Google Is Moving LSAs Into The Google Ads Interface

Google announced on July 20, 2026 that Local Services Ads are moving into Google Ads. Your LSA campaigns become a specialized Performance Max campaign type built for pay-per-lead goals, and the standalone LSA dashboard is being retired account by account. Pay-per-lead pricing, your placements, and your badge all carry over. The single most urgent item in the whole announcement is that your historical performance reports do not, and once your account moves, anything you did not export is gone.

Watch the full breakdown above.

What Is Changing and What Is Not

This is a platform change rather than a product change. Where and how your ads appear to local customers stays the same.

Staying the same: the pay-per-lead model, so you still pay only for valid leads such as calls, messages, and bookings rather than clicks. Placements stay exclusive to Google Search and Google Maps, in the same positions. Targeting stays keywordless, driven by your service categories and service areas. Despite the Performance Max name, these campaigns do not expand into YouTube, Gmail, or the Display Network the way a standard Performance Max campaign would.

Changing:

• The dashboard goes away. Budgets, targeting, and lead replies all move into Google Ads. On your migration day, logging into the old LSA dashboard redirects you to your campaign overview.
• Historical performance reports do not migrate. Past impressions, clicks, weekly spend, and ad-level reports are not coming with you. Lead history does transfer, including contact details, message history, and older call recordings.
• Manual bidding is deprecated. Setting a maximum cost-per-lead by hand is no longer supported.
• Vertical-level Target CPA is deprecated. If you ran different targets per business category in one campaign, Google calculates a single unified campaign-level target and applies it across all categories. To keep separate targets, you need separate campaigns per vertical.
• Better Business Bureau callouts are gone. Google recommends selecting at least six other structured callouts from the assets tab to replace them, such as business hours, specialties, or accepted payment methods.
• Your badge and verification carry over automatically. Google states that insurance and license reverification are no longer required, though you will see a notification if any additional business-level check is ever needed.

The Budget Math Is Automatic, but Check It

Weekly budgets become daily average budgets, and Google does the conversion for you. Your historical average weekly budget is divided by 7. Monthly spend is then capped at that daily average multiplied by 30.4, which is the average number of days in a month. Daily spend can fluctuate on busy days without exceeding the monthly ceiling.

So you are not recalculating the number. You are checking whether the result matches what you actually want to spend, particularly if your business runs on a limited schedule or your weekly budget was set years ago and never revisited. Our guide to Google Ads budget pacing covers how to tell whether a daily budget is genuinely constraining a campaign.

The bidding change deserves a decision rather than a shrug. If you have been managing separate targets for plumbing and HVAC inside one account, a single blended target will not serve both well. Plan the split into separate campaigns before your migration date, not after. Our post on Google Ads bidding strategies covers how target-based bidding behaves once you are inside Google Ads proper.

Four Details Worth Knowing That Are Easy to Miss

These are in Google's documentation but have not made it into most of the coverage.

1. Expect up to two weeks of instability. Google says to allow up to two weeks for migration to fully complete and for campaign performance to ramp back to stable levels. Plan for a dip rather than being surprised by one, and do not judge the new campaign in week one.
2. You cannot create new pay-per-lead campaigns in Google Ads yet. For now, new campaigns and new local accounts still go through g.co/localservices. Google says creation inside Google Ads will become available later. If you onboard local service clients, this affects your process today.
3. Editing your Google Business Profile can pause your campaign. Business name, address, and hours sync one direction from Business Profile into Google Ads on a daily basis. Minor changes sync within 24 hours, but significant updates to your business name, storefront address, or primary category trigger a verification review that typically takes 24 to 48 hours, during which your campaign may pause. Do not make those edits around your migration date.
4. Your lead inbox moves and changes names. Lead Manager lives under the Goals dropdown, then Conversions, then Leads. In reporting, "Conversions" means the number of leads you were charged for, and "Cost / conv." is your cost per lead. Our post on the Google Ads metrics worth tracking covers how those columns behave.

What to Do Before Your Migration Date

You will get an email 14 days out, a banner in the LSA dashboard, a reminder email 7 days later, and a confirmation once migration completes. You cannot opt in or out. Settings, budgets, and creative assets transfer automatically.

Agencies should start exporting across the portfolio now rather than waiting for the first notice. Doing this for twenty accounts on a two-week clock is not a good week.

One rule I would hold to after cutover: do not adjust budgets or test new settings until call and form tracking are confirmed working. If tracking is broken and you change three things at once, you will not know which change caused what. Our guides to conversion tracking for local websites and phone call tracking with Google Tag Manager cover the setup.

Question to Answer:

If your account migrated next week, which reports would you wish you had exported, and where would you store them so your team can find them in a year?

Sources: Google documented the change in its Google Ads Help Center article on the Local Services Ads transition, and Ads Product Liaison Ginny Marvin confirmed it publicly. Coverage from Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Search Engine Roundtable. Backup instructions are in Google's guide to viewing reports on Local Services Ads.