If you run a plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical, or cleaning business and you have been getting leads from those Google ads with the green “Google Guaranteed” checkmark, something is about to change on you, and most of the articles explaining it are written for marketers, not for the person actually holding the wrench.
This one is written for you. No jargon that isn’t explained. No assumption that you have ever opened Google Ads in your life, because most Local Services Ads advertisers never have. By the end you will understand exactly what is happening, what will break if you ignore it, and the handful of things worth doing before your migration date, which could be any day now.
Let me start with the single most important sentence, the one thing that, if you do nothing else, do this:
Before your migration happens, log into your Local Services Ads dashboard and download your performance reports. Once you migrate, that dashboard disappears forever and those historical reports do not come with you. We will cover exactly how below. If you read nothing else, read the section titled “The one thing you cannot undo.”
Now the full picture.
First, what even is a Local Services Ad? (Skip if you know)
Because a lot of contractors run these without knowing the official name, here is the quick version so the rest makes sense.
Local Services Ads, or LSAs, are the ads that appear right at the very top of Google when someone searches something like “emergency plumber near me.” They sit above the regular ads and above the map. They show your business name, your review score, your years in business, and crucially that green Google Guaranteed badge, the checkmark that tells a nervous homeowner that Google has verified your license and insurance and will refund the customer if the job goes badly.
Two things have always made LSAs different from every other kind of Google advertising:
You pay per lead, not per click. With normal Google ads, you pay every time someone clicks, even if they click by accident and leave. With LSAs, you only pay when someone actually calls you or messages you. A real lead. This is why contractors love them.
There are no keywords. You never had to figure out which search terms to bid on. You told Google your services and your area, and Google matched you to the right searches automatically using your Google Business Profile. Dead simple.
You managed all of this in a separate, simple dashboard at your Local Services Ads login. Not the big complicated Google Ads platform. A stripped-down interface built for busy business owners.
That simple dashboard is what is going away.
What is actually happening
Starting in August 2026, Google is moving Local Services Ads out of their own dashboard and into the main Google Ads platform, the big one that businesses use for all their other advertising.
Inside Google Ads, your LSA becomes a new, special campaign type. Google calls it “Performance Max with a pay-per-lead goal.” That is a mouthful, and the name causes panic among people who know Google Ads, so let me defuse that right now.
If you have heard of Performance Max, you may have heard it is an automated, hands-off campaign type that spreads your ads across YouTube, Gmail, the whole internet, wherever Google wants. That is the normal version. This is not that.
Google built a special, locked-down version just for Local Services advertisers. It borrows the “Performance Max” name and the automation, but it keeps everything that made LSAs work:
- Your ads still only appear on Google Search and Google Maps. Not YouTube. Not Gmail. Not random websites. Exactly the same places as today, in the same spots.
- You still only pay per lead. Calls and messages. Not clicks. The thing you love about LSAs is not changing.
- It is still keywordless. You still do not manage search terms. It still uses your Google Business Profile.
- Your Google Guaranteed badge stays. If you are already verified, your badge and verified status carry over automatically. You do not re-verify your license or insurance.
So the reach, the model, and the badge are all staying the same. What is changing is the steering wheel and dashboard you use to drive it. The car is the same. The cockpit is different, and a few of the controls you were used to have been moved or removed.
Let me walk through exactly which ones, because this is where the useful detail lives and where every other article goes vague.
Who is affected, and when
Google is doing this in waves, not all at once.
August 2026, the first wave, is specifically home and storefront services in the United States. Google named the industries directly: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving. If that is you, and you are in the US, you are in the very first group. Your migration could land any day this month.
Late 2026 brings in the broader group: service-area businesses that do not have a physical storefront, and accounts with more complex custom bidding or booking setups.
2027 is everyone else, including all businesses outside the US and any remaining categories.
You do not pick your date. Google picks it and tells you. Which brings us to the most important practical point in this whole article.
