Your Local Services Ads account is moving to Google Ads. Split your trades before it does.

TL;DR

• Google is moving every Local Services Ads account into Google Ads, into a Performance Max campaign type with pay-per-lead goals. Google names plumbing, HVAC and electrical in the first phase, from August 2026, but says only "select" advertisers go first, and the late-2026 phase includes service-area businesses without a storefront. The only reliable date is the 14-day email.
• If you run more than one trade in one LSA campaign with a separate target cost per lead for each, Google will replace those targets with one campaign-level target. The only way Google offers to keep separate targets is separate campaigns, one per trade.
• Your LSA performance reports do not come with you. Your lead history does. Save the reports before your migration date.
• You still pay per valid lead, not per click, and the ads still show only on Google Search and Google Maps.
• Google emails a 14-day warning to the account administrator on your LSA profile. If that is your agency, you may never see it.

What is actually changing

What stays the same. You pay for valid leads such as calls and messages, not clicks. The ads show only on Google Search and Google Maps, "in the same ad positions as before". Targeting stays keywordless: it runs off your service categories and service areas, not a keyword list. Our owner's manual for Local Services Ads covers what you pay for and how service areas and job types work.

What changes:

Two more details matter to an owner:

• What the report calls your leads. In Google Ads, "Conversions" is the number of leads you were charged for, and "Cost / conv." is your average cost per lead. That is a charged lead, not a booked call and not a sold job.
• Your Business Profile now controls part of the campaign. Your business name, address and hours sync one way from your Google Business Profile into Google Ads. Google says a significant change to the name or address triggers a verification review that "typically takes 24 to 48 hours, during which your campaign may temporarily pause". Do not rename the company in the weeks before and after your migration date.

If you have already completed business verification, your Google Verified badge and verified status carry over, and Google says insurance and license reverification are no longer required.

When your account moves

Google is moving accounts in three phases:

• August 2026: "select home and storefront service advertisers in the United States". Plumbing, HVAC and electrical are named in this phase.
• Late 2026: the move "expands to broader advertiser groups", including "service-area businesses without physical storefronts" and accounts with custom bidding or booking configurations.
• 2027: accounts outside the US and every remaining category.

Google doesn't say which accounts count as "select", so a service-area shop in these trades could be in either phase. Prepare as if your 14-day email could arrive any week. Google follows it with a reminder 7 days later and shows a banner inside the LSA dashboard. After the move, Google says to allow up to two weeks for the campaign to "ramp back to stable levels".

One target cost per lead for every trade you sell

This change happens on migration day, without any action from you.

If you sell two trades from one LSA campaign with a different target cost per lead for each, you set them apart for a reason: a plumbing lead and an air conditioning lead are worth different amounts, cost different amounts and arrive in different months. Google's page is direct about what happens to those targets on migration day:

"If you previously managed different Target CPA amounts for separate verticals under a single campaign, a unified campaign-level Target CPA will be calculated and applied to all vertical categories."

Google does not say how that single number is calculated or how the campaign divides spend between trades under it. What follows is our reading of how target cost per lead bidding behaves, not a statement from Google.

A target is an average the campaign tries to hit. The cheapest way to hit an average is to buy more of whichever leads come in under it and fewer of the ones that come in over it. Say, purely as an illustration, your air conditioning target was $70 and your plumbing target $110, and the blended target lands at $80 because you buy more AC leads. A plumbing lead that used to be worth buying at $105 is now $25 over target, so the campaign buys fewer of them, although nobody decided to sell less plumbing.

Which trade loses depends on your market and the month. If Google weights the new number by lead volume, which its page doesn't say, the smaller trade, with fewer leads feeding the average, has the least say in it.

We have seen the second trade fade in search campaigns, where two trades share one daily budget instead of one target.

Rescue Air Heating, Cooling & Plumbing · Dallas, TXRead the case

2.0 to 2.2×

Plumbing jobs sold from search

Window

Two quarters against the two before

Source

Client CRM

That case is about search budgets, not LSA targets. How two trades in one budget play out has the full story; what a plumbing line with its own budget looks like is on our plumbing marketing page. The mechanism is not identical: in a shared budget the busier, higher-ticket trade tends to take the money; under one blended target, in our reading, the trade whose leads cost more than the average gets bought less. The result we saw in search, and expect under one target, is the same: one trade fades without anyone deciding it should.

