Where did my Local Services Ads dashboard go?

If you logged in to Local Services Ads and landed in Google Ads instead, your account has migrated. Since August 2026 Google has been moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads, where they run as Performance Max campaigns with a pay-per-lead goal. Your ads show in the same place and you still pay per lead. Almost everything about how you manage them has moved, and a few things did not make the trip.

What is happening, and when

Google is retiring the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard and running the ads from Google Ads instead. It is doing it in three phases, per Google's migration page.

• Phase one, from August 2026: selected home and storefront service advertisers in the United States.
• Phase two, late 2026: broader groups of US advertisers and categories.
• Phase three, 2027: accounts outside the United States and the remaining categories.

You do not choose when. The account administrator gets an email 14 days before the migration date, banners appear in the dashboard, a reminder follows seven days later, and a final email confirms the move is done. From migration day, logging in to the old dashboard redirects you to the campaign overview in Google Ads.

Phase one is moving slowly. As of the end of October 2026, not one of our own client accounts has migrated. Everything below comes from Google's documentation, and we will update it with what we see when the first account moves.

What stays the same

• Where the ads appear: the carousel above the regular ads and the organic results.
• How you pay: per lead, not per click.
• The Google Verified badge and the verification checks behind it.
• Your lead history. Google says past leads transfer to Google Ads automatically.
• The leads themselves. Calls, messages and bookings arrive the same way, and you still rate them.

What changes

1. Budgets go from weekly to daily. Google divides your historical average weekly budget by seven and sets that as a daily average. Monthly spend is capped at the daily average times 30.4. The total is about the same, but the pacing is different, and advice that talks about "this week's budget" is now out of date.
2. Manual bidding is removed. Setting a maximum cost per lead is no longer supported. Bidding is automated, with a campaign-level target cost per lead if you want one.
3. One target across your job types. If you had different bids for different verticals, Google calculates a single campaign-level target and applies it to all of them. To keep them separate, you need separate campaigns per vertical.
4. Performance reports do not transfer. Your lead history does, but the reports from the old dashboard do not. Google says a download page is coming and suggests screenshots in the meantime. Export what you need before your date.
5. Performance takes time to settle. Google says to allow up to two weeks for the migration to complete and for performance to ramp back to stable levels. Do not judge the new setup, or change it, in the first fortnight.
6. The screens move. Leads, ratings, budget, schedule and service area all live in Google Ads now. The settings are the same settings in a different place.

Before your account moves

• Do nowExport your lead and performance history from the old dashboard. Reports do not come across, and the download page Google promised is not here yet.
• Do nowWrite down your current settings. Weekly budget, bid mode and any per-vertical bids, ad schedule and time zone, job types, service area. You will want to check them against the migrated campaign.
• Do nowCheck who has access to the Google Ads account. The migration email goes to the account administrator. If a past agency is still the admin, fix that first.
• DecideWhether you need separate campaigns per vertical, if you were bidding differently on different job types.

After it moves

Open the campaign overview and compare it with your notes. Check the daily budget is your weekly budget divided by seven, the schedule and time zone survived, every job type and the service area are intact, and leads are still arriving where someone sees them. Then leave it alone for two weeks.

If leads drop during those two weeks, that is what Google said would happen. If they are still down a month later, look at the usual causes on the not-getting-leads page, starting with whether a setting reset.

Confused by the move? Get a Local Services Ads audit › We export the history, check every setting against the migrated campaign, and watch the first two weeks so you do not have to.

Common questions about the move into Google Ads