Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads. Here's what it means for your leads.

If you run Local Services Ads, you’re about to log in one morning and land somewhere different.

Google is moving Local Services Ads out of its own standalone platform and into Google Ads. Your campaigns come along automatically, your ads keep showing in the same places, and you keep paying per lead. But the place you go to manage all of it is changing; your performance history doesn’t come with you.

Here’s what’s actually different, what to do before your move date, and what to check in your CallRail setup afterward.

What "moving into Google Ads" actually means

Google is turning your Local Services Ads (LSA) campaigns into a new campaign type inside Google Ads called Performance Max with pay-per-lead goals.

If you haven’t worked with Performance Max before, here’s the short version. These campaigns are highly automated, and marketers get less control over the individual levers than they do in a standard Google Ads campaign. Google's AI makes the bidding decisions. They also run across all Google platforms, including YouTube, Gmail, and Display.

However, this LSA pay-per-lead version of Performance Max does not run on all platforms. Your ads keep running only on Google Search and Google Maps, in the same spots they run today.

Google's rollout timeline

Google is doing this in waves rather than all at once

August 2026: The first wave covers select home and storefront service advertisers in the US, including plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving.
Late 2026: Broader groups follow, including service area businesses without a storefront and accounts with custom bidding or booking setups.
2027: Non-US accounts and the remaining business categories.

Account admins get an email roughly 14 days ahead of their move date, plus a reminder about a week out. Notices go to whoever is listed as the account admin, which isn’t always the person managing the ads day to day.

And through the rest of 2026, you still have to create new Local Services accounts in the old interface, since Google Ads won’t support creating pay-per-lead campaigns directly until 2027.

What stays the same

Where your ads show. Google Search and Google Maps, same placements.
How you get matched to customers. Still keywordless, driven by your services, categories, and service area.
How you pay. Still pay per valid lead, not per click.
Your verification status. Your Google Verified badge carries over.
Your lead routing number. Whatever number you set to receive Local Services leads comes across with the campaign, including a tracking number if you use one.

What changes

Your old dashboard goes away. After your move date, logging in to the old Local Services dashboard redirects you to Google Ads. There’s no going back to the old view.
Google's AI handles bidding. Manual bidding is no longer available, and neither is setting a different target cost per lead for each service category. You get one campaign-level target CPA instead.
Weekly budgets become daily budgets. Google automatically converts them for you.
Leads live somewhere new. You’ll find them in Google Ads under Goals, then Conversions, then Lead Manager. Your existing lead history, including contacts, messages, and call recordings, will move over.
Your business info now flows from your Google Business Profile. Name, address, and hours are managed on your Business Profile and sync into Google Ads automatically. This doesn’t touch the number your leads route to.
Better Business Bureau (BBB) callouts go away. Google no longer supports BBB callouts. To keep standing out on Google Search, navigate to your campaign's assets tab and select at least six other structured callouts (such as business hours, specialties, or accepted payment methods).
Performance will take time to stabilize. Google says it can take up to two weeks for a migrated campaign to settle. Plan for a noisy couple of weeks rather than a clean before and after.
Direct Business Search adjustments. Direct Business Search may surface ads for branded searches while filtering out returning customers.
Google may build ad assets for you. It can generate assets automatically from your website, so check what it produces against how you'd describe your own business.
Business Profile edits can pause your verification. Major changes to your Google Business Profile can trigger a temporary verification pause, so avoid overhauling it around your move date.

A hard deadline for saving historical reports

Your historical Local Services performance reports don’t come with you. Impressions, spend history, weekly lead counts, ad-level performance: none of it transfers, and it’s permanently deleted after your move date.

Download it before your migration day. There’s no recovery path afterward and no second reminder once the dashboard is gone.

For the first few weeks after the move, you'll have no benchmark to compare your cost per lead against (unless you download those historical reports).

Your lead routing number and why it matters more now

Local Services campaigns route leads to a phone number you specify. That’s the number a lead dials when they tap your ad, and it’s the one field in this change with a direct effect on what you can measure afterward.

If that number is a dedicated tracking number, every call arrives labeled with the campaign that produced it, recorded and transcribed, and you keep that history no matter what Google changes next. If it’s your main business line, you get a mixed stream. A paid Local Services lead, an organic Maps call, a repeat customer, and a supplier all ring the same phone and look identical afterward. That’s workable while a dashboard shows you weekly lead counts and spend. It gets a lot harder once your history resets and your reporting moves inside a more automated campaign type.

Switching does not change the caller experience, since a tracking number forwards to the same place your calls already go. Doing it before your move date gives you a clean read from day one instead of starting the comparison late.

One note for anyone running several trades. Because Google removed per-category target CPA, many businesses will split into separate campaigns per trade to keep control of cost per lead. If you do that, each campaign needs its own number, or you lose the ability to compare lead quality by trade, which is usually the reason you split them in the first place.

What to check in your CallRail setup

If you already use CallRail on your pay-per-lead campaigns, this checklist applies to you.

Nothing in your CallRail account needs to change before your migration date. Your static tracking number set as the Local Services lead routing number carries over automatically. Here are four things to check:

1. Confirm your routing number on day one. Log in to Google Ads and verify your CallRail number is still set as the campaign's lead routing number. This should carry over automatically. The campaign routing number field and the Business Profile phone number field are separate, so your Business Profile fills in details that are missing rather than replacing a number you’ve already set.

2. Number hygiene. Pay-per-lead campaigns should always route through a dedicated static tracking number. Not a website pool number, and not one you’re also using somewhere else. This is what lets you read this campaign's performance on its own.

3. Split your numbers if you split your campaigns. If you break a multi-trade campaign into per-trade campaigns, mirror that with per-campaign tracking numbers. This one gets missed often, because the campaign work happens in Google Ads and the number work happens in CallRail.

4. Watch your call volume through the transition. Between AI bidding, converted budgets, and a two-week learning period, volume can fluctuate. If it spikes, Voice Assist can answer, qualify, and capture the calls your team can’t get to. If it drops, your call data tells you whether the calls actually stopped or are landing somewhere you are not monitoring.

While Google's reporting starts from scratch, your call history does not. Every call that came through your tracking number is still in CallRail’s Call Tracking with its recording, transcript, and source attached, which gives you the before-and-after comparison Google can no longer provide.

The bottom line

Google is changing where you manage Local Services Ads, not how the ads work. Your Local Services placements, billing model, and routing number all carry over, but the management side really is changing (more so for agencies than for anyone else).

If you don’t export your Local Services performance history before your move date, it’s gone.