Google has confirmed that Local Services Ads are moving into Google Ads. U.S. accounts move first, with non-U.S. markets — Canada included — scheduled for 2027. Two details from that announcement matter more than the rest: historical campaign performance reports will not transfer, and the budgeting and bidding model changes as the product adopts Google Ads conventions.
For Canadian trades, legal, home services and healthcare advertisers, that combination is the whole story. You have a long runway, and the single highest-value thing to do in it is preserve the data and settings you will otherwise lose. Third-party coverage (Search Engine Journal, July 20, 2026; Search Engine Roundtable, July 21, 2026) tracked the announcement, but timelines for platform migrations move, so re-check Google's own documentation on the day you execute anything date-dependent.
1. Confirm account ownership and access
Migrations expose access problems that were invisible while everything worked. Before anything else:
- Identify the Google account that actually owns the Local Services Ads profile — not the one your agency logs in with.
- Confirm at least two people at your business hold admin access, ideally on domain email rather than personal addresses.
- Document which Google Ads manager account will house the migrated campaigns.
- Check that billing details and the billing contact are current and that the payment profile is not tied to a departed employee.
- Note any third parties with access and decide whether that access should persist.
If ownership sits with a former agency or a personal account, resolve it now. Recovering access under time pressure during a platform change is materially harder.
2. Export every report you will want later
This is the irreversible one. Historical performance reports will not carry over, so treat exports as an archive project rather than a task.
- Full lead history: date, type, service category, status, and any disputed or credited leads.
- Monthly spend and cost-per-lead by service category and by geography.
- Booking and job-type breakdowns for at least the last 24 months, so seasonality survives.
- Review and rating history connected to the profile.
- Budget change history, so you can explain past performance shifts.
- Screenshots of dashboards you rely on, for context that raw exports lose.
Store exports somewhere permanent and organisation-owned — a shared drive folder with a dated naming convention, not a laptop. Then load the lead and spend data into whatever reporting layer you already use so year-over-year comparisons remain possible after the interface changes.
3. Capture a settings baseline
Write down the current state of every configurable element while you can still see it in the original interface:
- Service categories and job types enabled, and any deliberately disabled.
- Service area definitions, including postal codes and municipal boundaries.
- Business hours and after-hours handling.
- Weekly or monthly budget levels and how they were arrived at.
- Bidding mode and any target settings in use.
- Lead types accepted — calls, messages, bookings — and routing for each.
- Licence and insurance documents on file, with expiry dates.
This baseline is what lets you tell the difference, post-migration, between an intentional platform change and something that silently reset.
4. Understand the budget conversion
The standalone product's weekly budget concept does not translate directly to Google Ads daily budgets. Before migration, calculate what your current spend looks like in daily terms and decide the number you actually want, rather than accepting whatever conversion arrives by default.
- Convert weekly spend to an average daily figure and note your realistic monthly ceiling.
- Record your current cost per lead by category so you can detect drift immediately.
- Decide in advance what constitutes an acceptable cost-per-lead increase and what triggers intervention.
- Check that seasonal budget patterns are documented, so nobody flattens a deliberately high summer budget.
5. Plan your bidding approach
Bidding under Google Ads conventions gives more control and more ways to go wrong. Two principles reduce the risk. First, do not change bidding strategy and budget in the same week as the migration — you will not be able to attribute the outcome. Second, give any automated strategy enough conversion volume to work with; low-volume service categories often perform better on a more manual footing until data accumulates.
Decide before migration day which categories are high-volume enough for automation and which you will hold steady, and write the decision down.
6. Clean up Business Profile data
Local Services Ads lean on your business information, so inconsistencies become more visible after a platform change, not less. Verify that name, address and phone number match exactly across your Business Profile, your website and your ad account. Confirm service categories match what you actually sell, hours are accurate including holidays, and photos and service descriptions are current. Renew licence and insurance documentation that expires within six months of your expected migration window.
7. Migration-day QA
When your account moves, work through a fixed checklist rather than a general look around:
- Confirm the account appears in the intended Google Ads manager account with correct access for everyone who needs it.
- Compare every setting against your baseline document and note each discrepancy.
- Verify budgets are at intended levels, in daily terms, and that nothing is paused unintentionally.
- Confirm bidding strategy matches your documented decision.
- Check service areas and categories survived intact.
- Place a test call and submit a test message; confirm both arrive and are attributed.
- Confirm conversion actions are recording and that CRM handoff still works.
- Verify billing is active and that no charge is failing silently.
Complete this on migration day, not the following week. Most costly migration problems are cheap to fix in the first 24 hours.
8. The first 14 days
Monitor daily for two weeks, and compare against your exported baseline rather than against the previous day.
- Days 1–3: lead volume, spend pacing, and whether any lead type has stopped arriving. Investigate a volume drop over roughly 20% immediately.
- Days 4–7: cost per lead by category, lead quality as judged by your intake team, and attribution accuracy in your CRM.
- Days 8–14: weekly totals against the equivalent pre-migration week, then make at most one deliberate change and document it.
Resist stacking changes during this window. Migration weeks generate noise, and simultaneous adjustments make the noise permanently unreadable.
What not to do
Do not pause campaigns "to be safe" — you lose lead flow and disturb the performance history automated bidding depends on. Do not delay exports until migration is announced as imminent. Do not assume your agency has archived everything; ask for the files. And do not treat the 2027 date as fixed — Google has moved platform timelines before, in both directions.
Where this fits
Migrations are mostly a records-keeping problem wearing a technical costume. The businesses that come through cleanly are the ones with exported history, a written settings baseline, and one owner for the checklist. That preparation is part of how we run PPC advertising engagements, with the archive and comparison layer handled through marketing reporting. If you would like a second set of eyes on your account before 2027, that is standard work for us as a PPC agency in Vancouver.
You have time. Use it on the parts that are irreversible.
