Local Services Ads Migration: Your 14-Day Countdown Playbook

The local services ads migration to Performance Max is now a live rollout, and the trigger you were waiting for finally has a shape. Google will not warn you months in advance. You get 14 days.

Google confirmed the exact notification sequence in its Help Center documentation. An advance email lands 14 days before your migration date. A reminder lands 7 days out. On migration day, the old Local Services Ads dashboard stops working. Your historical reports go with it.

So the plan is not “read about the local services ads migration when it happens to you.” The plan is a 14-day playbook you can run the day the email lands. Here is what to do, in order, if you or a client account is on the list.

What the local services ads migration actually changes

Your LSAs are not going away. They are becoming a constrained version of Performance Max called “pay-per-lead goals.” Google’s own product managers explained the shape of the change in a Search Engine Journal webinar last month.

Four things stay the same. You still pay per lead, not per click. Ads still serve on Google Search and Google Maps only, in the same positions. Targeting is still keywordless, driven by your service categories and service areas. Your Google Guaranteed badge carries over automatically.

Four things move. Campaign management moves inside Google Ads. Your Google Business Profile now feeds your campaign in real time, and one-way. Reporting moves to the Google Ads reporting stack. Budgets convert from a weekly amount to a daily average with a monthly ceiling.

The single most important thing to understand: your old dashboard becomes inaccessible on migration day. There is no parallel window. There is no revert switch. There is a 14-day countdown, and then it is gone.

Day 1 to 3: export before the local services ads migration wipes your reports

Historical performance reports do not carry over. That is confirmed in the PPC Land coverage above. Not weekly spend, not lead volume, not the ad-level breakdowns. When you log in on migration day, you get redirected into Google Ads and your old dashboard is gone.

Export everything the day the 14-day email lands. Total spend by week, going back as far as the dashboard lets you. Lead volume by category. Cost per lead by category. Any lead-quality tags you have applied inside the LSA dashboard. Any dispute history for leads you charged back.

Save it three ways. A copy in your agency drive. A copy in the client’s shared folder. A copy inside your reporting workbook so your monthly reports do not suddenly have a blank column. If you buy leads for clients or run pay-per-call, this is the same rule your lead return policy depends on: keep your own record, because the vendor’s dashboard is not a database.

If the client has multiple locations or multiple service categories running under one LSA login, export each one separately and label them clearly. You will need those splits later when you decide whether to run one campaign or several.

Day 4 to 7: audit the Google Business Profile before Google Ads pulls from it

After the local services ads migration, Google Business Profile becomes the source of truth for your business name, physical address, and standard hours. You cannot edit those fields inside Google Ads. If the profile is wrong, the ad is wrong.

Walk the profile field by field. Business name matches the legal name and the license. Address matches the service area. Phone number routes to a line you answer. Hours match the hours you actually answer calls. Categories match the services you actually deliver. Photos are current and show real people, real trucks, real jobs.

Two warnings from Google’s own documentation. First, if you change the business name or physical address after migration, expect a verification review of 24 to 48 hours during which the campaign can pause. Second, Better Business Bureau callouts are no longer supported. Pull them and add at least six of the supported structured callouts to fill the slot.

This is also the moment to reconcile ownership. If the LSA login and the Google Business Profile are on different email addresses, or the client owns one and you own the other, fix it now. The same warning we made about Google Ads corporate email and sensitive actions applies here: an unresolved ownership question during a forced migration becomes an outage.

Day 8 to 11: decide your campaign structure

Most agencies running LSAs today have one campaign per account per vertical, with a single Target Cost Per Acquisition. In the new pay-per-lead Performance Max, one campaign covers everything by default, and one bidding target covers everything with it.

That is a problem if your client is a plumber who also does drain cleaning and water heater installs at very different lead values. It is a bigger problem if the account has been running vertical-level Target CPA numbers you tuned over months.

Google’s guidance is explicit. If you want to preserve separate bidding by category, you must split the verticals into separate campaigns before or right after migration. That means listing every service category the account runs, mapping each to its historical CPA, and grouping them into two to four campaigns based on economics.

The same discipline applies to service areas. If one metro pays back twice what another one does, and you were leaning on your dashboard to see it, split the campaign by geography now. Your daily budgets and monthly ceilings will land better if the campaigns match the economics you already know.

If you are new to daily average and monthly cap thinking after years of weekly budgets, borrow the framework from our budget-limited bidding audit. The failure mode is the same: a campaign that runs out of budget mid-week or mid-month loses the auctions that would have paid back best.

Day 12 to 14: prep the reporting stack the local services ads migration will hand you

You lose the LSA dashboard. You gain the Google Ads reporting suite. That is a net upgrade for most teams, but only if you have set up the reports before the switch. On migration day, the last thing you want to do is design a new lead report while the client is asking why the old dashboard is dark.

Build the reports you know you need. Cost per lead by service category. Cost per lead by service area. Lead volume by day and by day-of-week. Booked calls versus form leads versus messages, if the account uses more than one intake path. Any lead-quality signal you can pipe in through your CRM, using the same discipline as our new customer acquisition report split.

Turn on conversion imports if you have not already. Pay-per-lead billing is only as good as the lead events you send back. If you are already using offline conversion imports on Search campaigns, add the same feed to the new pay-per-lead campaign so the bidding model sees your qualified leads, not just your raw ones.

Save the report views. Save the filters. Save the segment splits. Screenshot the layouts if you need to. When migration day lands, the client sees whatever you were going to show them anyway, on the new stack, with no gap.

What the local services ads migration means for the rest of the account

This is the third forced migration hitting local advertisers this quarter. The first was AI Max for Search campaigns, which auto-upgraded eligible campaigns starting September 1. The second was the language targeting removal, which stripped a manual control from Search and Performance Max in the same window.

The local services ads migration is the third leg. All three share a pattern. Google announces a phase. A subset of accounts moves. Documentation appears. Advertisers scramble to export historical data. Then the next phase lands.

Two things follow from that pattern. First, treat every account as if the email is coming this month. Do the export. Do the profile audit. Do the campaign structure decision. Do the reporting prep. If the email never comes, you have improved the account. If it comes, you are ready.

Second, put the same 14-day playbook in every account’s operating documentation. Not as an emergency response. As a routine. The next forced migration is already in the pipeline, and the accounts that survive the cleanest are the ones treating this as normal, not exceptional.

If you manage LSAs for multiple clients and want a second set of eyes on the export, the profile audit, or the campaign split before your migration email lands, book a free consultation and we will walk your account through the 14-day plan together. Let’s Grow!