Local Services Ads Are Moving Into Google Ads. Here Is Your 7 Step Migration Checklist.

If your company runs Local Services Ads, the green tick ads that sit above everything else when someone searches "garage door repair near me", your account is about to change homes. Google started moving Local Services Ads out of their standalone dashboard and into Google Ads in August 2026, and the first wave is aimed at home service categories: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving. Garage door companies and other service area businesses follow in the late 2026 phase.

Most of what matters does not change. Your ads keep the same positions on Google Search and Google Maps, you still pay per lead rather than per click, and targeting stays keywordless. What does change is where you manage it, how bidding and budgets work, what happens to your reporting history, and, from October 1, which phone calls you get charged for. Work through this checklist before the migration email lands, not after.

What Google has actually announced

The primary source is Google's own help page, Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay per lead goals. The short version:

• Existing Local Services Ads campaigns are being migrated automatically into a specialised Performance Max campaign type built for pay per lead goals.
• The migration is phased. August 2026 for select US home and storefront service categories, late 2026 for service area businesses without a storefront and accounts with custom bidding or booking setups, and 2027 for everything else, including accounts outside the US.
• Your account administrator gets an email 14 days before the migration date, a reminder 7 days later, and a confirmation once it completes.
• After migration, the old dashboard redirects to Google Ads. Your historical performance reports do not carry over.
• Weekly budgets become daily budgets (weekly divided by 7), with monthly spend capped at the daily figure multiplied by 30.4.
• Manual bidding (setting a maximum cost per lead) and vertical level Target CPA are deprecated.
• Better Business Bureau callouts are no longer supported.
• Your Google Verified badge transfers automatically; no insurance or licence reverification.
• Allow up to two weeks for performance to settle after migration.

Separately, Google emailed advertisers in late August about a billing change effective October 1, 2026, reported by Search Engine Roundtable. Missed calls during business hours become chargeable leads if the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds, and qualifying follow up calls can also be charged. Step 7 covers what to do about it.

The 7 step checklist

Step 1: Find out who owns the account and when you migrate

The 14 day notice goes to the account administrator listed on your profile. In many home service companies that is a former office manager, a previous agency, or an email nobody checks. Log in now and confirm the administrator is a current person with a monitored inbox. If an agency set the account up, ask them in writing who receives the notices.

If the warning banner is already showing in your dashboard, your date is set and the rest of this list is urgent.

Step 2: Save your reporting history before it disappears

This is the step people will regret skipping. Google states plainly that performance reports will not transition. A download page is promised, but the current advice is to take screenshots if you need the data now. At minimum, capture:

• Leads by month for the past 24 months, split by phone call, message and booking.
• Cost per lead by month, and total spend by month.
• Charged versus disputed or credited leads.
• Leads by service type (repair, installation, emergency, maintenance).
• Your current weekly budget, ad schedule and targeted areas.
• Your lead inbox, exported to a spreadsheet or CRM so you keep the customer record, not just the total.

Without last year's numbers you cannot tell whether a dip after migration is the migration, the weather, or a real problem.

Step 3: Convert your budget so nothing surprises you

Google divides your historical average weekly budget by 7 to set a daily average, then caps monthly spend at that daily figure times 30.4. A $700 weekly budget becomes $100 a day, capped at $3,040 a month. Over a year that is almost identical to before, but the daily figure is an average, not a ceiling. On a high demand day (the first cold snap for HVAC, a storm for roofing, a Monday morning for garage doors) Google may spend well above $100 and balance it out later in the month.

Write down the new daily figure and monthly cap, and tell whoever reconciles the card statement.

Step 4: Decide how you want bidding to work without manual bids

Setting a maximum cost per lead is going away. So is running different Target CPA amounts for different verticals inside one campaign. If you previously paid one rate for garage door repair leads and another for new door installation leads, Google will calculate a single campaign level Target CPA and apply it to everything.

That matters when lead values differ by a factor of five or more. A spring replacement lead and a two door installation lead are not worth the same, and a blended target will overpay for small jobs or underbid on large ones. Google's stated solution is separate campaigns per vertical. Sketch that structure now: which service types deserve their own campaign, what a lead in each is worth, and what Target CPA you can live with. You cannot build it until the account is in Google Ads, but arriving with the numbers ready saves weeks.

Step 5: Clean up your Google Business Profile first, then leave it alone

Google Ads will pre populate your new campaign from your Google Business Profile, and your business name, address and hours will sync one way from the profile into Google Ads from then on. Two consequences follow.

First, any errors on your profile become errors in your ads. Wrong hours mean wrong ad scheduling and, after October 1, potentially chargeable missed calls at hours you are not open. Fix them now.

Second, Google says a significant change to your business name or physical address triggers a verification review of 24 to 48 hours, during which your campaign may pause. Make those changes well before your migration window or well after it settles, never in the same fortnight. If your profile has deeper problems, our guide to the 9 reasons a Google Business Profile stops showing up is the place to start.

One more thing to watch. In early September, Google's Ads Liaison confirmed a bug that was unlinking some Local Services Ads accounts from their Google Business Profiles, as reported by GBP Promote. Google said it was unrelated to the migration, but the effect is the same: leads stop. Check the link once a week until you are safely migrated.

Step 6: Replace your BBB callout with at least six others

Better Business Bureau callouts are being dropped. Google's guidance is to go to the assets tab in your campaign and select at least six structured callouts, such as business hours, specialties or accepted payment methods. For a home service company the obvious candidates are same day service, emergency availability, licensed and insured, free estimates, financing available, family owned and warranty terms. Choose six that are true and that customers actually ask about on the phone. This one waits for migration day, because you cannot do it in the old dashboard.

Step 7: Get your phones ready for October 1

This is the change with the most direct effect on your bill. From October 1, 2026, a missed call during business hours counts as a chargeable lead if the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds. If a first call does not qualify as a charged lead, follow up calls between you and that customer that do meet the criteria will be charged. Google's Ads Liaison clarified that you are charged once for follow up calls within 15 days of the initial interaction; after 15 days, a new contact is a new lead.

One useful exception: if your phone system asks callers to press a key to reach a department, the 20 second timer does not start until they press it, and you are not charged if they never do.

• Make your published hours match the hours a human actually answers. If the office closes at 5 but your profile says 6, you are paying for an hour of missed calls every day.
• Measure your answer rate and your time to answer. Anything routinely past 20 seconds is now a cost line.
• Decide who covers the phone at lunch, during install runs and on Saturday mornings. For a two van operation that may mean an answering service.
• Do not use the key press exception as a trick. A menu that makes emergency callers wait costs you the job, which is worse than paying for the lead.
• Review charged leads weekly for the first two months and dispute anything that does not qualify.

Where organic search fits in all this

None of this is an argument to stop running Local Services Ads. For emergency and repair searches they remain the fastest route to the top of the page. But every lever in this migration moves cost or control away from you: manual bids are gone, blended targets replace vertical ones, and missed calls start costing money. Your per lead cost is more likely to rise than fall over the next year.

The hedge is the same as ever. A Google Business Profile that ranks in the map pack and a site that ranks for your service pages produce calls with no per lead fee, and those calls do not switch off when the budget cap is reached on a busy Monday. We wrote about how to think about the split in SEO vs Google Ads: a decision framework for business owners, and specifically for the trade in our garage door search guide.

It is also why OmnifySEO is built the way it is. Migrations, billing changes and profile bugs do not arrive on a schedule that lines up with an agency's monthly call. Our agents monitor the profile, the rankings and the connected accounts continuously, publish and adjust as things move, and flag this kind of change the week it happens, so the work does not stop when the meeting ends.