Local Services Ads are being rebuilt as a Performance Max campaign with a pay-per-lead goal, and most of what has been written about the move stops at the timeline. This is about the machine underneath: what the new campaign type takes from Local Services Ads, what it takes from Performance Max, and the handful of places where it behaves like neither. If you run one of these accounts, or you are about to inherit one from a client, these are the mechanics that decide whether the migration is a non-event or an expensive month.
Everything here is drawn from Google’s own documentation for the transition and for pay-per-lead goals, as published in August 2026. Where Google has not said something, we say so rather than guess.
It is Performance Max in name, not in behavior
Standard Performance Max is a reach product. You hand it headlines, descriptions, images, video and a URL, and it serves across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, choosing the mix itself. That is the trade we described in our earlier piece on when Performance Max works: you surrender targeting and reporting in exchange for inventory.
The pay-per-lead version makes almost the opposite trade. It serves on Google Search and Google Maps only. There are no headlines, no descriptions, no videos, no sitelinks, and no final URL to send traffic to. It does not expand to YouTube or Display because there is nothing to expand with. What it borrows from Performance Max is the automation layer: the bidding, the budget pacing, the asset optimization, and the fact that it lives inside the Google Ads account alongside everything else. The surface it appears on and the way it charges are inherited straight from Local Services Ads.
So the mental model is not “PMax for plumbers.” It is “Local Services Ads with Google Ads bidding bolted on.” That distinction matters for every setting below.
There are no keywords, and there is no landing page
Targeting is built from three things: a service area (cities, counties or ZIP codes), between one and ten business categories, and the individual service types you switch on or off inside each category. Google matches the search to those inputs. You cannot add a keyword, a negative keyword or an audience. If a plumber wants to stop being shown for water-heater installs, the lever is the service-type toggle, not a negative list.
The ad also does not send anyone to a website. The unit of the ad is the business: name, rating, review count, photos, callouts, a phone number and a message button. The website URL is optional and used for Google’s asset optimization rather than as a destination. This is why a beautiful landing page does nothing for these campaigns, and why the Business Profile does everything.
The Business Profile is now the source of truth, and parts of it are read-only
After the migration the campaign pulls the business name, address, hours and review rating directly from the Google Business Profile, and those fields cannot be edited inside Google Ads. Change the hours in Google Ads and nothing happens; change them in the Business Profile and the campaign updates. The phone number is the exception and can be set at campaign level, which is what makes call tracking numbers possible.
This is the same direction Google has been moving since 2025, when Local Services Ads stopped collecting their own reviews and began reading them from the Business Profile instead. A business with a neglected profile now has a neglected ad, and no amount of budget fixes that.
What you can add on top: up to six callouts per category (“free estimates,” “licensed and insured,” “same-day service”), extra images beyond the profile photos, a founding year, and an ad schedule by day and hour. The Better Business Bureau callout that many accounts relied on is not supported after the move, which is why Google’s own guidance is to fill the six structured callouts instead.
You are charged for contacts, and a phone call is a mandatory conversion
Billing is per valid lead, not per click. A lead is a customer contacting the business directly through the ad, and Google recognizes three kinds. Phone calls are required: answered calls, voicemails and return calls to a missed connection all count, subject to a minimum duration. Messages by text or email are optional. Bookings, where a customer schedules through the ad, are optional and arrive from October 2026.
“Required” is doing real work in that sentence. Phone calls must be set up as a conversion action for the campaign to run. For an owner who used to tick a box in the old dashboard, this is the first time the phrase “conversion action” enters their vocabulary, and it is the first place a migrated account can quietly break: if the call conversion is missing or misconfigured, the campaign has nothing to optimize toward.
The lead itself lands in Lead Manager inside Google Ads, which shows whether it was charged, how it arrived, and the customer details. Lead and message history transfers from the old dashboard. Performance history does not, which is the single most important line in the migration notes and the reason every account should have its reports exported before the fourteen-day email runs out.
The bid you never touched is gone
Local Services Ads let you bid manually per lead, or set a target cost per lead for each vertical you were listed under. Both are retired. The migrated campaign uses Google Ads automated bidding, and Google has said the vertical-level targets consolidate into a single campaign-level target. If a business genuinely needs a different cost per lead for two services, say emergency repairs and scheduled installs, the answer is two campaigns, not two targets.
