Google’s LSA Migration Is Live. Contractors Get 14 Days to Save Their Data.

The migration is no longer theoretical

What contractors need to know now

• Google's first U.S. migration wave began in August 2026 for selected plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving advertisers.
• The account administrator receives a 14-day migration notice, then another reminder seven days later. The timing is account-specific; not every contractor is moving at the same time.
• Historical campaign performance reports—including past impressions, spend and ad-level reporting—do not migrate into Google Ads.
• Past customer lead history does transfer, including contact information, message history and older call recordings, according to Google.
• The migrated campaign remains pay-per-lead, keywordless and limited to Search and Maps. It is not the same product as a standard click-based Performance Max campaign.
• Manual maximum cost-per-lead bidding is deprecated, and vertical-level Target CPA controls become a campaign-level target after migration.
• Contractors should expect Google Business Profile to play a larger role because core business details sync into the new campaign experience.

The migration clock

Advance warning

14 days

Google emails the account administrator two weeks before the scheduled migration.

Second reminder

7 days later

A second warning arrives one week after the first notice.

Performance settling

Up to 2 weeks

Google says migrated campaigns may need time to ramp back toward stable performance.

Google is retiring the standalone management experience for Local Services Ads in favor of a specialized Performance Max campaign with pay-per-lead goals inside Google Ads. The rollout is phased rather than universal: select U.S. home and storefront service advertisers started moving first in August, broader service-area businesses and accounts with more complex bidding or booking configurations are scheduled later in 2026, and remaining categories plus non-U.S. accounts are slated for 2027.

The distinction between this campaign type and ordinary Performance Max matters. Standard Performance Max can distribute advertising across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps and is generally built around click or conversion bidding. Google's migrated Local Services campaign remains a local pay-per-lead product. Google says it continues to appear only on Search and Maps, remains keywordless, and continues charging for valid customer leads rather than ordinary clicks.

So the headline is not that Local Services Ads are disappearing from consumers' search results. The operating environment behind them is changing—and some of the controls and history contractors have used for years are changing with it.

Google's migration guidance draws a sharp line between customer-lead history and campaign-reporting history. Past customer leads are supposed to move into the new Leads page in Google Ads, including contact details, message history and older call recordings. Historical campaign performance metrics do not.

Google specifically says previous campaign-level metrics such as impressions, clicks, weekly spend and ad-level performance reports will not migrate. The company says a dedicated page for downloading historical reports will be available, but its current guidance still tells advertisers who need that history immediately to preserve it before migration.

For a contractor, that history can matter well beyond marketing nostalgia. It can be the record used to compare branches, evaluate an agency, establish seasonal lead-cost patterns, reconstruct acquisition costs, or explain why a market changed after a budget or operational shift. Losing that reference does not stop the ads from running, but it makes long-term performance analysis harder.

Before your 14-day clock expires

• Preserve the historical LSA performance reports your company uses for budgeting, forecasting, market comparisons and agency accountability.
• Capture a pre-migration baseline: current spend, lead volume, cost per lead, booking rate if you track it internally, bidding mode, service categories, service areas and ad schedule.
• Confirm which email address is the account administrator. That is where Google's advance migration notice is sent.
• Document any intentionally different economics between HVAC, plumbing, electrical or other verticals before Google consolidates bidding controls at the campaign level.
• Verify your Google Business Profile business name, physical address, standard hours and phone information before the campaign relies more heavily on profile synchronization.
• After migration, check campaign status, daily budget, target settings, service areas, call routing, message settings and the Leads page before assuming the transfer was exact.
• Compare post-migration lead quality and cost against the baseline for at least the first several weeks instead of judging performance from the first day or two.

One of the more consequential changes for larger home-service operators is the loss of some bidding controls. Google says manual bidding—such as a maximum cost per lead—is no longer supported after migration. It also says vertical-level Target CPA settings are not supported inside a single migrated campaign. If multiple business categories previously carried different targets, Google calculates one campaign-level target.

That matters because the economics of an HVAC replacement opportunity, an emergency plumbing call and a smaller electrical service ticket can be dramatically different. Google's documented solution for advertisers that want distinct bidding rules is to separate business categories into separate campaigns. During the rollout, however, new pay-per-lead campaigns still cannot be created directly from the normal Google Ads campaign builder; Google continues directing those setups through Local Services onboarding for now.

Contractors running multiple trades should therefore treat migration day as an account-structure audit, not merely a software update.

Google says the new campaign experience pre-populates information from Google Business Profile. Business name, physical address and standard hours sync into Google Ads. Service areas and ad schedules can still be customized for the campaign, but major changes to core profile details may trigger verification and, according to Google's guidance, can temporarily pause the campaign during review.

For contractors that have historically let an agency manage LSA while a different person—or nobody—maintained the Business Profile, that division of responsibility becomes riskier. The profile is increasingly part of the paid acquisition infrastructure. Ownership, access and accuracy should be treated accordingly.

Google is framing the transition as a platform consolidation that preserves the core Local Services experience. The contractor question is whether the new structure preserves the economics as cleanly as it preserves the ad format.

Three things will matter most as more accounts migrate: whether lead quality changes, whether automation and consolidated bidding reduce the control operators had over materially different service lines, and whether the move into Google Ads makes performance easier to measure or simply harder to compare with the historical LSA era.

For now, the practical move is straightforward: do not wait for migration day to discover what did not come with you. When the 14-day email arrives, treat it as a data-retention and account-audit deadline.

Methodology

TradeVulcan Dispatch rechecked Google's official Local Services Ads migration guidance, pay-per-lead campaign documentation and August 2026 announcement on September 6, 2026. This brief distinguishes Google's specialized Performance Max campaign with pay-per-lead goals from standard Performance Max and focuses on contractor-operating implications that are explicitly supported by Google's published migration rules. The article is a news update to Dispatch's earlier in-depth LSA migration analysis rather than a replacement for that guide.