If you run Local Services Ads for your HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, or pest control business, something is about to change that nobody asked for and most owners have not heard about yet.
Google is retiring the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard. Your campaigns are being moved into Google Ads, and they are being converted into a different kind of campaign along the way. Your ads keep running. Your billing model does not change. But the place you manage everything is moving, and one thing you probably care about is not coming with you.
Here is what is actually happening, in plain terms, and what we recommend you do about it.
Everything else in this article can wait. This part cannot.
Your historical Local Services performance data does not transfer. Impressions, spend history, weekly lead counts, and ad level performance are all left behind and permanently deleted after your move date. There is no recovery option, no archive, and no second reminder once the old dashboard is gone.
Download your reports before your move date. Export everything: lead volume by week, spend, cost per lead, and any category level breakdowns you rely on.
Why this matters more than it sounds: for the first few weeks after your migration, your new reporting starts from zero. If your cost per lead climbs, you will have nothing to compare it against and no way to prove whether the change hurt you. Owners who export get a real before and after. Owners who do not are flying blind at exactly the moment they need visibility most.
If we manage your Local Services campaigns, we are already handling this for you. If you run them yourself, put it on your calendar today.
Google is rolling this out in waves, not all at once.
August 2026 started the first wave, covering home and storefront service advertisers in the US. That list includes plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving companies. If that describes your business, you may already be in the queue.
Late 2026 brings in service area businesses without a storefront, plus accounts using custom bidding or booking setups.
2027 covers non US accounts and the remaining categories.
You get an email roughly two weeks before your move date, with a reminder about a week out. One catch worth knowing: those notices go to whoever is listed as the account admin, which is very often not the person actually running the ads. If your office manager set up the account three years ago, the warning may land in an inbox nobody checks. Confirm who your admin is now, not after the fact.
One more wrinkle for anyone opening a new account this year. Through the rest of 2026 you still have to create new Local Services accounts in the old interface, because Google Ads will not support building pay per lead campaigns directly until 2027.
The good news first, because most of what makes Local Services Ads work for you is staying exactly as it is.
Here is where it matters.
Your campaigns become Performance Max. Specifically, a pay per lead version of it. If you have never run Performance Max, the short version is that it is heavily automated and gives you fewer levers to pull. The important detail for you: unlike normal Performance Max, this version does not spread your budget across YouTube, Gmail, and Display. It stays on Search and Maps.
Google’s AI takes over bidding. Manual bidding goes away. So does setting a different target cost per lead for each service category. You get one target at the campaign level instead.
Weekly budgets convert to daily budgets. Google handles the math automatically.
Your leads move. You will find them in Google Ads under Goals, then Conversions, then Lead Manager. Your existing contacts, messages, and call recordings come with you.
Better Business Bureau callouts are gone. Google dropped support for them. To keep your listing standing out, you need to select at least six other structured callouts in your campaign’s assets tab, things like business hours, specialties, and accepted payment methods. Do not skip this. An ad with thin assets loses ground against competitors who filled theirs in.
Google may write your ad assets for you. It can generate them automatically from your website. Read what it produces. Automated copy pulled from a website that has not been updated in two years will describe a business you no longer are.
Expect a bumpy couple of weeks. Google says a migrated campaign can take up to two weeks to stabilize. Plan for noise, not a clean switchover.
This is the change we care about most, and it is getting the least attention.
After migration, your business name, address, and hours flow into Google Ads directly from your Google Business Profile. Your Business Profile is no longer just where people find you in the map pack. It is now feeding the information inside your paid ads too.
Two consequences follow from that.
First, an incomplete or outdated Business Profile now costs you twice. Wrong hours, an old address, or a thin profile does not just hurt your local rankings anymore. It shows up in what Google displays to people clicking your ads.
Second, and this one has a deadline attached: major edits to your Business Profile can trigger a temporary verification pause. If you were planning a big profile overhaul, do not do it in the same window as your migration. Get it done well before, or wait until things settle after.
If you have been putting off cleaning up your Business Profile, this is the moment it stops being optional.
There is one field in this whole change that quietly decides how much you can measure afterward, and that is the phone number your leads route to.
If that number is a dedicated tracking number, every call arrives tagged with the campaign that produced it, recorded and transcribed, and that history is yours regardless of what Google changes next.
If it is your main business line, everything blends together. A paid lead, an organic call from Maps, a repeat customer, and your parts supplier all ring the same phone and look identical afterward. That was manageable while a dashboard showed you weekly lead counts. It gets a lot harder when your history resets and your reporting lives inside an automated campaign type.
Switching does not change anything for the caller. A tracking number forwards to the same place your calls already go. Doing it before your move date means you get a clean read from day one instead of starting the comparison late.
If you run multiple trades, read this twice. Because Google removed per category cost per lead targets, a lot of businesses are going to split into separate campaigns per trade to keep control. If you do that, each campaign needs its own tracking number. Otherwise you lose the ability to compare lead quality by trade, which was the whole reason to split them.
No. Your ads keep running in the same placements on Google Search and Google Maps throughout. What changes is where you manage them.
Yes. The pay per lead billing model carries over unchanged. You are still charged for valid leads, not clicks.
No. After your move date, logging into the old dashboard redirects you to Google Ads, and there is no option to return to the previous view.
No. Your verification status carries over with your campaign.
Your existing lead history, including contacts, messages, and call recordings, moves into Google Ads under Goals, then Conversions, then Lead Manager. It is your performance reporting, not your lead history, that gets deleted.
Clean it up well in advance, but avoid major edits close to your move date. Significant Business Profile changes can trigger a temporary verification pause at the worst possible time.
If Nickel SEO manages your local marketing, you do not need to do anything. We are already exporting performance history, auditing lead routing numbers, and getting Business Profiles cleaned up ahead of migration dates.
If you run your own Local Services Ads and this is the first you are hearing about it, the export deadline is the one that bites. Once your move date passes, that data is gone for good.
We help HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and other home service businesses across Dallas Fort Worth and Texas rank in local search and turn that visibility into booked jobs. If you want a second set of eyes on your setup before your migration lands, get in touch.
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