Running paid search for a home services business, mid-migration

What is actually happening, and when

Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads as a specialised Performance Max campaign type built for pay-per-lead goals. The first phase began in August 2026 for selected US home and storefront services, and it names the trades directly.

Phase one covers plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving. Late 2026 expands to service-area businesses without a storefront and to accounts with custom bidding or booking configurations. 2027 covers non-US accounts and everything remaining.

The account administrator gets an email 14 days before the migration date, a reminder seven days later, and a confirmation afterwards. After migration the old dashboard redirects and is gone.

So for most operators reading this, the question is not whether to prepare but how many weeks are left. Full detail in Local Services Ads are moving into Google Ads.

What survives, which is more than the panic suggests

The commercial mechanics are conservatively preserved. You still pay only for valid leads such as calls and messages, not clicks. Ads still show only on Google Search and Google Maps, in the same positions. Targeting stays keywordless, driven by service categories and areas.

That matters because the pay-per-lead model is the reason LSA works for trades in the first place. A roofer buying leads has a different risk profile from a roofer buying clicks, and Google has not touched that.

The disruption is in management and measurement, not in the product being bought. It is worth saying that plainly to anyone who has been told the sky is falling.

What you lose, in the order it will hurt

Four things go, and the first one is the only one that cannot be undone later.

Your reports do not come with you. Google's documentation is blunt: Local Services Ads performance reports will not transition to Google Ads, and the advice is to screenshot them before migrating. Years of cost-per-lead history informing your seasonal budgets becomes inaccessible. Export it now, not on migration day.

Manual bidding goes. Setting a maximum cost per lead is no longer supported.

Vertical-level target CPA goes. If you have run different targets for different trades inside one campaign, Google calculates one campaign-level target and applies it across all of them. For a business where a roofing lead and a lawn care lead are worth very different amounts, that blended target misallocates budget from day one. The fix is structural: separate campaigns per trade, decided before migration rather than after.

Better Business Bureau callouts are deprecated. Google's guidance is to select at least six other structured callouts from the assets tab. For trades where the BBB badge was doing real trust work, that is a message change, not an admin task.

The budget arithmetic nobody mentions

Weekly budgets become daily. Google divides your historical average weekly budget by seven, and caps monthly spend at the daily average times 30.4. The monthly total should hold. Daily spend can now swing on high-demand days in a way it could not before.

For a seasonal trade that is a real change in behaviour rather than an accounting one. A roofer after a storm, or an HVAC business in the first genuinely hot week, will now see spend concentrate into the days demand spikes.

That is usually what you want. It is not what a weekly cap did, and if your cash flow was built around the old smoothing, the first busy week will be a surprise.

What to count, now that both live in one account

LSA charges for valid leads and credits invalid ones, which is a cleaner starting signal than most channels give you. It is still not the same as a job. Once LSA sits inside Google Ads alongside Search, the two are optimising in the same place, and the account needs one definition of a good outcome rather than two.

The Leads page under Goals, Conversions, Leads replaces the old lead inbox, with charged status and lead type intact. That is where the raw signal lives.

The gap worth closing is between a charged lead and a booked job. A charged call from someone outside your service radius, or asking for work you do not do, is still a charged lead. Feeding back which leads became booked jobs is the same qualified-lead feedback loop that applies to any lead-gen account, and it matters more here because pay-per-lead makes the cost of a bad lead explicit rather than buried in a click budget.

This is also the point where running LSA and Search in one account becomes an advantage rather than an inconvenience. The same outcome definition can now steer both.

One thing that gets better

You can edit the phone number that call and message leads route to in real time, from inside Google Ads. And your business name, address and hours sync one way from Google Business Profile, so the two stop drifting apart.

The sync has an edge worth knowing about. Significant changes to business name or physical address trigger a verification review of 24 to 48 hours, during which the campaign may pause. Do not change either during a period you cannot afford to be dark, which for most trades means not during your season.

Targeting settings operate independently of the profile after migration, so service areas and ad schedules can be tuned for advertising without touching your organic listing. That separation is new and useful.

The order to do this in

Two of these are irreversible if missed, and both are cheap. Do them first.

• Export or screenshot every LSA report you would miss. This is the only item that cannot be undone later.

• Decide your campaign structure. If you run more than one trade under one budget, split them, or accept one blended target CPA you did not choose.

• Watch for the 14-day notification. Migration is automatic; the date is not yours to pick, but the preparation window is.

• Re-baseline afterwards on cost per booked job, not cost per lead. The reporting surface, budget cadence and bidding are all different enough that a straight before-and-after on cost per lead will mislead you for the first month.

• Then connect the outcome loop, so LSA and Search are optimising toward the same definition of a good job rather than two different proxies for one.

What changes on migration day

Migration phases