Export your Local Services Ads numbers before Google deletes them

A pest control company in Greenwood can tell you that a termite inspection lead costs them $34 and a bed bug callout costs $68. They know because they have been paying Google for both since 2022. Sometime in the next few weeks, Google will delete the report that proves it.

Local Services Ads are moving into Google Ads. The first wave starts this month, August 2026, for home and storefront services in the United States. Your leads come with you. Your performance history does not, and you get 14 days of warning.

Export it now, before the banner shows up.

What is actually changing?

Local Services Ads are the pay-per-lead ads that sit above the regular search results and inside Google Maps, with the blue Google Verified badge next to your name. You pay for a phone call, a message, or a booking. You do not pay for a click.

That part is not changing.

Google is folding Local Services Ads into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign with a pay-per-lead goal. Performance Max is Google's automated campaign type: you hand it a budget and a target cost per action, and it decides the rest. You will run the whole thing from your Google Ads account, and the separate Local Services dashboard goes away.

When	Who moves
August 2026	Select US home and storefront service advertisers, including plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving
Late 2026	Broader US groups, including service-area businesses with no storefront, and accounts with custom bidding or booking setups
2027	Non-US accounts and every remaining business category

Account admins get an email and a banner 14 days before their migration date. A reminder lands at 7 days. A confirmation email arrives when it is finished. Nobody is asking your permission.

What you keep and what you lose

Thing	After migration
Your placement on Search and Maps	Unchanged
Pay-per-lead billing	Unchanged. Calls, messages, bookings. Never clicks
Google Verified badge	Kept, as long as you still pass the business registration and representative checks
Past leads, contact details, call recordings	Move into Lead Manager inside Google Ads
Your weekly budget	Converted. Google divides your average weekly budget by 7 for a daily average, and caps monthly spend at that daily figure times 30.4
Manual maximum cost-per-lead bidding	Gone
A separate target per service category	Gone. One campaign-level target covers everything
Impressions, clicks, weekly spend, ad-level reports	Not migrated. Download them or lose them
Your BBB accreditation callout	Discontinued

Why does one target cost per lead cost you money?

A plumbing company in Franklin sells two things that behave nothing alike.

Service	Cost per lead	Leads that book	Average job
Drain cleaning	$41	58%	$290
Water heater replacement	$96	31%	$2,400

Run it per booked job. Drain cleaning costs $41 divided by 0.58, or $71 of ad spend for every job that lands, against a $290 ticket. That is 24 cents on the dollar.

Water heaters cost $96 divided by 0.31, or $310 per booked job, against a $2,400 ticket. That is 13 cents on the dollar.

The expensive lead is the cheaper customer.

Until now that shop could set a target of $110 on water heaters and $45 on drains. After migration, Google calculates one campaign-level target and applies it to every service category in the account.

Set that single target at $50 and the water heater leads stop coming, along with the jobs that cost half as much to win. Set it at $96 and you pay more than double for drain calls that were never worth it.

Google's own answer is to split into separate campaigns, one per service category. That works. It also means you need your cost per lead and your close rate for each service before you can build them.

Google is deleting the record of what your leads cost, then asking you to name one number for all of them.

What should you do before the banner shows up?

1. Download every report in the Local Services dashboard today. Not when the banner appears. Spend, budget, leads by category, by month, as far back as it lets you go. Save it as a spreadsheet somewhere that is not Google.
2. Write down your cost per lead and your close rate for each service you sell. That is the input for your new target, and the numbers behind it are the ones that disappear.
3. Decide now whether you need one campaign or several. Different lead prices mean separate campaigns.
4. Check who the admin on the account is. The 14-day email goes to them. If that is an agency you stopped working with in 2024, you find out on day 15.
5. Replace the BBB callout with structured ones: hours, specialties, payment methods, years in business, languages spoken. Google suggests running at least six.
6. Leave the target alone for two weeks after you migrate. Smart bidding needs data before you start pulling on it.
7. Do not edit your Google Business Profile during the switch. Change something significant and Google runs a 24 to 48 hour verification review, which can pause your campaign while it works.

The lead credits do not get better

Since 2024, Google bills you for calls from outside your service area and calls for work you do not do, with no automatic credit and no appeal. It still credits spam, wrong numbers, and duplicates on its own.

That carries over unchanged. If you were hoping the new Lead Manager came with a dispute button you did not have before, it does not.

The migration itself will probably be fine. Same ads, same spot above the map, same deal where you pay for the phone ringing. The twenty minutes worth spending is the export. Knowing what a termite lead actually cost you in 2023 is worth more than whatever number Google calculates on your behalf in September.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals	Google's own migration page: the August 2026 phase-one vertical list, the 14-day and 7-day notices, weekly-to-daily budget conversion and the 30.4 monthly cap, the unified campaign-level target CPA, and the confirmation that past performance metrics do not migrate.
2	About the Google Verified badge	What the badge covers now and the registration and representative checks a business has to keep passing to hold it.
3	Upcoming changes to Local Services Ads Google Guarantee badges	Google's notice that the green Google Guaranteed badge became the blue Google Verified badge on October 20, 2025, and that the money-back guarantee was discontinued.
4	Google Is Bringing Local Services Ads Into Google Ads	The move of the Local Services inbox into Lead Manager, the end of manual bidding, and the discontinued BBB callouts.
5	Google Local Services Ads Meet PMax: What You Need to Know	The recommendation to run at least six structured callouts, and the post-migration checklist including the two-week wait before touching targets.