If you run Local Services Ads, an email from Google is going to land in your inbox giving you fourteen days' notice. After that, the dashboard you have been logging into for years stops existing, and everything you do with Local Services Ads happens inside Google Ads instead.
The first wave starts this month, August 2026, and it starts with home and storefront services in the US. Google's own documentation names the categories: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving. If you work in the trades, this is not something arriving next year. It may already be scheduled for your account.
Here is the short version, because there is a lot of noise about this and most of it is pitched at the wrong volume. Local Services Ads are not being shut down. The pay-per-lead model survives, the placements survive, your badge survives, your leads survive. What is being retired is the separate dashboard, and with it, a specific control that has quietly protected your margin for years.
More Survives Than the Panic Posts Will Tell You
Start with what does not change, because it is most of it, and because you cannot make a sensible decision about the rest while you think the sky is falling.
You still pay per lead. This is not becoming a pay-per-click product. Calls, messages and bookings are still what you get charged for, and the billing model is written into the new campaign type.
Your ads still show only on Google Search and Google Maps. This matters more than it sounds, because the new campaign type is a version of Performance Max, and Performance Max has a reputation for spraying budget across Display, YouTube and Gmail. That is not what is happening here. Google built a pay-per-lead variant that is locked to Search and Maps. The reach you have now is the reach you keep.
The campaign stays keywordless. You are not about to start building keyword lists and match types. Relevance still comes from your service categories and your service area, the same way it does today, and the things that decide who ranks above whom are unchanged by this move.
Your Google Verified badge transfers automatically, and you do not have to re-verify your license or your insurance. Anyone who has been through that process will understand why this is the single most welcome line in Google's documentation.
And your lead history comes with you. Customer contact details, message threads, call recordings, all of it moves into a section called Lead Manager, which lives inside Google Ads under Conversions. The place changes. The record does not.
So this is a management-layer move. Google is closing a side door and making you come in through the front. The engine underneath is largely intact.
Which is exactly why the one thing that does change deserves your full attention.
A Speed Limit Just Became an Average Speed
Until now, you could set a maximum cost per lead. You told Google you would pay up to $200 for a lead and not a dollar more, and that number behaved like a speed limit. No single lead went over it.
Google's documentation is direct about this: manual bidding, including setting a maximum cost-per-lead, is no longer supported. You move to automated bidding with a target cost per action, which is a different kind of number entirely.
A target is an average. It is the speed you intend to average across the whole trip, not the fastest you are allowed to go at any point. Individual leads can come in well above your target, and nothing is broken when they do. The system is doing precisely what you asked. It is aiming at an average, and averages are made of numbers on both sides. If you have ever watched a target CPA get treated as an instruction rather than a wish on a search campaign, you already know how this behaves.
This is the change to understand, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not put at risk, because the loud version of this story gets it wrong.
Your total spend is still capped. Google converts your historical average weekly budget into a daily average by dividing it by seven, and your monthly spend is capped at that daily figure multiplied by 30.4, the average number of days in a month. Run the arithmetic and it lands almost exactly where your weekly cap already had you. The ceiling on what leaves your bank account in a month is still there.
What is gone is the ceiling on what any single lead can cost you. Those are two different promises, and only one of them ever protected your cost per booked job.
There is a practical step here, and it takes five minutes. Before your migration date, go and look at the weekly budget number sitting in your account right now, and ask yourself whether it is a number you actually intend to spend. A lot of contractors set that figure high years ago as a visibility signal rather than a spending plan, then quietly underspent it every week. Local Services Ads never chased your ceiling. An automated bidding system is built to work toward the budget it is given. Set that number to something you are genuinely comfortable with before the switch, not after.
One Blended Number for Every Service You Sell
If you sell one service, skip ahead. If you sell more than one, this is the section that decides how your account performs in September.