The one thing you cannot undo
I am putting this first among the action items because it is the only one that is permanent and the only one with a clock on it.
When your account migrates, your old Local Services Ads dashboard is gone. Not hidden. Gone. If you try to log into it on or after your migration day, it just redirects you to Google Ads. And here is the part that catches people: your historical performance reports do not transfer. All those records of how many leads you got, what you spent each week, how you performed month over month, season over season, none of it comes across to Google Ads.
Your actual customer leads do transfer. Contact details, message history, even old call recordings move over into the new “Lead Manager” inside Google Ads. That part is safe.
But the performance history, the numbers you would use to compare this June to last June, or to show a bank or a buyer how the business has grown, that you have to save yourself, and you have to do it before your migration date.
How to save it, step by step:
- Log into your Local Services Ads dashboard now, before any migration email arrives, so you are not scrambling.
- Find the reporting or performance section of the dashboard.
- Export or download every report you might ever want: monthly spend, lead counts, lead types, and any year-over-year views.
- Save them somewhere permanent. Not your downloads folder. A labelled folder in Google Drive, Dropbox, or emailed to yourself.
- If you work with a marketing person or agency, send them a copy too.
Do this today if you are in one of the August industries. The migration email gives you 14 days of warning, then a reminder 7 days later, but that warning only helps if the email goes to an inbox someone actually checks. If your Google account is under an old email, or an employee who left, or a web guy you no longer talk to, you may never see the warning, and then one day the dashboard is simply gone.
Go check right now which email address is the administrator on your Google account. This is the most valuable thirty seconds in this entire article.
What changes in how you pay: weekly becomes daily
Here is a subtle one that will confuse people who do not know to expect it.
LSAs ran on a weekly budget. You told Google what you wanted to spend per week. Google Ads does not think in weeks. It thinks in daily budgets. So on migration day, Google automatically converts your budget by taking your weekly amount and dividing it by 7.
Say you were spending $700 a week. After migration you will see a daily budget of $100 ($700 ÷ 7).
Do not panic when you see that smaller-looking number. It is the same spend. And your monthly total is protected: Google caps your monthly spend at your daily budget times 30.4 (the average days in a month), so $100 a day works out to a maximum of about $3,040 a month, the same as your $700 a week was.
The one real difference: your spending can now vary day to day. On a big demand day, a heatwave for an HVAC company, a freeze for a plumber, Google may spend more than your daily average to catch those leads, then less on quiet days to balance out. Over the month it evens out to your cap. So do not be alarmed if you glance at one day and see more than $100 spent. Look at the month, not the day.
What changes in how you bid: two controls are being removed
This one matters most for contractors who were actively managing their cost per lead, and especially for anyone running more than one trade.
Manual bidding is gone. In LSAs, some advertisers set a maximum cost per lead by hand, a manual bid. Google Ads no longer allows that for these campaigns. You move to automated bidding, where you set a target cost per lead and Google’s system works toward it, rather than a hard manual cap.
The bigger one, if you run multiple trades: per-vertical Target CPA is gone. In plain terms, “vertical” means a service category, like plumbing versus HVAC. In the old world, if you ran both under one account, you could tell Google you were willing to pay a different amount for a plumbing lead than for an HVAC lead. That made sense, because a new furnace install lead is worth far more than a drain-clearing lead.
After migration, you cannot set different lead prices for different trades inside one campaign. Google takes your old per-trade targets and blends them into a single, unified target cost per lead that applies to every service in that campaign. So your high-value furnace leads and your low-value drain leads get treated as if they are worth the same.
Here is the fix, and it is worth knowing before migration rather than after: if you want to keep bidding differently for different trades, you need to split them into separate campaigns. One campaign for plumbing, one for HVAC, each with its own target cost per lead. Google’s own documentation confirms this is the intended workaround. If you run a multi-trade business and lead value varies a lot between your services, put a reminder in your calendar to set this up once you are migrated, or have your marketing person do it. Left alone, the blended target can quietly overpay for cheap leads and underbid on the valuable ones.
