LSA to PMax Migration Is Live: The August Checklist

The LSA to Performance Max migration is no longer an announcement — it’s live. Google’s Help documentation puts phase 1 in August 2026 for select US home and storefront service advertisers, with nine trades named on the phase 1 list, and documents the warning mechanism: an email to the account admin 14 days before that account’s individual migration date. If your Local Services Ads account hasn’t flipped yet, this is the window where preparation still counts.

When Google first published the plan in July, coverage focused on what was changing in the abstract: LSA folds into Google Ads as a specialized Performance Max campaign type with pay-per-lead goals. We covered the original announcement in depth on July 20 — what the new campaign type is, why billing and placement don’t change, and why the export warning matters. This post is the update layer: what the migration mechanics look like now that Google has documented the rollout.

Three things deserve more attention than the July news cycle gave them: the consolidated what-transfers-vs-what-doesn’t checklist (Google spreads it across five help-doc sections), the Target CPA unification that quietly averages away per-vertical bid control for multi-service businesses, and one circulating claim — the YouTube/Display expansion myth — plus two assumptions the Performance Max name invites, that Google’s own documentation contradicts.

Per Google’s Help Center documentation, phase 1 of the transition began in August 2026 for select home and storefront service advertisers in the United States — specifically plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving. Phase 2, slated for late 2026, expands to service-area businesses without physical storefronts and to accounts with custom bidding or booking configurations. Phase 3 covers non-US accounts and all remaining categories in 2027.

One discrepancy worth flagging honestly: some of July’s trade coverage — including Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal — described the first test cohort as pet care, home services, wellness, and education. That list differs from the nine trades in Google’s own Help documentation, and the two were never reconciled publicly. Our July post carried the trade-press framing; Google’s Help Center list is the canonical one at the time of writing. The practical takeaway is the same either way: no published master list tells you your date — the notification email and dashboard banner do.

That notification cadence is fixed: account admins get an email 14 days before their individual migration date plus in-dashboard warning banners, a final reminder email 7 days later, and a confirmation once migration completes. Google Ads product liaison Ginny Marvin reportedly framed the consolidation as ending the need to hop between LSA and Google Ads accounts (per WordStream), and — per ppc.land — strongly recommended advertisers download their historical data ahead of their transition timing and start that process immediately. If Performance Max itself is new territory, our guide to how Performance Max campaigns work covers the standard version this local variant is built on.

Google’s migration documentation spreads the transfer rules across five separate sections — what’s not changing, what’s changing, the timeline, what to expect, and bidding and budget adjustments. The table below consolidates all of it into one checklist, grouped by what each item requires from you. Every row traces to the Google Ads Help migration documentation.

The asymmetry in the bottom group is the whole story. Everything customer-shaped — contacts, lead history, verification status — moves on its own. Everything operator-shaped — performance history, manual bid control, BBB assets — either converts with changed behavior or disappears. Google’s documentation is blunt about the report side: “Please note that previous performance reports won’t carry over to Google Ads.” After migration, the old LSA dashboard auto-redirects, so any report not downloaded first is gone. If your client dashboards or year-over-year baselines lean on LSA history, our analytics team builds exactly this kind of reporting continuity into platform migrations.

This is the mechanic the July announcement wave barely touched, and it’s the one most likely to move real money. In the standalone LSA dashboard, an advertiser running several service verticals — say plumbing and HVAC under one account — could hold a different Target CPA for each vertical. Post-migration, that granularity is gone at the campaign level: Google auto-calculates a single unified campaign-level Target CPA across all categories for accounts that previously ran different amounts.

Why that matters: lead economics differ sharply by trade. A lead that’s worth a premium bid in one category may be worth a fraction of that in another, and a blended average target treats both the same — overbidding the cheap vertical, underbidding the valuable one. Cost-per-lead benchmarks vary widely across industries, as our Google Ads industry benchmark data shows on the click side — and the same logic applies to lead pricing.

