The Local Services Ads Performance Max migration is real, it started in August 2026, and if you advertise in Australia it is not happening to you at all. Your standalone LSA dashboard goes away. The campaign becomes a Performance Max campaign that keeps pay-per-lead billing.
The whole change in five lines. Billing, placements, keywordless category targeting and your service area settings survive the move. Historical LSA reporting, manual bidding, vertical-level Target CPA and your BBB callout do not. Google sends an email 14 days out and another 7 days out, then migrates the account on its own. Performance can take up to two weeks to settle afterwards. Download your reporting before the migration date, because it does not come with you.
Who is actually migrating, and when
Google’s help page on the transition splits this into three waves. August 2026 covered selected home and storefront service advertisers in the United States: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving. Late 2026 picks up service-area businesses without a physical storefront, plus accounts running custom bidding or booking configurations. 2027 is everything else, which means every non-US account and every remaining business category.
One discrepancy is worth flagging. Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land both described the first wave as including pet care, wellness and education. Google’s current help page lists the home and storefront categories above and mentions none of those verticals. Both pieces were written in July, before the rollout started, so trust Google’s live page and your own account notification over any published category list.
Then there is the part almost nobody outside the United States has been told, which is most of you.
Local Services Ads run in 11 countries. Google’s own getting started page lists Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Australia is not on it, and was still not on it when I opened that page on 28 September 2026. So if you run a trades business in Melbourne and somebody has offered to set up your Local Services Ads, ask them which country they plan to do that in.
What survives the move
Less changes than the word migration suggests. Ads still appear on Search and Maps only, never Display or YouTube, which is why this behaves nothing like the standard Performance Max campaigns we have written about before. You are still charged per lead. Clicks cost you nothing. Targeting stays keywordless, matched on your service categories and service area, so there are no keywords to add and no search terms report in the usual sense.
One capability is genuinely new: you can edit the phone number your call and message leads route to in real time, instead of waiting for a settings change to propagate. Small thing. If you have ever had a receptionist quit on a Friday afternoon, you will appreciate it.
What you lose in the Local Services Ads Performance Max migration
Your historical performance reports do not transfer. Google’s guidance is to download them from the redirection page before migration, or to take screenshots. That is the only irreversible item on this list, and it is why this is a job for today rather than for the week the email arrives.
Manual bidding is deprecated. So is vertical-level Target CPA: where you could previously set one target for emergency plumbing and a different one for lawn care inside the same account, you now get a single campaign-level Target CPA applied across every vertical in that campaign.
BBB callouts are gone. If you were leaning on that badge you need to select at least 6 other structured callouts to fill the gap, which you do on the Assets page. That same page takes up to 100 business photos and up to 6 callouts per category.
Your Google Business Profile also starts syncing one directionally into Google Ads. Name, address and opening hours flow from the profile into the campaign automatically, with no way to push a change back. That sounds like a convenience until the next line: a significant change to your business name or physical address triggers a standard verification review of 24 to 48 hours, and campaigns can pause while it runs.
The budget maths that catches people out
LSA budgets were weekly. Performance Max budgets are daily. Google converts by taking your historical average weekly budget and dividing it by 7, then caps monthly spend at that daily average multiplied by 30.4.
Read that again if you set a high weekly ceiling you rarely hit. The conversion uses your historical average, so the daily number you inherit can sit well below the spend you were comfortable authorising in a busy month. After migration you will find it on the Settings tab inside the Campaigns menu, next to bidding targets, service areas and ad schedules. Leads move to Goals, then Conversions, then Leads, a long way from where your eye is trained to go.
Check the daily figure on day one.
318 conversions, 12 real leads, and why pay-per-lead sharpens the problem
An Australian roofing account I audited was reporting 318 conversions at roughly $10 cost per acquisition. On paper it was the best performing account I had seen that quarter.
96% of those conversions were taps on the phone number button. Not connected calls. Taps. Across 16 months the account produced 12 leads anybody could trace to an actual conversation, which put the true cost per acquisition closer to $263. Worse than the reporting error: Smart Bidding had been trained on that fake signal for over a year and was buying more of the traffic that produced taps and nothing else. The full breakdown is here, and it is the clearest example I own of a cost per lead that looks healthy and is not.