Today you can set different targets by service category. A plumbing call and an HVAC call are different businesses wearing the same uniform: different acquisition cost, different odds of turning into work, different money at the end of it. So you price them separately. That is not a nicety. That is how a multi-service contractor stays profitable.
Google has confirmed that vertical-level target CPA bidding is not supported in Google Ads. After migration, your categories get one unified campaign-level target CPA. One number, averaged across everything you sell.
Think about what a blended number does to a business with a $60 service and a $250 service. It sits between them, which means it is wrong for both. It is too generous for the cheap work, so that category absorbs spend it never needed. It is too stingy for the valuable work, so you stop winning the jobs you actually wanted. Neither of those announces itself. Both surface a month later as a bad month with no obvious cause.
The fix Google points to is splitting into separate campaigns, one per service, which restores per-service control. And it genuinely does. But it is not free, and this is the part worth slowing down on.
Automated bidding runs on conversion data. Split one campaign into three and each of those campaigns now learns from roughly a third of the leads. For a business doing solid volume in every category, that is fine and the control is worth having. For a business doing a handful of leads a month in two of its three services, splitting can starve the algorithm of exactly the signal it needs, and you end up with more control over a worse-performing account.
There is no universal answer. There is only your account, which is why the next section exists.
The Migration Is Asking You a Question Most Owners Cannot Answer
To make the split-or-consolidate call properly, you need four numbers for each service you sell: how many leads it produces, what those leads cost, what share of them close, and what a closed job is worth.
Most owners have the first two. Almost nobody has the third and fourth broken out by service, because Local Services Ads never made you produce them. You could run the thing on autopilot, glance at the lead count, and get on with your day.
That era is finishing, and not because Google is being difficult. When you hand bidding to an algorithm, the quality of your decisions depends entirely on knowing what you are actually buying.
You do not need a CRM project to fix this. You need a spreadsheet and about an hour. Take the last ninety days of leads. Tag each one with the service it was for. Mark whether it turned into a quote, and whether that quote turned into a job. Add what the job billed. That gives you a close rate and an average job value per service, and it is enough to make this decision intelligently.
Do it before your migration notice arrives rather than after, because fourteen days is not long, and you will want to spend those two weeks acting rather than counting.
Export It Before Google Deletes It
Your leads transfer. Your performance reports do not.
Google states plainly that previous campaign-level performance metrics will not migrate. Spend, impressions, clicks, cost per lead, the category breakdowns, your year-over-year trend lines, all of the history you have accumulated. Once your account moves, the old dashboard is not accessible, and there is no route back to it.
Take a second to notice what that means in combination with everything above. Bidding moves to an algorithm. Per-service targets collapse into one blended number. And the historical record you would use to prove your cost per lead got worse afterwards is the record being deleted.
That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to spend twenty minutes this week downloading everything: weekly and monthly spend, cost per lead, lead volume by category, impressions, the full performance export, as far back as the dashboard will give it to you. Save it somewhere that is not a Google product. If your numbers go sideways in October, that export is the only baseline you will have to argue from.
Your Business Profile Just Became Part of Your Ad Account
After migration, your business name, physical address and standard hours sync one way, out of your Google Business Profile and into your campaign. You cannot edit them on the Google Ads side. The profile is now the source of truth.
For most businesses this is an improvement, since it removes a place where two records could disagree. But it introduces a trap worth knowing about. Significant changes, particularly to your business name or address, can trigger a verification review that typically takes 24 to 48 hours, and your campaign may pause while that review happens.
So the rule for migration week is simple: freeze the profile. No name changes, no address tidy-ups, no reorganizing your primary category because someone finally got around to it. Routine updates sync within about 24 hours and are not the issue. It is the significant edits that can quietly stop your ads while you are watching a new campaign type settle in. Get the profile clean and accurate now, then leave it alone until the dust has settled.
While you are in there, fill out your services properly with real descriptions. That information is now doing more work than it used to, because it is a large part of how the system decides what you are relevant for. The less you tell it, the more it has to guess.
