Local Services Ads are moving into Google Ads

An email lands saying your Local Services Ads account is migrating in fourteen days. You read the first line, decide Google is reorganizing something on their end, and archive it.

Two weeks later your leads look different and you can’t say why.

Local Services Ads is moving out of its own dashboard and into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign. The pay-per-lead model doesn’t change. Almost everything around it does, and some of it changes what you spend.

Google started with home and storefront service businesses in the U.S.: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving. Service-area businesses without a storefront follow later, along with accounts running custom bidding or booking setups. Everything outside the U.S. moves in 2027.

You get an email fourteen days out and a reminder at seven. That’s your window.

Your weekly budget becomes a daily one

Local Services Ads ran on a weekly budget. Google Ads runs on a daily average. Google converts it by taking your historical average weekly budget and dividing by seven, then caps monthly spend at roughly 30.4 times that daily figure.

On paper it’s the same money. In practice a daily average behaves differently from a weekly cap. Google can spend more on a busy day and less on a slow one, which is usually what you want, but the number you’ve watched for years is now measuring something else.

Check the converted figure the first time you log in. If your weekly budget was unusual for any reason, a seasonal push, a slow stretch you never adjusted, the division carries that forward.

The bidding controls you had are going away

Manual bidding is no longer supported. Neither is target CPA set per business type.

If you paid different rates for different job types, one target for drain cleaning and a higher one for repipes, those collapse. Google calculates a single campaign-level target CPA and applies it across the account.

This is the change most likely to cost you money quietly. A blended target bids on your cheap jobs and your expensive jobs as though they were the same job. If most of your volume sat at the cheap end, the blended number pulls up. If most sat at the expensive end, it pulls down and your expensive work stops showing.

Nothing alerts you. Your cost per lead moves and it reads like the market got harder.

Write down your current targets before you migrate so you have something to compare against.

Your Google Business Profile is now driving

After the move, your business name, address and hours sync one direction, out of your Business Profile and into Google Ads. Not the other way.

Routine changes flow through within about a day. Update your hours for a holiday and the ads follow.

The part to know: a significant change to your business name or address triggers a verification review. Google says that usually runs 24 to 48 hours, and campaigns can pause while it does.

So if you were planning to clean up your business name, or you’ve just moved shops, do it deliberately and not on a Friday. An unplanned pause is two days without a ringing phone, in a business where the ringing phone is the whole point.

Your Business Profile has stopped being an SEO thing you set up once. It’s wired into your ad account now.

What to do before your fourteen days start

Four things, none of them long.

Confirm whether you’re in the first wave. If your trade is on the list above and you’re in the U.S., assume yes and watch for the email.

Open your Business Profile and read it the way a customer would. Name, address, hours, phone. Fix anything wrong now, while a verification review costs you nothing.

Write down what you’re spending and what a lead currently costs. Weekly budget, target CPA, and the rate per job type if you set those separately.

Screenshot your performance numbers. Your lead history transfers, contacts and message threads and older call recordings. Your performance history does not: past impressions, clicks, weekly spend and ad-level reports don’t migrate. Google says downloads will come to the redirection page, and recommends screenshots if you need the numbers sooner.

If tracking where your leads come from is already patchy, a platform change is the worst time to discover that. Two things are worth reading before the migration reaches your account. Google charging for calls you miss, because the lead economics carry straight over. And what happened when broad match became AI Max, because it is the same handover of control you are about to get on placement.

If Local Services Ads is most of how your phone rings, the two weeks between the notice and the switch are better spent on your settings than on hoping it goes smoothly. If you’d rather someone watched the numbers through it, that’s worth a conversation.