Google Ads documentation sets out the operational mechanics of the Local Services Ads migration, which entered its first phase in August 2026 with selected home and shop front advertisers in the United States. The standalone dashboard stops working on transition day, and campaign performance is expected to take up to two weeks to stabilise.

The help centre page describing the move, published under the heading Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, now carries a level of procedural detail that was absent when the transition was first documented in July 2026. Google has laid out a notification sequence, a budget conversion formula, a set of deprecated bidding controls and a list of interface locations where migrated advertisers will find the functions they previously used in a separate product.

The first phase covers plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and removals. According to Google, these categories were selected as home and shop front service advertisers in the United States. Broader groups follow in late 2026, including service-area businesses without physical shop fronts and accounts running custom bidding or booking configurations. Non-US accounts and all remaining business categories move in 2027.

Three emails and one redirect

The notification cadence is fixed. An advance notification email reaches the account administrator listed on the profile 14 days before the individual migration date. Warning banners appear inside the existing dashboard over the same period. A final reminder email is sent seven days later, which places it seven days before transition. A third message confirms completion once the account has moved.

What happens on transition day is unambiguous in the documentation. Access to the original Local Services Ads dashboard ends. Any attempt to log in on or after the migration date redirects to the campaign overview inside Google Ads. There is no parallel running period and no described mechanism for reverting.

That redirect is the point at which the historical reporting gap becomes permanent. Google states that previous performance reports will not carry over and will no longer be accessible after migration. The documentation directs advertisers to a frequently asked questions section for instructions on downloading reports beforehand. In the captured version of the page, seven FAQ entries appear as collapsed headings without visible answers, among them "Will my campaign performance reports (total spend, leads, etc.) carry over?" and "Will my past customer leads carry over?" The export instructions themselves are therefore behind an interaction rather than in the body text, which matters given that the 14-day window is the only period in which the export is possible.

What the documentation says is preserved

Four things are described as unchanged. Billing continues on a pay-per-lead basis, covering valid leads such as phone calls and messages rather than ad clicks. That distinction separates the new campaign type from standard Performance Max, which charges per click. Placement is unchanged: ads continue to serve exclusively on Google Search and Google Maps, in the same positions as before. Targeting remains keywordless, driven by service categories and service areas rather than keyword lists. And the stated focus on high-intent customer connections is described as unchanged.

Verification status survives the move. Businesses that have already completed verification keep their Google Verified badge, which transfers automatically. Insurance and licence reverification are no longer required. The documentation adds a conditional, however: if any additional business-level checks are ever required, a notification will appear in the Google Ads account. Neither the trigger for such checks nor their scope is specified.

The bidding controls that disappear

Two bidding mechanisms are deprecated outright. Manual bidding, including the maximum cost per lead setting, is no longer supported. Vertical-level Target CPA is also removed, on the grounds that Google Ads does not support that granularity.

The second removal carries a concrete arithmetic consequence for multi-vertical accounts. Where an advertiser previously ran different Target CPA amounts for separate verticals inside a single campaign, a unified campaign-level Target CPA is calculated and applied across all vertical categories. Preserving separate bidding rules by business category now requires separate campaigns, one per vertical. The documentation gives plumbing and HVAC as its worked example.

Manual bidding in Local Services Ads has a documented history of contraction. Google introduced Target Cost Per Lead bidding in September 2024 as a middle position between the manual Max Per Lead setting and fully automated Maximize Leads, reporting at the time that advertisers moving from manual bidding to the new option saw lead volume rise while those moving from automated bidding saw it fall. Feature removal has also been selective by vertical before: tax specialist advertisers lost message leads, autocrediting, booking and call recording in January 2025.

The deprecation also lands during a wider adjustment to how targets behave. Google restored Target CPA and Target ROAS as standalone bidding strategy labels in June 2026, and a separate change effective 17 August 2026 altered how budget-constrained campaigns pursue their stated targets, a change that drew sustained criticism from practitioners before it took effect.

Weekly budgets divided by seven

Budget conversion follows a stated formula. The historical average weekly budget is divided by seven to produce a daily average budget. Google states that monthly spend is unaffected, because the monthly ceiling is the daily average multiplied by 30.4, the average number of days in a month. Daily spend may fluctuate on high-demand days without monthly billing exceeding that limit.

Seven multiplied by 30.4 divided by seven returns 30.4, so a weekly budget of 700 units becomes a daily average of 100 and a monthly ceiling of 3,040. Under the previous weekly structure the equivalent four-week figure would have been 2,800, with the difference reflecting the 4.34-week average month rather than any change in policy. The mechanism is the standard Google Ads average daily budget, whose pacing behaviour was itself modified on 1 March 2026 so that systems proactively pursue the monthly ceiling regardless of ad scheduling. Advertisers who had used weekly budgets as a hard operational cap inherit a different instrument, one where the binding constraint is monthly rather than weekly.

Business Profile becomes the system of record

The migrated campaign draws its core identity data from Google Business Profile. Business name, physical address and standard opening hours sync in one direction, from the profile into Google Ads. Changing those details requires editing the profile itself. Other fields, including photos and service areas, are pre-populated from the profile but can be customised independently for ads once migration is complete.

A caveat attaches to the sync. Significant updates to a business name or physical address trigger a standard verification review, described as typically taking 24 to 48 hours, during which the campaign may temporarily pause. For a service business making a legitimate address change, that is a documented gap in serving with no stated exemption.