One useful exception: the phone number your calls and messages route to can still be edited directly in Google Ads, in real time. That one you keep control of.
Five Small Things That Will Bite You
Better Business Bureau callouts are being retired. They are no longer supported, and Google's recommendation is to have at least six other structured callouts ready to take their place. Line them up now in the campaign's assets tab: licensed, insured, years in business, emergency service, financing available, warranty, family owned, veteran owned. That strip of text does real persuasive work in a local ad unit, so do not leave the space half empty.
Sanity-check the converted budget. Google does the weekly-to-daily arithmetic automatically. Check it against what you actually meant to spend rather than assuming the conversion landed where you wanted.
Check who actually receives Google's emails. The 14-day notice, the 7-day reminder and the completion confirmation all go to whoever is listed as account administrator. If that inbox belongs to someone who left the company two years ago, you will learn about your migration by noticing that it already happened.
Verify every setting afterwards rather than assuming. Google moves your configuration across automatically, and mostly it lands correctly. Go through it anyway: daily budget, target CPA, service categories, locations, ad schedule, the phone number leads route to, photos and callouts.
The new campaign type appears to arrive by migration, not by choice. Practitioners working in these accounts report that you cannot yet build a fresh pay-per-lead campaign from inside Google Ads, so launching a brand new Local Services presence still starts at the Local Services sign-up rather than the Google Ads campaign builder. Google has not documented this either way, so if you are opening a new location, check before you plan around it.
Two Weeks for Judgment, Zero Days for Your Bank Account
Google's guidance is to allow up to two weeks for the migration to complete and performance to ramp back to stable levels. That is fair guidance and you should follow it, but be precise about what you are giving two weeks to.
Give it two weeks before you judge lead performance. Early numbers after any bidding change are noise, and yanking levers on day three is how a temporary dip becomes a permanent one.
Give it zero days before you check your spend. Those are separate activities. Look at what is going out daily from the moment the campaign goes live, because "allow two weeks to stabilize" is advice about interpreting performance, not permission to stop watching the money.
And when you do assess it, assess the right thing. The failure mode here is not dramatic, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. It looks like a perfectly good month on paper: volume up, cost per lead holding steady, every figure on the dashboard pointing the right way, and a booking rate that has quietly collapsed underneath all of it. An automated system asked to produce more leads will go and produce more leads. It cannot tell that the caller is on their fifth estimate, or is redecorating in the spring rather than now, or wants a job so small you would rather pass. Those are real people having real conversations with your office, and every one of them counts as a lead.
So track what happens after the phone rings. What share of leads became a quote, what share of quotes became a job, and what those jobs billed. That is the measurement that tells you whether this migration was neutral or expensive for you, and it is a measurement Google's reporting cannot do on your behalf.
One last thing, offered as an open question rather than an accusation. We could not find published guidance on how lead credits and disputes are handled once you are working inside Lead Manager. You are still only charged for valid leads, so a route for challenging an invalid one has to exist somewhere. It simply is not documented yet, and the older path that ended with a person reviewing your case was replaced by automatic crediting back in 2024. Until that detail is filled in, keep your own records: which leads were junk, when they came in, and the recordings that show it. If you ever have to make the argument, being able to evidence it is most of the battle.
What This Actually Asks of You
Strip away the noise and the migration asks three things. Know what a lead is worth to you, by service. Keep your own record of performance rather than relying on Google to hold it. And pay attention during the window when nobody, including Google, knows exactly how a blended target CPA behaves across services with very different lead costs.
None of that is exotic. It is the same discipline that separates a profitable ad account from an expensive one, and it was true before this announcement. Google has just made it compulsory.
If you would rather hand this to someone already inside these accounts watching the first wave move across, that is the work we do every day. And if you would rather run it yourself, run it with the numbers in front of you. Either way, download your reports this week. That part is not optional, and nobody can do it for you after the dashboard is gone.