A small thing that will surprise Better Business Bureau members
If you have been showing a Better Business Bureau callout on your LSA, that badge is being removed. Google is no longer supporting BBB callouts in the new system.
It is not a disaster, but if the BBB logo was part of how you built trust with cautious homeowners, you will want to replace that trust signal. Google’s answer is to use its other callouts, the little text badges under your ad. After migration you can go into your campaign’s assets and turn on at least six of them: things like your business hours, your specialties, the payment methods you accept, whether you offer emergency service, and so on. Set these up so your ad still looks credible and complete. It takes a few minutes and it is easy to forget.
The trap nobody warns you about: your Google Business Profile can pause your ads
This is the most technical thing in the article and I am including it because it can genuinely take your ads offline for a day or two, and almost nobody is talking about it.
After migration, your ad campaign is wired directly to your Google Business Profile, the free business listing that shows your name, address, hours, and phone number on Google. Certain details now sync automatically, in one direction, from your Business Profile into your ads. Change them on your Business Profile and they update on your ads within about a day.
That is convenient. Here is the catch.
If you make a significant change to your business name or your physical address on your Google Business Profile, it triggers a verification review, and your ad campaign can pause while that review happens. Google says the review typically takes 24 to 48 hours. During that time, your ads may stop showing, which means no leads.
So the practical warning is this: do not casually edit your business name or address on your Google Business Profile during your busy season, or right before a weekend you are counting on for leads. A change that felt harmless, tidying up your business name, updating a suite number, can silently pause your lead flow for a day or two at the worst possible time. If you must make such a change, do it on a slow Monday, not the Friday before a holiday weekend.
Minor things, your hours, your phone number, small name tweaks, sync within 24 hours without pausing anything. It is specifically the big identity changes, name and address, that trigger the review.
What actually gets better
This is not all caution. A few things genuinely improve, and it is fair to name them.
One login for everything. If you also run regular Google Search ads, or ever want to, everything now lives in one place instead of two separate dashboards. Many marketers have wanted LSAs here for years.
You can change your lead routing phone number in real time. In the new setup you can edit the phone number your call and message leads go to, yourself, instantly. Useful if you are switching phone systems or want leads going to a different line after hours.
The Lead Manager keeps everything you had. The new lead inbox inside Google Ads has the same features as your old LSA inbox: which leads you were charged for, the type of each lead, the ability to dispute a bad lead through the feedback form, and the option to download your leads into your own CRM. Nothing you relied on for managing leads day to day is lost.
Your verified badge and status carry over with no re-verification. You do not redo your license and insurance checks. That is one headache you are spared.
One limitation to plan around: you cannot make new campaigns in Google Ads yet
A heads-up if you were planning to expand. Right now, you cannot create a brand-new pay-per-lead campaign inside Google Ads. The migration moves your existing LSA over, but if you want to set up a new one, say you are opening a second location or adding a trade, you still have to do that the old way, at g.co/localservices, for now. Google says the ability to create new ones inside Google Ads is coming later. So if expansion is on your horizon, know that the tooling is mid-transition.
Your simple, dated checklist
Here is everything above, boiled down to what to actually do and when.
Right now, this week, if you are in an August industry (plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, moving):
- Check which email address is the administrator on your Google account. Make sure it is one you actually monitor. This is how you will get your 14-day warning.
- Log into your Local Services Ads dashboard and download all your historical performance reports. Save them somewhere permanent. This is the one thing you cannot undo later.
When your 14-day migration email arrives:
- Do the report download now if you somehow have not. Time is up soon.
- Note your migration date. Avoid making big Google Business Profile changes (name, address) around it.
In the two weeks after migration:
- Log into Google Ads and confirm your budget looks right (remember: weekly ÷ 7 = your new daily number, same total spend).
- If you run multiple trades and value their leads differently, plan to split them into separate campaigns so you can bid differently for each.