The dependency is not new. Google moved Local Services Ads review management into Business Profile on 11 July 2025, and had earlier merged the booking systems of the two products in 2024. The migration completes a sequence in which the profile, rather than the advertising account, holds the authoritative record of what a business is and where it operates.

Callouts, assets and a number that appears twice

Better Business Bureau callouts are no longer supported. The documentation instructs businesses to open the campaign assets tab and select at least six other structured callouts, naming opening hours, specialities and accepted payment methods as examples.

The figure six recurs later in a different sense. Under asset management, the page states that up to 100 additional business photos can be uploaded and that business callouts can be managed up to six per category. Whether the earlier instruction to select at least six callouts refers to six in total or six within a category is not resolved in the text, and the two passages sit in different sections without cross-reference.

The asset model is otherwise deliberately narrow. Although standard Performance Max requires or supports headlines, videos and sitelinks, the documentation states that these do not apply to campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. The campaign type is a constrained variant rather than the full product.

Where the lead inbox went

Lead handling moves to a table reached through the Goals drop-down, then Conversions, then Leads. Google describes this as a replacement for the Local Services Ads lead inbox, retaining charged status, lead type such as call or message, a lead feedback form and CSV-style download for import into a customer relationship management system. Message leads open a communication panel where text messages or emails can be read and answered inside Google Ads.

That location is the same one Google populated with a native Leads screen on 1 June 2026 for Google-hosted form leads, tracking raw, qualified, converted and lost status across a 60-day window. Lead quality measurement in the same product area has been shifting as well: Google replaced call duration with AI analysis of call recordings as the primary conversion signal for phone calls in April 2026, with call recording enabled by default for most accounts.

Reporting for migrated campaigns runs on three named metrics: Conversions, displaying the total number of charged leads; Cost, total ad spend; and Cost per conversion, the average cost per lead. Real-time editing of the phone number to which call and message leads route is available in the interface, which the documentation frames as a gain in self-service control.

Smooth transition, two-week ramp

The migration timeline section opens by describing a rollout structured for a smooth transition with no disruption to advertising. Two later passages qualify that. Campaigns may temporarily pause during verification reviews lasting 24 to 48 hours. And a flagged note states that while many ads will start running right away, the process can take up to two weeks to complete fully and for campaign performance to ramp back to stable levels.

A two-week performance ramp is not the same as no disruption. For a roofing or HVAC business in the northern hemisphere, an August or September transition falls inside a working season, and the documentation offers no mechanism for selecting a migration date.

The help page also fronts an AI support agent with three suggested questions: how to access old lead history after migration, what happens to the weekly budget during the transition, and why manual bidding was removed for pay-per-lead campaigns. Routing those questions to a chat interface rather than answering them in the body text continues a pattern PPC Land documented when the Google Ads support contact form began redirecting toward an AI agent experience in February 2026.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Local Services Ads occupied an unusual position in Google's portfolio: a separate interface, a separate billing model, a separate verification regime and a separate lead inbox, all serving a category of small businesses that rarely touch Google Ads directly. Folding it into Performance Max removes that separation and applies standard platform mechanics to accounts that were never built around them.

For agencies managing home service clients, the immediate work is bounded and dated. Historical reports must be exported inside a 14-day window that opens without warning. Multi-vertical accounts running distinct Target CPA values lose that structure unless they are split into separate campaigns first. Weekly budget discipline converts to a monthly ceiling with a documented 2-times daily and 30.4-times monthly tolerance. None of these are reversible after transition day.

The consolidation also arrives while local advertising inventory itself is being reshaped. Paid placements inside the local pack rose from under three percent to 21.99 percent of mobile ranking reports between November 2025 and January 2026, a 733 percent increase in three months. Apple opened Maps ad buying in the United States and Canada in August 2026, but its policy excludes home services outright, leaving plumbing, roofing, HVAC and contracting businesses without the alternative inventory pool that retail and hospitality advertisers gained.

The wider pattern inside Google Ads is one of optional settings becoming defaults and distinct products becoming goal types. Local Inventory Ads become the default for all Shopping campaigns from 31 August 2026. Campaign total budgets reached Search, Performance Max and Shopping in January 2026. The Local Services migration is the largest single instance of that pattern to date, because it retires an entire advertiser-facing product rather than a setting inside one.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, and the Local Services Ads advertisers whose campaigns are being converted into Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. The first phase covers home and shop front service businesses in the United States across plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and removals. Account administrators listed on each profile receive the notifications.

What: Automatic migration of every existing Local Services Ads campaign into a constrained Performance Max campaign type. Pay-per-lead billing, Search and Maps placement and keywordless targeting are preserved. Manual bidding and vertical-level Target CPA are deprecated, weekly budgets convert to daily averages by dividing by seven, Better Business Bureau callouts are removed, historical performance reports do not carry over, and the standalone dashboard redirects to Google Ads on transition day.

When: The first phase began in August 2026. Broader advertiser groups follow in late 2026, and non-US accounts plus all remaining categories move in 2027. Each account receives an advance email 14 days before its individual migration date, a reminder seven days later, and a confirmation on completion. Verification reviews triggered by name or address changes take 24 to 48 hours, and full performance stabilisation can take up to two weeks.

Where: Inside the Google Ads platform, replacing the separate Local Services Ads dashboard. Ad serving continues on Google Search and Google Maps in the same positions as before.

Why: According to Google, the transition allows all Google advertising to be managed in one platform while retaining the pay-per-lead model. The practical effect is that a product with its own interface, billing logic and bidding controls is absorbed into standard Google Ads mechanics, with the controls that did not fit those mechanics removed rather than ported.