The migration into Google Ads

The standalone Local Services Ads dashboard is going away. Campaigns are moving into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, in phases, with the account administrator getting an email first.

The thing to understand before it happens: your historical performance reports do not come with you. Everything else on this page is mechanics; that one is irreversible if you ignore it.

What transfers, and what you lose

The budget arithmetic

Your historical average weekly budget is divided by 7 to set the daily average. Monthly spend is then capped at that daily average multiplied by 30.4.

Two consequences worth working through before migration rather than after:

Daily spend can exceed the daily average. The ceiling that holds is the monthly one. A week of heavy demand is not a malfunction.

Check the division yourself. If the migrated daily figure is not your former weekly budget divided by seven, something is wrong and it is easier to raise before the campaign has a history.

Bidding: less control, deliberately

Manual bidding — setting a maximum cost per lead — is no longer supported, and neither is a target CPA set per vertical category. A single campaign-level target CPA is calculated and applied across all your categories.

If you genuinely need different economics for different service categories, the remaining route is separate campaigns. That is a real decision with real overhead, and it is worth taking before migration while you still have per-vertical performance data to justify it — data that, as above, does not transfer.

The one-way sync

Business name, address and hours flow from your Google Business Profile into Google Ads and cannot be edited on the Ads side.

This connects directly to the missed-calls spoke: your Business Profile hours are the hours used to decide whether an unanswered call is billable. After migration, that field is edited in one place only, and it is doing two jobs at once.

Practitioners report that significant edits to name or address can pause a campaign for review for a day or two, and advise against making them immediately before migration. That pause length was not found in Google's documentation when this page was built, so treat the timing as practitioner reporting rather than a documented figure — while noting the underlying advice is sound regardless: do not restructure your core business details in the same week as a migration.

Notices, and who receives them

The notice goes to the account administrator. If your agency holds that role, your firm may never see it, and the first you learn of the change is a dashboard that no longer exists.

Verify who the administrator is now. This is a five-minute check that determines whether you get two weeks of warning or none.

Rollout, in phases

Google's documentation describes the first phase beginning with selected home and storefront service advertisers in the United States, expanding later in 2026 to broader groups including service-area businesses without storefronts and accounts with custom bidding or booking setups, with non-US accounts and remaining categories moving during 2027.

The practical reading: do not plan from the published phase list. Plan from your own account notice, because the phases are groupings and your account is what migrates.

The fourteen-day checklist

When your notice arrives:

1. Export everything. Spend, charged leads, lead type, cost per lead, call recordings, category and location performance. Screenshots where export is unavailable. Store them outside the agency's account.
2. Write down your own outcome data. Qualified lead rate, consultation rate, signed-work rate, cost per signed piece of work. Google does not know which leads became good business unless you record it, and after migration you lose the baseline to compare against.
3. Audit the Business Profile. Name, address, phone, hours, primary category, website, photos. Correct it now, not during the migration window.
4. Confirm the administrator is someone at your organization.
5. Check the budget math on the day it converts.
6. Document the pre-migration bid setup and target CPA, so you can tell whether the new campaign-level target is better or worse.
7. Test every lead path afterward — calls, messages, notifications, the Leads page, recordings, and anything feeding your CRM.
8. Leave it alone for a fortnight. Performance takes time to settle, and a budget change made in week one tells you nothing except that you changed two things at once.

One reported change not confirmed here

Practitioner reporting indicates the Better Business Bureau callout is no longer supported, with advice to select several other structured callouts in its place. That was not confirmed from Google's documentation when this page was built. If you run that callout, check your own account rather than relying on this page or any other, and choose replacements that are accurate for your business and permitted by whatever advertising rules govern your profession.