What Google offers instead. The same help page gives the fix: "If you wish to maintain separate bidding rules for different business categories after migration, you can achieve this by setting up separate campaigns for each vertical (for example, creating separate campaigns for plumbing and HVAC in Local Services)." The FAQ adds that you can't create new pay-per-lead campaigns inside Google Ads yet. New campaigns are still created at g.co/localservices.

So split before your date. If you do it after, the unified target is already running on both trades while you set the new campaigns up.

Your reports don't come with you

Google's FAQ answers this plainly: past impressions, clicks, weekly spend and ad-level reports "will not migrate to Google Ads". A download page is promised "soon". Until it exists, Google's own advice is to take screenshots.

Lead history does transfer, to a new Leads page under Goals → Conversions in Google Ads. It keeps the charged status, lead type, the lead feedback form and a download to import into your CRM.

The reason the reports matter is comparison. After the move you will be looking at a new daily budget, a new single target and a new report layout. Without last season's cost per lead by trade, you have nothing to judge the new numbers against.

What this doesn't cover

• How the unified target is calculated. Google hasn't published it. Our explanation of what one target does to two trades is our reading of how target cost per lead bidding works, informed by what we have seen in search campaigns, not by Google.
• Lead credits and disputes after the move. The migration page mentions a lead feedback form on the new Leads page and says nothing about credits. How credits work today is in our guide to Google LSA lead credits.
• Missed-call charging. As reported by Search Engine Roundtable and other trade outlets in August 2026, Google will charge for some missed calls from October 1; we could not find a Google help page on it when we checked on September 24. That is covered, with its sources, in a separate article.

Do this before your migration date

1. Check who gets the 14-day email. Ask whoever set up your LSA account which email is listed as account administrator. If it is your agency's, ask them to forward the notice the day it arrives.
2. Screenshot the reports. Every performance report the dashboard shows, as far back as it goes, per campaign if you run more than one. Lead history transfers, per Google, so the reports are what you must save.
3. Write down your current targets. Weekly budget, and target or max cost per lead per trade. If you have separate targets per trade, these are the numbers the unified target replaces; if you bid manually, they are what you check the new bidding against.
4. Split the trades if their targets differ. Separate campaigns per trade at g.co/localservices, before your date.
5. Leave the Business Profile alone. No name or address changes in the weeks before and after your migration date. That triggers a 24–48 hour review with a possible pause.
6. Replace the BBB callout. Add at least six structured callouts, such as hours, specialties and payment methods, as Google suggests.
7. After the move, wait two weeks before judging it. Then compare "Cost / conv." per campaign with the numbers from step 3.

FAQ

When will my Local Services Ads account move to Google Ads? Google migrates in phases. Some US home service advertisers, including HVAC, plumbing and electrical, started in August 2026. Google says the late-2026 phase includes service-area businesses without physical storefronts, and doesn't say which accounts are in the first phase.

Will I start paying per click? No. Google says you still pay only for valid leads, such as calls and messages, rather than ad clicks.

Will my ads start showing on YouTube or other sites? No. Pay-per-lead campaigns show only on Google Search and Google Maps, in the same positions as Local Services Ads.

Do I keep my Google Verified badge? Yes, if you already passed business verification. Google says the verified status and the badge transfer automatically.

Can I create a new Local Services Ads campaign inside Google Ads? Not yet. Google says new pay-per-lead campaigns are still created at g.co/localservices, and campaign creation in Google Ads will come later.

What does "Conversions" mean in the new report? The number of leads you were charged for. "Cost / conv." is your average cost per lead. Neither tells you how many of those leads were booked or sold.

Sources

• Google Ads Help, "Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals", https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17213585. Read in full on September 24, 2026. Every quotation above is from that page. The trade reports on missed-call charging are listed in the separate article on it.
• Google Ads Help, "Best practices for pay-per-lead goals for Performance Max campaigns", https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17326561. Read in full on September 24, 2026. Source of the Maximize Conversions default and the 15-leads-a-month threshold.