What changes, and when
Starting in November 2026, Google is integrating Local Services Ads into Google Ads. The standalone LSA account you log into today goes away, access ends, and you get redirected into Google Ads to manage what used to live in its own dashboard. Google announced it in an October 15 email to account holders (“Google Local Services Ads is integrating with Google Ads”), so if LSA feeds your phones, this is already on the calendar whether you read the email or not.
Two controls disappear in the move. Manual bidding is removed, and so is the business-category-level target cost per lead — the setting that let you say what a lead is worth to you category by category. After the migration, there is one campaign-level target instead of a target for each kind of work you advertise.
What does not change is the reason this matters: LSA leads are still phone calls from people with a problem right now. The channel keeps working. What changes is how much of your own history and how many of your own bidding decisions survive the move — and both of those are decided by what you do before November 1.
The November 1 backup: your reports do not move with you
Your LSA performance reports do not carry into the new setup. When the migration happens, the reporting access you have today goes away, and the history in it — what you spent, what you paid per lead, which categories produced and which ones just burned budget — is gone with it unless you saved your own copy first.
So before November 1, download your performance reports. Pull the longest history the account will give you, not just last month. Save the files somewhere you will actually find them in six months — a folder with your other business records, not a downloads folder on one laptop.
Here is why the backup matters more than it looks. After the migration, every argument about whether the new setup is costing you more starts with “compared to what?” Your saved reports are the only baseline that answers that question. Without them, you are negotiating with your own memory, and memory always loses to a spreadsheet.
The highest-bid trap
This is the part of the migration that can quietly cost you money. When your per-category targets go away, Google does not average them, and it does not pick the one you use most. The migration automatically applies the highest category bid in your account as the new campaign-level target CPL — for everything.
Run the numbers on a hypothetical account to see why that stings. Say an operator targets $45 a lead on their bread-and-butter category, $70 on a second category, and $120 on a rare, high-ticket category they only switch on during storm season. Three targets, each set on purpose, each reflecting what that work is actually worth. After the migration, all three categories run against a single target: $120. The everyday work now gets bid like the emergency work, and the operator pays premium prices for ordinary leads without ever making that decision.
The trap is not that Google raises your target. The trap is that it raises it silently, to the one number in your account you chose for the most expensive job you do. If you have one category in your account with a much higher target than the rest — a seasonal service, an experiment you forgot about, anything — that number is about to become your price for every lead you buy.
Go look at your category targets this week. If the highest one is an outlier you would never pay across the board, that is the single most important fact to know about your account before this migration touches it.
The split decision: who should split, and who can ignore it
There is one way to keep distinct per-category bidding: before November 1, split the account into dedicated per-category campaigns, so each category carries its own target into the new setup instead of being folded into one. Google built the door; you just have to walk through it before the deadline.
Split if your categories genuinely earn different money. If one line of work closes at three times the ticket of another, paying the same target for both leads is a subsidy from your good work to your cheap work, and splitting is how you stop paying it. Split, too, if your highest category is a seasonal or emergency service whose target would poison the bidding on everything else.
Do not split if your category targets are all in the same neighborhood anyway. If the gap between your highest and lowest targets is small, the single campaign-level target changes very little, and separate campaigns are just more accounts to babysit. The split is a tool for accounts with real spread between categories, not a ritual every operator needs to perform.
Either way, make it a decision, not a default. Operators who check their targets and choose will come out of this fine. Operators who find out from their first post-migration invoice will not.
The two-week checklist
- Download your LSA performance reports before November 1. Longest history available. Store them with your business records.
- Write down every category target CPL in your account. You want the full list in front of you, not the one you remember setting.
- Circle the highest number. That is the target Google will apply across your whole account if you do nothing.
- Decide on the split. Categories with real spread in value → split into dedicated per-category campaigns before November 1. Categories clustered together → leave it alone.
- Mark the calendar for November. When the account moves into Google Ads, check your campaign-level target on day one and confirm it is the number you expected.
None of this takes an afternoon. It takes one login, one download, and one honest look at your own numbers — the same discipline that made the Oct 1 LSA billing change manageable for operators who saw it coming. Google is rearranging the furniture in a channel a lot of shops depend on. The operators who keep their history and choose their own target will barely notice. The ones who let the default choose for them will feel it in their cost per lead — and by then, the reports that could prove it will be gone.
If your LSA presence runs through your Google Business Profile — and it does — the profile hygiene in The Words Your Customers Actually Type is worth a pass while you are in there.