Operating Record
Google Retires the LSA Dashboard in August. Export Your Reports First.
Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign built for pay-per-lead goals. Phase one starts in August 2026 with United States home and storefront service advertisers, and plumbing, HVAC and electrical are on the first list. Most of what makes LSA work is unchanged. One thing is not recoverable, and you get fourteen days of notice before it happens.
What is actually changing, and what is not
The parts that make the channel work are staying put, per Google’s own migration documentation. You still pay per valid lead rather than per click. Your ads still serve exclusively on Search and Maps, in the same positions. Targeting stays keywordless and still runs off your service categories and areas. Your verified status and badge carry over, and Google says insurance and license reverification are no longer required. Your past lead history moves with you, including contact details, message threads and older call recordings.
Despite the Performance Max name, these campaigns do not spill onto YouTube, Gmail or the Display Network. Search and Maps only.
What changes is the management layer. Manual bidding goes away. Weekly budgets convert to daily averages by dividing your historical weekly figure by seven, with monthly spend capped at that daily number times 30.4. Better Business Bureau callouts are deprecated, so you will need to pick at least six other structured callouts. And after your migration date, logging into the old dashboard just redirects you into Google Ads.
The one step that cannot be undone
Your campaign-level performance reports do not migrate. Past impressions, clicks, weekly spend, ad-level performance. Google states plainly that these will not carry over and that you must download or export them from the Local Services Ads dashboard before your migration date. Leads transfer. The performance history behind them does not.
That is the whole reason this Field Note exists. Every other item on the list is an adjustment. This one is a door closing.
Our LSA demos, by year
2021 175
2022 267
2023 191
2024 111
2025 34
2026 63 through April 29
Toledo market. Demos, not leads and not spend.
What six years of our own LSA looked like
The channel peaked for us in 2022 at 267 demos, then fell for three straight years to 34 in 2025. That is an 87 percent decline from peak. If you had asked me at the end of last year whether LSA was still a channel, I would have said it was close to dead in our market.
Then 2026 opened with 63 demos through April 29. Compare those carefully, because the shapes are different. Thirty-four demos across twelve months is under three a month. Sixty-three across four months is nearly sixteen. That is roughly five and a half times the monthly rate, off a partial year that is not finished and may not hold.
I can only tell you that because I have six years of the numbers in one place. A contractor who has been running LSA since 2021 and never exported anything is about to lose the ability to answer the only question that matters here: was this channel always like this, or did something change.
If you run more than one trade, read this part twice
Vertical-level Target CPA is being deprecated. If you have been running different cost-per-lead targets for separate categories inside one campaign, Google will calculate a single campaign-level target and apply it across all of them.
For a shop running plumbing and HVAC out of one account, those are not the same lead and never were. A blended target will overpay for one and starve the other, and the reporting will average away the evidence. Google’s stated fix is to split them into separate campaigns. That is worth doing before the migration rather than after you have spent a month wondering why one trade went quiet.
What to do before the fourteen-day email lands
Export everything this week. Do not wait for the notice. You get fourteen days and a seven-day reminder, and the account administrator on file is the only person who receives them. If that address is a former office manager, you may not get them at all.
Write down your baseline before you lose the dashboard. Leads per month, cost per lead, and the seasonal shape of both. You will need that to judge whether automated bidding helped or hurt, and Google says to allow up to two weeks after migration for performance to stabilize.
Split multi-trade campaigns now if you want separate targets to survive.
Check who the account administrator is and confirm your Google Business Profile details are correct. Name, address and hours sync one direction from the profile into Google Ads, and a significant change to your name or address triggers a review that can pause the campaign for a day or two.
Keep your own record from here forward. The broader lesson is not about LSA. Any number that lives only in a vendor’s dashboard is a number you are renting. We keep lead source in our own system for exactly this reason, and it is the only reason the table above exists.
One thing I cannot tell you
I cannot tell you whether our 2026 rebound is the channel recovering or us getting better at it, because we changed several things at once and I do not have LSA cost broken out by year in front of me. Those demos might have been cheap or they might have been the most expensive on the sheet. Volume is not efficiency, and anyone showing you a lead count without a cost beside it is showing you half a picture, including me, in this instance.
What I am confident about is the export. That deadline is real, it is set by someone else, and there is no version of this where having your own six years hurts you.
