Fourteen days. That is the warning Google gives before it rebuilds a Local Services Ads account into something else entirely. A pest control company in Greenwood got that email two Mondays ago: migration date September 9th, old dashboard gone that same day, every report inside it gone with it.

The owner didn't ask for this and didn't get a vote. Google picked the date and started the clock.

If you run a plumbing company, an HVAC business, a roofing crew, a lawn care service, an electrician's shop, a house cleaning company, a pest control outfit, or a moving company anywhere in the United States, this migration is either scheduled for your account already or coming soon. The changes below apply no matter when your migration date lands.

What changes

Four things matter. The rest is repackaging.

Your weekly budget becomes a daily average. Google divides your historical weekly budget by seven to set the new daily average, then caps monthly spend at that daily number times 30.4. A shop running $700 a week nets a $100 daily average and roughly $3,040 a month, close to what four and a third weeks used to cost. The full-month math holds up fine. The new risk is a single busy day spending well past $100 before the average evens out, and that shows up on the card statement before it shows up in the budget spreadsheet.

Seven hundred dollars a week becomes a hundred dollars a day becomes three thousand and forty dollars a month. Same money. New number to explain to the bookkeeper.

Manual bidding is gone. If you were setting your own maximum cost per lead, Google's automated bidding takes that decision over completely.

Vertical-level Target CPA gets blended. A company running both roofing and gutter leads under two different cost-per-lead targets loses that split. Google calculates one campaign-level Target CPA and applies it across every category in the account. If roofing leads are worth more to the business than gutter leads, that difference disappears into the average unless the account splits into separate campaigns before the migration date arrives.

Historical reports do not transfer. Past spend, past leads, past cost-per-lead numbers, all of it sits in the old dashboard, which stops being reachable the day the account migrates. Google says a download tool for this data is coming. It hadn't shipped as of this writing. A screenshot today costs a few minutes. Rebuilding a year of reporting from memory costs an afternoon most shop owners don't have.

What stays the same

• Pay-per-lead pricing: a call, a message, a booking, never a click.
• Ad placement: Google Search and Google Maps only, same positions as before.
• Targeting: keywordless, built from service categories and areas.
• A Google Verified badge already earned carries over. No reverification.

Changing	Staying the same
Weekly budget to daily average, times 30.4 for the monthly cap	Pay-per-lead pricing
Manual bidding, retired	Search and Maps-only placement
Vertical Target CPA, blended into one number	Keywordless targeting
BBB callouts, retired	Verified badge status
Historical reports, not carried over	Past lead and message history

Who gets migrated first?

August 2026 covers home and storefront service categories specifically: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving, all US accounts. Late 2026 expands to service-area businesses without a storefront and to accounts running custom bidding or booking setups. Every remaining account, including everything outside the US, migrates sometime in 2027. A missing migration email means the date hasn't been set yet. The account still migrates eventually.

What should you do before your migration date?

1. Screenshot or export your reports now. Weekly spend, leads, cost per lead, whatever the dashboard shows. Don't wait for the 14-day warning email. We wrote about exactly which numbers to pull back when Google first signaled this data would eventually disappear, and that advice still holds.
2. Run the budget math before Google runs it. Take the current weekly number, divide by seven, multiply by 30.4. That's the new monthly ceiling. Tell the bookkeeper before the first invoice looks different.
3. Swap the BBB callout for six structured ones. The BBB callout stops working after migration. Google wants at least six structured callouts instead: business hours, specialties, accepted payment methods, whatever applies. Fill those in now so the listing doesn't go quiet on the exact day it gets rebuilt.
4. Decide on vertical splitting before it's decided for you. If two categories under one account have meaningfully different lead values, set up separate campaigns ahead of migration rather than accept a blended Target CPA nobody at the shop chose.

Same fight, third round this year

Google has touched the Local Services program three times in three months. Google Guaranteed went away this summer. The export warning landed in early August. Now the account itself is being rebuilt underneath every home service business running it. Every one of these changes is mandatory, and there's no opt-out toggle anywhere in the dashboard. It fits a pattern we've tracked across every Google Ads change that hit small advertisers this year: the platform moves and the business either moves with it or loses ground without noticing.

For accounts running more than one service category, or for a shop owner whose week has no room left for a migration date, this kind of account cleanup is exactly what we handle for clients through ongoing marketing and site work. Most of the time that takes one 30-minute call.

Check the Local Services Ads dashboard today. If there's a banner sitting unread, read it now. The clock started the day the banner appeared, whether anyone on staff opened it or not.

---

Sources

| Source | What it backed up

--- | --- | --- 1 | Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, Google Ads Help | Migration timeline, budget math (weekly divided by 7, times 30.4 for the monthly cap), bidding and Target CPA changes, BBB callout deprecation, and the reporting data loss. 2 | Local Services Ads come to Google Ads via Performance Max, Search Engine Land | Confirmation of the August 2026 phased rollout and which service categories migrate first. 3 | Google Ads Help Announcements | Notification timeline: 14-day advance email, in-dashboard banners, 7-day final reminder.