If you run Local Services Ads, there’s a change coming to your account that’s worth ten minutes of your attention now rather than a surprise later. Google is folding Local Services Ads into Google Ads as a Performance Max pay-per-lead campaign. The first phase started in August 2026 for U.S. home and storefront categories, and later phases run into 2027.
The short version: the green guarantee badge and the pay-per-lead billing aren’t going away. What changes is where the campaign lives, how it’s managed, and what happens to the history you’ve built up. That last part is the one nobody warns you about, so I want to start there.
What actually changes
Today, Local Services Ads sit in their own dashboard at the Local Services site, separate from everything else. You set a weekly budget, you pick your job types, and leads come in with the customer’s name and phone number attached. Disputes happen there too.
After migration, that campaign shows up inside your Google Ads account as a Performance Max campaign built for pay-per-lead. You’ll still be charged per lead rather than per click. But budgets, bidding and reporting move into the same account as the rest of your Google spend, and they follow Google Ads conventions instead of the Local Services ones.
- Budget moves from a weekly number to a daily budget, so the math you’re used to changes shape.
- Bidding becomes a campaign-level Target CPA in Google Ads.
- Reporting merges into your main account, which is genuinely useful once you’re through it.
- The standalone Local Services dashboard becomes inaccessible for that account.
The part I’d handle first: your lead history disappears with the old dashboard
This is the one thing that can’t be undone after the fact. On migration day the old dashboard closes, and the lead-by-lead history inside it goes with it. That includes the record of which leads you were charged for, which ones you disputed and won, and the customer contact details attached to each lead.
I want to be clear that this isn’t anyone being careless. Nothing in the product prompts you to export before a migration, and the notice, when it arrives, reads like a routine product update rather than a deadline. It’s simply not built to make you think about the archive.
So before your account flips, pull the history down while you still can. Two things are worth having:
- Your lead report, exported to a spreadsheet, covering the full life of the account. Every lead, the date, the job type, whether you were charged, and the outcome of any dispute.
- Your budget and performance history month by month, so you can compare your first Performance Max months to a real baseline instead of a memory.
One detail worth knowing: customer names and phone numbers can only be pulled out of the Local Services dashboard by hand. There’s no automated route to them. If those contacts matter to you for follow-up or a database, that export is a manual afternoon, and it has an expiry date.
If you run more than one service category, decide your structure first
Plenty of home service businesses run several job types under one Local Services account, with a different target cost per lead on each. Drain cleaning and full sewer replacement aren’t worth the same to you, and the settings today let you say so.
When the campaign moves to Performance Max pay-per-lead, the target cost per lead becomes a single campaign-level number. If everything stays in one campaign, your cheap job types and your expensive ones get pointed at the same target, and the mix you were carefully managing goes flat.
The fix is a structural decision you can make ahead of time: split the service categories that deserve different targets into separate campaigns, rather than discovering the blend afterwards. It’s much easier to set up before the switch than to unpick after it.
How you’ll know it’s happening
There’s no public schedule you can look up and no setting that shows your date. It arrives as a notice inside the account or an email from Google, and the honest answer is that timing varies by category and region.
The one reliable signal is the campaign type itself. If you check your Google Ads account and see a Performance Max campaign where the Local Services campaign used to be, it’s happened. I check for that across accounts on a schedule rather than trusting the announcement to land somewhere I’ll see it, and it’s a five-minute habit worth building if you’re managing this yourself.
What good looks like in the first 60 days after the switch
Migration weeks are noisy. Costs wobble, lead volume moves, and it’s easy to react to a bad Tuesday. A few things I’d hold steady on:
- Watch cost per lead across a full month, not a week. Pay-per-lead campaigns in a new environment need a settling period.
- Keep your target cost per lead close to what you were actually paying before, at least at first. Setting an ambitious target on day one usually just throttles volume.
- Check your daily budget math. A weekly budget divided by seven isn’t always how the new campaign spends.
- Keep disputing bad leads. The route changes, the right to dispute doesn’t.
- Make sure your booked jobs are still being counted somewhere you can see, because that’s the number that actually tells you whether this went well.
The upside, once you’re through it
I don’t want this to read as bad news, because it isn’t. Local Services Ads have always been an island. Leads came in with no easy way to see them next to your search campaigns, so questions like “which channel is producing the jobs we actually close” were a manual reconciliation every month.
Once your pay-per-lead campaign lives in Google Ads, all of that sits in one account with one set of conversion tracking. If your call tracking and your booked-job data are wired in properly, you can finally see cost per lead and cost per booked job side by side across everything you run. That’s a real improvement, and it’s the reason I’d rather clients get ahead of this than resist it.
If you want the difference between those two numbers spelled out, I wrote about that here: Cost Per Lead vs Cost Per Booked Job. And if you’d like a second set of eyes on your account before the switch, including the exports you’d want to keep, that’s what my free marketing audit is for.