your migration date. If you already migrated in phase 1 and did not export, that data is not recoverable.
What is the biggest problem with the LSA migration?
The loss of vertical-level Target CPA. Previously you could set different maximum lead prices for different service categories. Now Google Ads calculates one campaign-level Target CPA covering every service in the campaign. For a contractor whose services have very different job values, a single blended target will overpay for cheap work and underbid profitable work.
Should I split my LSA into separate campaigns per service?
Only if you have the lead volume to support it. Google's documented workaround for the single Target CPA is separate campaigns per vertical, but splitting divides your conversion data. Google's guidance is at least 30 conversions in 30 days for Target CPA to perform well, and published analysis suggests it underperforms below roughly 15 a month. Divide your monthly leads by the number of campaigns you are considering; if any campaign lands under 30, keep them together.
Can I still dispute bad LSA leads after the migration?
Yes, and the criteria did not change. Disputes move into Google Ads with everything else. Worth remembering that Google replaced manual dispute filing with an automated credit system back in mid-2024, where machine review applies credits it judges valid after leads are charged. The migration does not change that system, only where you view it.
Does the migration affect my LSA ranking or my Google Verified badge?
No. The Google Verified badge remains available for eligible businesses in eligible verticals. Ranking still depends on the same factors: review count and velocity, responsiveness, proximity and profile completeness. Nothing in the migration changes how Google decides who appears in the ad pack.
Did anything get better in the migration?
Two things. Insurance and licence reverification are no longer required, which removes the slowest step in LSA onboarding. And business name, address and hours now sync one directionally from your Google Business Profile into Google Ads, so you stop maintaining the same details in two places. The catch is that a significant name or address change triggers a verification review that can pause serving for 24 to 48 hours.
What should I do immediately after my account migrates?
Leave it alone for two weeks. Google says performance takes up to two weeks to stabilise, and every significant change restarts a learning period. Beyond that: confirm your weekly budget divided by 7 produced the daily figure you intended, check the campaign-level Target CPA Google assigned, find the lead inbox at Goals then Conversions then Leads so nothing sits unanswered, and deliberately start a new performance baseline since the old one did not come with you.