Local Services Ads advertisers lose dashboard access 14 days after the email, and manual bidding goes with it

Google Ads documentation now sets out how the Local Services Ads migration into Performance Max actually works, and the first phase went live in August 2026 with selected home and shop front service advertisers in the United States. On the day an account transitions, access to the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard ends, any login attempt redirects to the campaign overview inside Google Ads, and manual bidding is no longer supported. PPC Land reported on 23 August 2026 that the help centre page describing the move, published under the heading Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, now carries procedural detail that was absent when the transition was first documented in July 2026.

What was already known, and what Google has now documented

The announcement is not the news. Since July 2026 it has been on record that Local Services Ads would be folded into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign type billed on leads rather than on clicks. What was missing was every operational answer underneath that sentence. Google has since published the notification sequence advertisers receive, the formula that converts a weekly budget into a daily one, the bidding controls that do not survive the move, and the interface locations where migrated advertisers find functions they previously reached through a separate product. The first phase being live moves the story from a plan to a dated schedule, and the account-level details are the part that now needs acting on. Reporting from PPC Land covers the captured state of that documentation.

Who moves, and when

Phase one covers home and shop front service advertisers in the United States in nine categories: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and removals. Google selected those categories as the starting group. Broader sets follow in late 2026, specifically service-area businesses that operate without a physical shop front, and accounts running custom bidding or booking configurations.

Non-US accounts and all remaining business categories move in 2027. That single line is the one that matters most outside the United States, and it is worth stating plainly: no account outside the United States is in the first two waves. The source gives no Thailand-specific date, no country-by-country sequence within 2027, and no indication of which month inside that year any particular market moves. Anyone quoting a Thai date for this migration is quoting something the documentation does not contain.

The export deadline is the only irreversible loss

Everything else in the migration is a change of mechanics. One thing is a deletion. Google states that previous performance reports will not carry over and will no longer be accessible after migration. Total spend, lead counts and the campaign history behind them stop being retrievable once the account has moved, and the documentation describes no archive, no read-only view, and no support route for recovering them afterwards.

That makes the 14-day notice period the entire export window. An advance notification email reaches the account administrator listed on the profile 14 days before that account's individual migration date, warning banners appear inside the existing dashboard over the same period, and a reminder email lands seven days later, which places it seven days before transition. After transition day there is nothing left to export from, because the login redirects into Google Ads.

The documentation points advertisers at a frequently asked questions section for instructions on how to download the reports first. In the captured version of the page, seven of those FAQ entries appear as collapsed headings with no visible answers, among them the entry asking whether campaign performance reports carry over and the entry asking whether past customer leads carry over. The export instructions therefore sit behind an interaction rather than in the body of the page, which is an awkward place for them given that the window closes permanently.

For any agency or in-house team holding Local Services Ads accounts, the practical response does not depend on knowing a migration date. Export the full performance history now, before an email arrives, and store it outside the platform. A pre-emptive export costs an hour. Missing the window costs the entire measurement baseline for a lead channel, which is the number every future budget argument gets tested against.

Three emails, one redirect, no way back

The notification cadence is fixed and the transition itself is described without ambiguity. There is no parallel running period during which both interfaces work, and the documentation describes no mechanism for reverting an account after it has moved.

A third email confirms completion once the account has moved. The migration timeline section opens by describing a rollout structured for a smooth transition with no disruption to advertising, and two later passages qualify that description. Campaigns may pause temporarily during verification reviews lasting 24 to 48 hours, and a flagged note states that the process can take up to two weeks to complete fully and for campaign performance to ramp back to stable levels. A two-week ramp is not the same as no disruption, and the documentation offers no mechanism for choosing a migration date, so a roofing or HVAC business can land inside its working season.

What survives the move

Four elements are described as unchanged. Billing stays on a pay-per-lead basis, charging for valid leads such as phone calls and messages rather than for ad clicks, which is the distinction between this campaign type and standard Performance Max, where the charge is per click. Placement stays on Google Search and Google Maps only, in the same positions as before. Targeting stays keywordless, driven by service categories and service areas rather than keyword lists. The stated focus on high-intent customer connections is also described as unchanged.

