Google is shutting down the Local Services Ads dashboard and moving LSA into Google Ads. Your ads will keep running. Your old reports won't carry over.
If you are a plumber, HVAC contractor, electrician, roofer, or any other home service business spending real money on LSA, this affects you this year. Google started moving US home service accounts in August and will continue through 2026, with everyone else following in 2027.
What's changing
The short version: the product stays, the control panel moves. Here is what Google's own help documentation says, in plain English.
Before |
After the move |
|
|---|---|---|
Where your ads show |
Top of Search and Maps, with the Google Verified badge |
Same spots, same badge |
What you pay for |
Valid leads (calls, messages, bookings) |
Same |
Where you manage it |
The LSA dashboard |
Google Ads, as a "Performance Max" campaign with a pay-per-lead goal |
Where leads land |
The LSA inbox |
Lead Manager inside Google Ads |
Budget |
Average weekly budget |
Average daily budget |
Bidding |
Manual max cost per lead, or a target per job type |
One target cost per lead for the whole campaign. Manual bidding goes away. |
Business name, address, hours |
Entered in LSA separately |
Synced from your Google Business Profile |
Old performance reports |
Live in the LSA dashboard |
Do not transfer. Dashboard access ends. |
Two things worth flagging.
Do not let the "Performance Max" name scare you. A normal Performance Max campaign runs your ads across YouTube, Gmail, Display, and everywhere else Google can put them. This one does not. Google says these campaigns stay on Search and Maps only, keep the pay-per-lead billing, and stay keywordless. It is LSA with a new label.
The bidding change is the one that can quietly cost you money. Today you can set a different target for drain cleaning than for water heater installs. After the move, Google blends those into one campaign-level target. If your job types have very different values, you may need separate campaigns, and each one will have less data to bid on. That is a judgment call, and it is worth making before the move rather than after.
The part nobody is talking about
Your lead history transfers. Your performance history does not.
That sounds like a small distinction. It is not. The individual leads, the names and phone numbers and call recordings, come with you. The reports that tell you what you paid per lead last March, how many leads you got by job type, how spend trended week over week, all of that stays in a dashboard you can no longer log into. On migration day, the old LSA login simply redirects you to Google Ads.
For a business spending $30K a month, that history is the only proof you have of what the channel has been doing. Without it, you cannot answer the questions that matter in January: Is the new campaign performing better or worse than the old one? Did cost per lead go up because of the move, or because of the season? Is Google's single blended target actually working for us?
Google gives account admins an email 14 days before the move and a reminder seven days later. Two weeks is enough time, if someone is watching the inbox. For a lot of businesses, that email goes to a login nobody checks.
What we're doing before the accounts move
None of this is complicated. It just has to happen before migration day, not after.
- Download every performance report, for every account. Lead volume, spend, and cost per lead by job type, going back as far as the dashboard allows. We store it outside Google entirely. This is the baseline we will compare the new campaigns against.
- Write down how the team disputes bad leads today. Who does it, how fast, what counts as a bad lead, and what the credit rate has been. The dispute process is moving to a new interface, and the people doing it need a checklist, not a memory.
- Audit each Google Business Profile. Name, address, and hours now sync straight into the campaign. If the profile says one thing and LSA said another, Google may trigger a verification review that pauses ads for a day or two. We fix the profile first.
- Recheck service areas after the move. Google says campaign settings transfer automatically. We will confirm every zip code, category, ad schedule, and lead-routing phone number anyway, on the day the account lands in Google Ads.
- Decide the campaign structure now. For two accounts with different job mixes, we are mapping out whether a single blended target works or whether high-value services need their own campaign. That decision is easier with the old reports in hand.
- Keep LSA separate from search ads in reporting. Once LSA and paid search live in the same Google Ads account, it is easy for the numbers to blur into one "Google Ads" line. We report them separately, with their own cost per lead, so the owner can still see which channel is doing what.
Google says some ads may run right away but to allow up to two weeks for performance to settle. We treat those two weeks as a watch period, not a judgment period.
Questions to ask whoever runs your LSA
If an agency or an employee manages this for you, ask them these five questions this week. The answers tell you whether you are prepared.
- Have we received a migration notice yet, and which email address does it go to?
- Have we downloaded our historical LSA reports, and where are they saved?
- What is our current cost per lead by job type, so we have something to compare against?
- Does our Google Business Profile match what is in LSA today?
- After the move, will LSA still be reported separately from our search ads?
If the answer to the second question is "not yet," that is the one to fix today.
The bottom line
This is not a reason to panic, and it is not a reason to pull back on LSA. For most home service businesses, it is still one of the best lead sources Google offers, and the move does not change where the ads show or what you pay for.
It's worth spending an hour this month to save your data. Google is not going to do it for you, and once the account moves, the chance is gone.
At RedBrick, we manage Local Services Ads and paid search for home service contractors on a month-to-month basis, and everything we build belongs to you, including the reports. If you want a second set of eyes on your LSA accounts before they migrate, reach out. It is a quick conversation, and it is a lot cheaper than losing the baseline.
Sources
- Google Ads Help, Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals: placements, pay-per-lead billing, phased rollout, dashboard retirement, deprecation of vertical-level target CPA, 14-day notice.
- Brooke Osmundson, Search Engine Journal, Google Is Bringing Local Services Ads Into Google Ads (July 20, 2026): before-and-after comparison, weekly-to-daily budgets, manual bidding removal, Lead Manager, GBP sync and verification pauses, two-week stabilization window.
- The $30K/month plumbing account figures are from RedBrick's own client onboarding, October 2026.