Google has not published which automated strategy the migrated accounts land on, or how the initial target is derived from the old settings. Anyone telling you precisely how the new bid will behave in month one is guessing. What can be said is that automated bidding needs conversion volume to be stable, and a single-truck plumber getting eight leads a month is thin data for any algorithm. Expect the first weeks to look different from the last weeks on the old system, and do not read that as the migration “breaking” the account.
Weekly budgets become daily averages, and the math changes the feel of the account
The old dashboard thought in weeks. Google Ads thinks in days. At migration the weekly budget is divided by seven and becomes an average daily budget; the monthly cap is that daily figure multiplied by 30.4. A $700 weekly budget becomes $100 a day and roughly $3,040 a month, which is more than the $2,800 that four weeks would have cost. That is not a trick, it is calendar arithmetic, but an owner comparing this month’s invoice to last month’s will notice it.
Google Ads also pacing-overspends on individual days and evens out across the month, where the old system spread the week more evenly. A Tuesday that costs double the daily budget is normal and will be balanced by a quiet Sunday. This is the second most common source of “something is wrong” calls after a migration, and the fix is explaining the model before the first bill rather than after it.
Lead disputes are more automated than the dashboard made them look
Two categories of invalid lead, a job type the business does not offer and a location outside its service area, are credited automatically rather than through a manual dispute. Spam and robocalls are scanned for automatically inside a 72-hour window. Manual disputes remain for the leads the system gets wrong. In practice this means the dispute job has shifted from filing to checking: someone still needs to read Lead Manager each week to confirm the automatic credits landed and to catch the ones that did not.
The ranking inputs have not changed, and they are still mostly outside the ad account
Nothing in the migration notes changes how these ads are ordered. The inputs that have always mattered still do: review volume, recency and rating, all of which now come from the Business Profile; response time, where the businesses that answer within minutes are favored over those that answer within hours; proximity to the searcher; completeness of the profile; and the Google Verified badge, which in October 2025 replaced the separate Google Guaranteed and Google Screened badges and no longer carries the old money-back guarantee. Verification status and completed background checks carry across the migration without being redone.
This is the part agencies most often get wrong when they take on a migrated account. The instinct from search campaigns is to work the account: bids, budgets, structure. Here, the account is maybe a third of the result. The rest is whether the phone gets answered in under fifteen minutes and whether the last twenty reviews are recent and good.
Sharing an account with Search campaigns, for the first time
Until now a business could run Local Services Ads and Search campaigns without the two ever appearing in the same interface. After migration they sit in one account, and the useful side of that is obvious: one login, one set of conversion actions, one place to see what a lead costs by channel. Google has not published rules on how the two campaign types interact in the auction, so we will not invent any. What we can say from running both is that the pay-per-lead and pay-per-click sides can be chasing the same emergency searcher, and part of the settings review is deciding, explicitly, what each campaign is for.
What this adds up to
- Surface and billing come from Local Services Ads. Search and Maps only, charged per valid lead, keywordless, no landing page.
- Bidding, budgets and the interface come from Google Ads. Automated bidding replaces manual and per-vertical targets; weekly budgets become daily; leads live in Lead Manager.
- The Business Profile is the creative. Name, hours, rating and reviews are read from it and cannot be edited in the ad account. Six callouts per category and extra photos are what you control.
- A call conversion action is mandatory. It is the first thing to verify on a migrated account and the first thing that silently breaks one.
- History does not transfer. Export the reports before the account moves. There is no recovery afterwards.
- Ranking is still mostly won outside the account. Reviews, response time and proximity decide more than any setting in Google Ads.
If you are an agency with trade clients in the first US wave, or a business that has just received the fourteen-day email, the practical version of all this is on our Local Services Ads migration page, along with a dated migration checklist you can run per account.
Sources: Google Ads Help, Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals; Google Ads Help, About pay-per-lead goals for Performance Max campaigns; Search Engine Land, August 2026. Verified 2 September 2026.