- Go to your campaign assets and turn on at least six callouts, especially if you are replacing a Better Business Bureau badge.
- Find the new Lead Manager (under the Goals dropdown, then Conversions, then Leads) so you know where your leads live now.
- Give it up to two weeks to settle. Google says performance ramps back to normal within about two weeks of migration, so do not panic if the first few days look different.
Ongoing:
Watch your cost per lead. If it drifts, that blended per-trade target is the first thing to check.
Do not edit your business name or address on Google Business Profile during busy periods, since it can pause your ads for 24 to 48 hours.
Where this fits in the bigger picture
If you have felt like Google keeps moving your cheese lately, you are not imagining it. This is part of a much larger pattern in 2026 where Google is consolidating everything into fewer, more automated campaign types. Standalone Display campaigns are folding into Demand Gen. Bidding behaviour changed on budget-limited campaigns in August. Now Local Services Ads are folding into Performance Max. The direction is always the same: fewer manual controls, more automation, everything in one platform.
For a contractor, the honest takeaway is that the things you can still control matter more than ever: your Google Business Profile being accurate and complete, your reviews being strong, your response time to leads being fast, and your lead disputes being filed diligently so you are not paying for junk. The platform is automating the ad delivery. It is not automating whether you pick up the phone or show up on time. That part is still all you, and it is still where most home service businesses win or lose.
If you want a broader sense of where Google Ads is heading and what it means for local businesses specifically, we wrote an honest state-of-things overview here, and if you are weighing whether to bring in help to manage any of this, our guide to why Google Ads generates bad leads and how to fix it is written in the same plain-language spirit as this piece.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to do anything, or does the migration happen automatically? The migration itself is automatic. Google moves your campaign, budget, settings, photos, and leads over without you rebuilding anything. The one thing you must do manually is download your historical performance reports before your dashboard disappears, because those do not transfer.
Will my Google Guaranteed badge disappear? No. If you are already verified, your Google Guaranteed (Google Verified) badge and your verified status carry over automatically. You do not need to redo your license or insurance verification.
Will my ads start showing on YouTube or random websites now that it is “Performance Max”? No. Despite the name, this special pay-per-lead version only shows on Google Search and Google Maps, exactly like your Local Services Ads do today. It does not spread to YouTube, Gmail, or the Display Network.
Do I still only pay per lead, or do I pay per click now? You still only pay per valid lead, calls and messages, not per click. The pay-per-lead model is explicitly staying the same.
What happens to my existing leads and call recordings? They transfer automatically into the new Lead Manager inside Google Ads. Contact details, message history, and older call recordings all move over and stay accessible. You can still dispute bad leads and download leads to your CRM.
My weekly budget turned into a smaller daily number. Am I spending less now? No, it is the same spend. Google divided your weekly budget by 7 to get a daily average. Your monthly total is capped at that daily number times 30.4, which matches what you spent before. Daily amounts can vary, but the monthly total does not exceed the cap.
I run both plumbing and HVAC. Why did my cost per lead settings change? Google Ads no longer lets you set different target lead prices for different trades within one campaign. It blends your old per-trade targets into one. If you want to bid differently for plumbing versus HVAC, split them into separate campaigns after migration, one per trade.
Can I create a new Local Services campaign in Google Ads? Not yet. For now, new pay-per-lead campaigns still have to be created at g.co/localservices. Google says in-platform creation is coming later.
How much warning will I get before my account migrates? An email to your account administrator 14 days before, a banner in your dashboard, and a reminder email 7 days later. This is exactly why you should confirm the administrator email is one you actually check.
Why did my ads pause after I updated my business info? Significant changes to your business name or physical address on your Google Business Profile trigger a verification review, and your campaign can pause for 24 to 48 hours while Google reviews it. Avoid making these changes during busy periods.
How long until performance is back to normal after migrating? Google says to allow up to two weeks for the migration to fully settle and for performance to ramp back to stable levels. Do not judge results in the first few days.
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