If you run Local Services Ads for a plumbing, HVAC, roofing, or pest control company, your account is moving into Google Ads, and the first United States wave starts this month. The move itself takes a single day and happens automatically. You keep your leads, your reviews, and your pay-per-lead billing. What you don’t keep is your performance history. Google sends fourteen days’ notice by email, and once transition day passes, your old spend and lead reports are gone unless you exported them first.
That last part is the only step in this whole process you can’t undo. Everything else Google handles for you.
Two Emails Start Your Clock
The account administrator listed on your profile gets an advance notification email fourteen days before your migration date, along with warning banners inside your current dashboard. A reminder follows seven days later. A third email confirms the move once it’s finished. That’s the entire warning system.
So the first thing worth checking has nothing to do with ads. Open your profile and look at who the account administrator actually is. We’ve taken over plenty of accounts where that field still points at a former office manager, a shared inbox nobody reads, or the agency the owner fired two years ago. If that’s your situation, the fourteen-day warning lands somewhere you’ll never see it, and the first sign of the change will be a dashboard that no longer exists.
Google is rolling this out in phases rather than moving everyone at once. The first phase covers select home and storefront service advertisers in the United States, and the vertical list reads like a directory of local trades, according to Google Ads Help.
Export Your Reports Before Transition Day
Your previous campaign-level performance metrics don’t come with you. Past impressions, clicks, weekly spend, and ad-level performance reports all stay behind, which means you have to download or export your data from the original Local Services Ads dashboard before your migration date. Miss it and the record is simply gone.
People underestimate how much this stings until they need the numbers. Six months from now, when you’re trying to work out whether the new setup is actually cheaper per job or just feels different, the only honest comparison is against what you were spending before. Without the export, you’re guessing.
Seasonality makes it worse for trades. If your only surviving record starts the day you migrate, you’ll end up comparing a November lead cost against an August one and blaming the platform for the weather. Pull at least a full year so you can compare like with like.
Pull the full history, not just last quarter. Monthly spend, lead volume, cost per lead, and performance broken out by service. Save it somewhere that isn’t a browser tab. It also helps to keep the raw numbers rather than a summary, because separating raw leads from qualified ones and booked jobs is what tells you whether the ads were working or just busy.
What Moves Automatically on Transition Day
Most of it. Google transfers your campaign setup, so your targeted locations, services, and budget carry across without you rebuilding anything. Your leads and customer messages land inside Google Ads instead of the standalone dashboard, and the separate Local Services Ads dashboard goes away once you’ve moved.
The practical change is where everyone looks. Lead notifications and message threads live inside the Google Ads interface afterward, so whoever answers your phones has been trained on a screen that won’t exist. Give that person a new bookmark and ten minutes of walkthrough before transition day, not after a missed lead.
The billing model survives too. You still only pay when a customer gets in touch from your ad, which is the part owners worry about most when they hear the word migration, per Google’s Local Services Help.
Your job matching doesn’t change either. Google still routes calls and messages to you based on the local service ads categories you selected, so a drain-cleaning specialist doesn’t suddenly start paying for water-heater calls.
Your Budget Math Changes Overnight
This is the change most owners feel first. Your historical average weekly budget gets automatically divided by seven to set your daily average budget. Your monthly ceiling is that daily figure multiplied by 30.4, so total spend shouldn’t jump, but daily spend can swing on busy days.
That multiplier matters more than it looks. One storm week won’t blow your month, but it can eat a lopsided share of it early and leave the back half quiet. Judge the first full month, not the first invoice.
Two levers disappear. Manual bidding, including setting a maximum cost-per-lead, is no longer supported, and industry-level Target CPA is deprecated in favor of a single campaign-level target. If you’d been hand-capping what you’d pay for a roof inspection versus a gutter clean, that granularity is gone. You now set one target and let the system work toward it.
Expect the first two weeks to look strange. Costs bounce while the system recalibrates, and the temptation is to start adjusting things daily. Don’t. Reacting to every daily swing is how a stable account gets talked into a worse one.
If you’d rather not learn the new bidding model during your busy season, book a free strategy call and we’ll walk your account through it with you.
What You Handle and What We Handle
Some of this only you can do, because it depends on records and decisions that live inside your business. The rest is account work.
| You handle | We handle |
|---|---|
| Confirming the account administrator email is one you actually read | Auditing the exported history and setting a real baseline |
| Exporting the full performance history before transition day | Rebuilding reporting so the new numbers stay comparable |
| Deciding what a booked job is genuinely worth to you | Translating that into a campaign-level target and watching it settle |
| Keeping licenses, insurance, and reviews current | Monitoring lead quality through the first weeks after the move |
Plenty of owners handle the whole list themselves, and that’s a reasonable call when the account is small and the season is quiet. It stops being reasonable when the migration lands in your peak month. That’s the honest test for bringing in outside help on a paid account.
Your Timeline and Costs at a Glance
- Notice: an email fourteen days out, a reminder seven days later, a confirmation after the move.
- Transition: one day, automatic, no rebuild required on your end.
- Billing: unchanged, you still pay when a customer contacts you.
- Budget: your weekly figure becomes a daily one, divided by seven.
- What you lose: every historical performance report you didn’t export.
The migration itself costs nothing. The only real expense is the time you spend exporting records and the money you waste later if you skipped that step. For the home-service companies we work with across Port St. Lucie, Stuart, and Fort Pierce, that export is the whole task, and it takes an afternoon. It’s the same discipline behind marketing a trades business on measurable numbers rather than impressions.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Migration
Do I lose my leads or my reviews?
No. Your campaign setup transfers automatically, and your leads and customer messages move into Google Ads rather than disappearing. Reviews stay attached to your business. The loss is limited to historical performance reporting, which is exactly why the export matters so much.
What if I miss the fourteen-day email?
Your account still migrates on schedule. You don’t lose the ads, the leads, or the billing arrangement. You lose the chance to export your history, and there’s no way to retrieve it afterward. That’s why checking your administrator email now beats watching for a notification later.
Will my cost per lead go up?
Nobody can promise either direction, and be skeptical of anyone who does. What we can say is that losing manual cost-per-lead caps removes a guardrail some accounts leaned on. Set a deliberate campaign-level target before the move, and judge results over weeks rather than days.
Can I stay on the old dashboard?
Not once your account migrates. The separate Local Services Ads dashboard is retired as part of the transition, and everything moves into Google Ads. The phased rollout means your date may be later than another company’s, but the destination is the same.
Ready to Handle This Before the Email Lands?
The businesses that come through this cleanly are the ones that exported their numbers early and decided what a lead is worth before the system asked them. The ones that struggle find out on transition day.
We’ve run local marketing for Treasure Coast trades since 2015, and these are the verticals in Google’s first wave. If you’d like someone to pull your baseline, set your targets, and keep an eye on the account through your Local Services Ads migration, book a free strategy call and we’ll start with your export.