Q.01
Are Local Services Ads going away?
No. Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. You still pay per lead, your ads still run on Google Search and Maps, and the verified badge still shows in the categories that support it. What changes is where you manage it and how budgets and bidding work.
Google started the move in August 2026 with selected home and storefront service advertisers in the United States. If you run plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, pest control or moving, you are in the first group.
The short version for an owner: the separate Local Services Ads dashboard stops being where you work. Budgets, targeting and customer messages move into a Google Ads account, and the bidding controls you had are replaced by automated ones.
Q.02
When does this happen to your account?
In three phases. Selected United States home and storefront service advertisers started in August 2026. Service-area businesses and accounts using custom bidding follow in late 2026. Accounts outside the United States and the remaining business categories move in 2027.
You do not pick the date. Google sends an email 14 days before your migration date and another one seven days later, puts a banner in the Local Services Ads dashboard, and emails again once the move is done.
Watch the inbox tied to the account, not your general one. That 14-day notice is the only reliable window you get to pull your reports out of the old place.
Q.03
What actually changes for you?
Four things: where you log in, how your budget is expressed, how bidding works, and what appears on the ad. Your weekly budget gets divided by seven to set a daily average, and setting a manual maximum cost per lead is gone.
Google caps monthly spend at the daily average multiplied by 30.4, so the monthly ceiling lands close to where it was even though daily spend can run higher on busy days. That is expected behavior, not a billing error.
If you advertise in more than one service category, Google calculates a single campaign-level target cost per action and applies it across all of them, rather than the per-category targets you may have set before.
- You work in Google Ads, not the Local Services Ads dashboard
- Weekly budget becomes a daily average: the weekly figure divided by seven
- Manual bidding, including a maximum cost per lead, is no longer supported
- Several service categories share one campaign-level target cost per action
- Better Business Bureau callouts are no longer supported on the ad
Q.04
What stays the same?
The parts that made this channel worth running. You are charged when a customer contacts you through the ad rather than when someone clicks it, the ads still appear on Google Search and Maps, and your lead history comes with you into the new interface.
Past customer lead history transfers automatically, including contact details, the back and forth message history and older call recordings. It lands in the Lead Manager interface inside Google Ads.
Phone calls stay the required lead type. Messages are optional, and bookings become an optional lead type starting in October 2026. Google says some business categories will display the Google Verified badge on the ad and profile page.
Q.05
What does not come with you?
Your campaign-level performance history. Google states that previous campaign-level performance metrics will not migrate to Google Ads. Anything you want for a year-over-year comparison has to be downloaded before your migration date.
This is the one item with a hard deadline on it. Once the account moves, the old numbers are not sitting somewhere waiting for you.
Export at minimum your monthly spend, lead volume and cost per lead for the last two years. If you have ever argued with a marketing company about whether this channel pays for itself, that spreadsheet is the argument.
Q.06
Can you still get credited for junk leads?
Yes, and part of it is automatic. Google runs automated spam and duplicate filtering, and a Charge Status column shows whether a lead was charged, is in review, or was automatically credited. You can still report poor-quality leads through the feedback survey for that lead.
What counts as a charged lead has not loosened. Under the Local Services rules you are charged for a valid lead, which includes answering the call and speaking with the customer, receiving a text or email, receiving a voicemail, returning a missed call, or receiving a booking request. On the pay-per-lead side Google says you are charged only for valid, qualified phone leads that meet minimum call duration requirements.
Google also lists what it will not credit: the caller was researching prices, asked for advice on a project, or never responded when you called back. Report the genuinely bad ones, and let the filtering deal with the obvious duplicates.
Q.07
What should you do before your migration date?
Export your history, confirm who owns the Google Ads account, check the service area and hours, set a budget you can live with, and name the person who watches leads once they show up somewhere new. None of it takes long.
The ownership question catches people. If a former marketing company set up your Local Services Ads, find out now whether you control the Google Ads account this lands in. It is the same problem covered in our guide on who owns your website and Google Business Profile, and it is far easier to sort out before the move than after.
You can edit the service area by adding or removing cities, counties or ZIP codes, and you can sync the ad schedule to your Google Business Profile hours so ads run when somebody can actually pick up.
- Download two years of spend, lead volume and cost per lead
- Confirm admin access to the Google Ads account, in your name
- Check the service area against the cities and ZIP codes you really drive to
- Set the ad schedule to the hours a person answers the phone
- Name one person who opens Lead Manager every morning
Q.08
Does this change whether Local Services Ads are worth it?
Not the economics. You still pay per lead, you still sit above the regular results, and screening is still the barrier most competitors quit at. What changes is that the controls are more automated, so how fast you answer the phone matters more than it did.
Automated bidding spends faster when it sees demand. If calls are going to voicemail at two in the afternoon during a Florida summer, you now pay for that at a higher rate than you used to.
If you have not cleared screening yet, the background check is still the first hurdle, and our guide on passing the Local Services Ads background check covers the paperwork. If you are weighing this against search and your own website, our comparison of Local Services Ads, SEO and your website sets out what each one actually does.
If you want a second set of eyes before your migration date, our free audit looks at how your calls are handled today and what your ads and profile look like to a homeowner in your area.
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