There’s one task connected to the Local Services Ads migration that has a hard deadline, and it isn’t a settings change. It’s an export. When your account moves over to a Performance Max pay-per-lead campaign, the old Local Services dashboard closes for that account, and the lead-by-lead history inside it goes with it.
Everything else about the migration can be adjusted afterward. Budgets, targets, campaign structure, all of that is still in front of you. The archive isn’t. So if you only do one thing this month, do this one, and give yourself an afternoon rather than squeezing it in.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it does
Your Local Services history is the only complete record you have of what a lead in your business actually costs and what happens to it. It’s also the evidence behind every dispute you’ve ever won. Once the campaign lives in Google Ads, you get fresh reporting, but it starts from that day. There’s no import of the old numbers.
That matters for three practical reasons. You lose your baseline for judging whether the new campaign is doing better or worse. You lose the record of which job types produced the leads worth having. And if a billing question comes up about a pre-migration lead, you’re arguing from memory.
I want to say plainly that nobody’s being careless here. Nothing in the product warns you that a migration notice is also an export deadline. The notice reads like a routine product update. The tool simply isn’t built to make you think about the archive, which is why this catches good operators every time.
The four things worth exporting
In the order I’d do them, most important first:
- The lead report, for the full life of the account. Date, job type, lead type, whether you were charged, the charge amount, and the dispute outcome. This is your baseline and your billing record in one file.
- Customer contact details attached to those leads, the names and phone numbers. These can only come out of the dashboard by hand, and I’ll come back to that.
- Budget and performance history, month by month. Weekly budget, total spend, lead volume, and average cost per lead per month.
- Your settings and review screenshots. Job types, service areas, business hours, and your review count and rating on the day you export. Small, but it tells you what you were actually running when those numbers happened.
How to do it
Sign in to the Local Services dashboard as the account owner or a manager, not through Google Ads. Go to the leads section and set the date range to the widest span the account allows, which for most accounts is the whole life of the account. Include every lead status, not just charged leads. Disputed and credited leads are exactly the ones you’d want later.
Export to a spreadsheet and save it somewhere that isn’t your downloads folder. A shared drive folder named for the account and the export date works. If you manage more than one location, do this once per location, because the reports don’t merge.
Then repeat for the monthly performance view. One file per report keeps it simple. Don’t spend time cleaning them up now. Getting them out is the deadline-bound part; tidying can happen any time.
The contact details are the manual part
This is the piece that surprises people. The lead export gives you the shape of your lead history, but the customer names and phone numbers attached to individual leads have to be pulled out by hand from the lead detail view. There’s no automated route to them.
So decide honestly whether you need them. If those contacts already flow into your CRM or your scheduling software when a lead comes in, you have them, and you can skip this. If your follow-up has been living inside the Local Services inbox, then those contacts are a real asset and they’re about to become unreachable.
If you do need them, budget a couple of hours and work backwards from the most recent leads. The last twelve months of contacts are worth far more to you than year-three history, so if you run out of time you’ll still have the part that matters.
Then set the baseline you’ll actually use
Once the files are safe, spend twenty minutes turning them into a single small summary you’ll look at again. Not a dashboard, just a few rows. For each of the last twelve months: leads, charged leads, spend, and cost per lead. If you track booked jobs anywhere, add a column for jobs booked from those leads.
That summary is what makes the first ninety days of the new campaign readable. Without it, a $95 cost per lead in October is just a number. With it, you know whether $95 is a win, a wash, or a problem, and you can say so in one sentence instead of hedging.
Worked example
Here’s the shape of it, using round numbers. Say the last twelve months came out at 780 charged leads and $70,200 in spend. That’s a $90 cost per lead across the year. Split by season, the spring and summer months land nearer $78 and the winter months nearer $112.
Now the campaign migrates and the first full month comes in at $101. On its own that looks like the migration hurt. Against the baseline, if that month is a winter month, $101 is actually better than the $112 you were paying a year ago, and the honest read is that the switch went fine. Same number, opposite conclusion, and the only difference is whether you kept the history.
What good looks like
- Every report exported before the migration notice becomes a migration, stored somewhere that isn’t one person’s laptop.
- One twelve-month summary of leads, spend and cost per lead that you can read in ten seconds.
- A decision made, on purpose, about whether you need the customer contact details pulled by hand.
- Booked jobs recorded somewhere outside the ad platform, so the baseline covers outcomes and not only leads.
That last one is the difference between knowing what leads cost and knowing what work costs. If you’d like that spelled out, I wrote about it here: Cost Per Lead vs Cost Per Booked Job. And if you’d rather not do the export alone, or you want someone to check the account before it flips, that’s the kind of thing I look at in a free marketing audit.