That matters here because pay-per-lead moves the same fault from the reporting layer onto the invoice. When a conversion action fires the moment somebody shows intent, and never checks whether anything came of it, you get bad data. When the platform billing you per lead also owns the definition of a lead, you get bad data with a charge attached.
Google does run automated lead credits for leads its models assess as invalid or low quality, and its help page on those credits says they land on your account balance within 30 days, with the original charge still showing on the invoice. Read the exclusions before you rely on that safety net. Credits are unavailable in health care verticals, for tax specialists, and for advertisers anywhere in EMEA, which covers every UK reader of this post. Google also stopped issuing credits for job type not serviced and geo not serviced leads, which were two of the most common legitimate complaints advertisers had.
The part I will argue about: one Target CPA across verticals
Collapsing vertical-level Target CPA into a single campaign-level target is the most damaging change in this migration, and the framing of it as simplification does not survive contact with a real account.
A lead for a burst pipe at 9pm and a lead for a quarterly lawn service are not worth the same money and never have been. Under LSA you could say so in the interface. Under one campaign-level target you cannot, so the algorithm optimises toward whichever vertical converts cheapest, which is almost always the low-value one. The workaround Google points to is splitting into separate campaigns per vertical, and it does work. It also fragments your conversion volume at exactly the moment Smart Bidding needs density to learn, which for a plumber running 40 leads a month is a real cost and not a theoretical one.
The counter-argument is legitimate and worth stating. Campaign-level targets with separate campaigns is how the rest of Google Ads has worked for years, vertical-level targets were always an LSA peculiarity, and one structure across products makes the automation easier to reason about. I still think the trade lands harder on small accounts than on large ones, and small accounts are most of the LSA base.
What could go wrong
The failure I expect most often is quiet, and it is the reports. An email arrives, the migration runs, the dashboard changes, and four months later a client asks what their cost per lead looked like last spring and there is nothing to show them. Pull a CSV and screenshots now, and store them outside Google.
The second is the verification pause. If you were already planning a business name change or an address update, do it before your migration window rather than during it, or you risk a 24 to 48 hour review holding your spend while competitors keep running.
The third is the one to watch weekly for the first month. Performance can take up to two weeks to stabilise, which is long enough that you will be tempted to intervene in week one. Do not. Moving the target mid-learning is how a two week dip turns into a six week one, and we saw that pattern when dynamic search ads were pushed into AI Max.
Fourth, and smaller: confirm your lead routing number on day one. It is supposed to migrate with the campaign. I would not assume that on any account where the number changed in the last few months.
What I still do not know
I do not have a clean answer on reconciliation. When pay-per-lead charges land as conversions inside a Performance Max campaign, and automated credits post back to the account balance up to 30 days later, I cannot yet tell whether the cost per lead shown in the Google Ads interface settles to what you actually paid or stays at the pre-credit figure. Nobody I have asked has run a migrated account long enough to hold a reconciled invoice against the UI. Until somebody does, I would export spend and leads weekly and reconcile by hand against the invoice, which is tedious and I would rather not.
What to do this week. US home services advertisers: download your full LSA history today and write your current weekly budget and per-vertical targets somewhere outside Google. UK and Ireland: you are in the 2027 wave, so fix your lead definition before a platform starts billing you against it, and note that automated lead credits do not reach you. Australia: nothing to migrate, and the thing worth watching is pay-per-lead becoming a goal type inside Performance Max.
Most accounts we open are mis-measured rather than underperforming, and a forced migration is the moment that mis-measurement turns into a bill. If you want somebody senior to go through the account before yours moves, book a free 30-minute audit. Month to month, no lock-in, no reporting theatre.
One more thing to check if your campaigns carry location assets: since 12 October 2026, Google Ads automated promotions extracts offers from your website and adds them to those campaigns by default.
Researched and drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed, fact-checked and edited by Rajat Verma before publishing. All account examples are from real campaigns managed by Turquoise Digital and are anonymised.