Verification survives as well. Businesses that already completed verification keep their Google Verified badge, which transfers automatically, and insurance and licence reverification are not required. Google attaches a conditional to that: if any additional business-level checks are ever required, a notification will appear in the Google Ads account. Neither the trigger for such checks nor their scope is specified, which leaves a verification obligation that exists in principle and has no published shape.

The bidding controls that disappear

Two mechanisms are deprecated outright. Manual bidding, including the maximum cost per lead setting, is no longer supported. Vertical-level Target CPA is also removed, on the stated grounds that Google Ads does not support that level of granularity.

The second removal carries arithmetic that multi-vertical accounts have to deal with before they migrate. Where an advertiser previously ran different Target CPA amounts for separate verticals inside one campaign, a single campaign-level Target CPA is calculated and applied across all vertical categories. Keeping separate bidding rules by business category now requires separate campaigns, one per vertical. Google uses plumbing and HVAC as its worked example, and the underlying point holds for any account where a lead in one category is worth several times a lead in another. Averaging those into one target does not produce a compromise, it produces a number that is too high for the cheap vertical and too low for the expensive one.

Manual control in this product has been contracting for years. Google introduced Target Cost Per Lead bidding in September 2024 as a middle position between the manual Max Per Lead setting and fully automated Maximize Leads, reporting at the time that advertisers moving up from manual bidding saw lead volume rise while those moving down from automated bidding saw it fall. Vertical-specific removals have happened before as well: tax specialist advertisers lost message leads, autocrediting, booking and call recording in January 2025.

The deprecation also lands in the middle of a wider adjustment to how targets behave. Google restored Target CPA and Target ROAS as standalone bidding strategy labels in June 2026, and a separate change effective 17 August 2026 altered how budget-constrained campaigns pursue their stated targets, drawing sustained criticism from practitioners before it took effect. An advertiser inheriting a campaign-level Target CPA for the first time is inheriting it under bidding behaviour that changed within the last month.

Weekly budgets divided by seven

Budget conversion follows a published formula. The historical average weekly budget is divided by seven to produce a daily average budget. Google states that monthly spend is unaffected, because the monthly ceiling is the daily average multiplied by 30.4, the average number of days in a month, and daily spend may fluctuate on high-demand days without monthly billing exceeding that limit.

The arithmetic is worth writing out. A weekly budget of 700 units becomes a daily average of 100 and a monthly ceiling of 3,040. Under the previous weekly structure, four weeks at 700 came to 2,800. The difference reflects the 4.34-week average month rather than a change in policy, but an advertiser who had been reading a weekly number as a hard cap now has a monthly instrument instead. That mechanism is the standard Google Ads average daily budget, whose pacing behaviour was itself modified on 1 March 2026 so that the system pursues the monthly ceiling regardless of ad scheduling.

Business Profile becomes the record, and the lead inbox moves

The migrated campaign takes its identity data from Google Business Profile. Business name, physical address and standard opening hours sync in one direction, from the profile into Google Ads, so changing any of them means editing the profile. Photos and service areas are pre-populated from the profile but can then be customised for ads independently. A caveat attaches: a significant update to a business name or physical address triggers a standard verification review, described as typically taking 24 to 48 hours, during which the campaign may pause. A service business making a legitimate address change inherits a documented serving gap with no stated exemption.

Lead handling moves to a table reached through the Goals drop-down, then Conversions, then Leads. Google describes it as a replacement for the Local Services Ads lead inbox, keeping charged status, lead type such as call or message, a lead feedback form, and CSV-style download for import into a CRM. Message leads open a panel where texts or emails can be read and answered inside Google Ads, and the phone number that call and message leads route to can be edited in real time. Reporting runs on three named metrics: Conversions as the count of charged leads, Cost as total spend, and Cost per conversion as the average cost per lead.