The fix has a deadline attached. Per Google’s documentation, advertisers who want to preserve separate bid control per vertical must proactively split into separate campaigns per category — a dedicated plumbing campaign, a dedicated HVAC campaign — and that split must be done through the Local Services interface at g.co/localservices before migration, not after. Once the account flips, you inherit the blended target.

The budget conversion is pure arithmetic, but the pacing behavior it produces is not what LSA veterans are used to. Per Google’s documentation, your historical average weekly budget divides by 7 to become the new daily average, and monthly spend is capped at that daily average times 30.4 — the average number of days in a month. So a $350 weekly budget becomes a $50 daily average with monthly billing capped at $1,520; a $700 weekly budget becomes $100 per day, capped at $3,040 per month.

The behavioral change hides inside “average”: daily spend can fluctuate above the daily figure on high-demand days, balancing out so monthly billing never exceeds the cap. Advertisers pacing against LSA’s weekly rhythm should expect individual days to overshoot and judge spend at the monthly cap, not the daily line. Manual bidding is retired entirely at the same time — setting a max cost-per-lead is not supported post-migration, and Smart Bidding becomes mandatory for pay-per-lead campaigns.

Two asset-level changes land with migration, one manual and one structural. The manual one: Better Business Bureau callouts are dropped as an asset type, and Google directs advertisers to the campaign’s Assets tab to select at least six other structured callouts — business hours, specialties, accepted payment methods and the like — as the replacement. Nothing rebuilds those for you; accounts that ran BBB callouts and do nothing migrate with thinner ads than they ran before.

The structural one: Google Business Profile becomes the single source of truth for core business details. Name, physical address, and standard hours sync one-way from GBP into Google Ads automatically and can no longer be edited inside the ads platform. That has a scheduling implication — significant changes to business name or address trigger a standard verification review of 24–48 hours, during which the campaign may pause. If a rebrand or a move is on your calendar, put it well before or well after your migration window, not inside it. On the upside, verification itself carries over: the Google Verified badge, license and insurance status all transfer with no re-verification required. Advertisers also gain real-time self-service editing of lead-routing phone numbers.

One claim in July’s myth-making coverage — MediaPost’s — doesn’t survive contact with Google’s own documentation either. Nor do two further assumptions the Performance Max name invites. Each correction below traces to the Google Ads Help migration doc.

The pattern behind all three myths is the same: the Performance Max branding invites assumptions from standard PMax behavior that the pay-per-lead variant explicitly doesn’t share. When a claim about this migration sounds like generic PMax knowledge, check it against the migration doc before acting on it — the same discipline applies to the phase 1 industry list, where trade coverage and Google’s documentation still disagree.

Migration itself is near-instant — but stable performance isn’t. Google’s guidance sets the expectation directly:

Treat that two-week window as a monitoring period, not a judgment period. Lead volume dips or daily-spend spikes inside it are expected ramp behavior, not evidence the migration broke your account — and conversely, it’s too early to credit the new structure for a good week. The operational moves that matter during the window: verify the converted daily budget matches your ÷7 expectation, confirm your callout assets are live, check that lead-routing phone numbers survived the move (they’re now editable in real time), and confirm message leads are flowing into the Google Ads communication panel if you run message goals.

Reporting continuity is the other week-one job. The new Lead Manager — under Goals → Conversions → Leads — retains feature parity with the old lead inbox per Google: charged status per lead, lead type, the lead feedback form, and export/download for CRM import. What it will never contain is your pre-migration performance history, which is why the export deadline sits above everything else in this checklist.

Read as a trend, this migration is Google continuing to retire standalone surfaces and manual levers in favor of one platform and automation-first control — LSA held out longer than most because pay-per-lead never fit click-auction infrastructure. Projecting forward, the reasonable expectation is that the pay-per-lead type gradually inherits more of the PMax toolset over time; none of that is announced, so plan against what’s documented today. Here’s how the documented mechanics translate into next steps by role.

If local lead generation is a meaningful share of your pipeline and you’d rather not learn the pay-per-lead PMax variant on a live budget, our paid media team runs this migration end to end — export and reporting continuity, campaign pre-splits for multi-service accounts, budget re-verification, and callout rebuilds included.