Two asset changes come with the move. Better Business Bureau callouts are no longer supported, and the documentation instructs businesses to open the campaign assets tab and select at least six other structured callouts, naming opening hours, specialities and accepted payment methods as examples. A later passage states that business callouts can be managed up to six per category, alongside up to 100 additional business photos. Whether the instruction to select at least six callouts means six in total or six within a category is not resolved in the text. Headlines, videos and sitelinks, which standard Performance Max requires or supports, do not apply to campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. This is a constrained variant of the campaign type rather than the full product.

What this means for Thai marketers

Local Services Ads is not the daily reality for most advertisers in Thailand, and the immediate operational impact here is small. The value of the story for a Thai team is different, and it is worth labelling the next part as analysis rather than reporting.

First, the date. Non-US accounts move in 2027, which means any Thai account holding this product has a year of notice and no published month. The rational response is not to wait for an email but to decide now what the historical reporting is worth, since the export window will be 14 days whenever it opens and there is no reason to assume a longer runway for later phases than for the first one.

Second, the pattern. What is happening here is a separate advertising product being absorbed into a goal type inside Google Ads, with the controls that did not fit standard mechanics removed rather than ported across. That is the same direction of travel visible elsewhere in the platform: Local Inventory Ads became the default for all Shopping campaigns from 31 August 2026, and campaign total budgets reached Search, Performance Max and Shopping in January 2026. Any account structure that depends on a granular manual control is holding a depreciating asset, and the Local Services migration is the clearest example so far, because it retires an advertiser-facing product rather than a setting inside one. Teams managing Google Ads accounts built around per-vertical targets should be asking which of those targets survive a forced consolidation.

Third, local inventory is being reshaped underneath all of this. Paid placements inside the local pack rose from under three percent to 21.99 percent of mobile ranking reports between November 2025 and January 2026, a 733 percent increase in three months. Apple opened Maps ad buying in the United States and Canada in August 2026 but excluded home services from its policy, so the businesses most affected by the Google migration gained no alternative inventory. For a Thai service business the read-across is that the organic side of the local pack is being squeezed while paid placement grows, which raises the return on profile completeness and review volume. That work sits with local SEO rather than with the ads account, and it is not affected by this migration at all.

What the source did not say

Google has not published a Thailand date, or any country-level sequence inside 2027. It has not described a way to choose, delay or decline a migration date. It has not said whether an account can be reverted after transition, and the absence of any described mechanism is not the same as a confirmed refusal. The visible FAQ headings on the captured page do not carry their answers, so the exact export procedure for historical reports is not readable from the documentation itself. The trigger and scope of the possible future business-level checks attached to the Google Verified badge are unspecified. The conflict between selecting at least six callouts and managing six callouts per category is unresolved in the text.

Frequently asked questions

Is this happening to Local Services Ads accounts in Thailand yet?

No. Non-US accounts and all remaining business categories move in 2027, and the first phase in August 2026 covered only United States home and shop front advertisers in nine service categories. The source gives no Thailand-specific date inside that year.

Do I have to do anything before my account migrates?

Yes, export your historical performance reports. Google states that previous performance reports do not carry over and are no longer accessible after migration, and the only warning is an email 14 days ahead, so exporting before that email arrives removes the risk entirely.

Does my Google Verified badge survive the move?

Yes, businesses that have already completed verification keep the badge and it transfers automatically, with no insurance or licence reverification required. Google adds that a notification will appear in the account if any additional business-level checks are ever required, without specifying what would trigger them.

Can I keep a different Target CPA for each of my service categories?

Not inside one campaign. Vertical-level Target CPA is removed, a single campaign-level Target CPA is calculated across all verticals, and preserving separate bidding by category now requires one campaign per vertical, with plumbing and HVAC given as the worked example.

Can I choose or postpone my migration date?

The source did not say. The documentation describes a notification cadence and a transition day for each account, but it names no mechanism for selecting a date, deferring one, or reverting after the move has happened.

If a lead channel is about to lose its reporting history, the useful work happens before the email, not after it. Relevant Audience audits lead-generation accounts against the measurement that will still exist afterwards, and the same question applies to any Thai account running on SEO services in Thailand alongside paid lead generation.