Export Your LSA Data Before Google Kills the Dashboard

It's 6:40 on a Tuesday morning. You're in the truck with coffee, thumbing through the Local Services Ads app before the first call of the day. Four leads overnight. One of them is a woman 38 miles outside your service area asking about a water heater you don't install. You tap dispute, you get your credit, you move on. That little ritual has probably saved you a few hundred bucks a month for years.

That ritual is ending. And so is the record of it.

On July 19, 2026, Google announced that Local Services Ads are being folded into Google Ads as a pay-per-lead Performance Max campaign. US home-service accounts started migrating in August and the rollout runs through late 2026. The part most contractors are sleeping on: the standalone LSA dashboard and your historical performance reports do not survive the move. Google's Ads Product Liaison confirmed the old reporting goes away after migration, and you get roughly 14 days' notice before your account flips.

Fourteen days. That's less notice than you give a customer for a maintenance visit.

What actually changes when your account migrates

Three things, and all three matter to how much you pay for a job.

1. Manual max cost-per-lead is gone

You used to be able to set a hard ceiling — "I will not pay more than $X for a drain lead." That's replaced by a single automated campaign-level target CPA. You give Google a target, Google decides what each individual lead is worth. For a roofer where one storm lead can be worth twenty gutter-cleaning leads, that's a real shift in control.

2. Dispute rules tighten

Google is no longer crediting leads for "geo not serviced" or "job type not serviced." Those two categories are the bread and butter of most contractors' dispute workflow. If you're a pool service company in a metro with three counties, or an electrician who doesn't touch panel upgrades, you've been clawing back those leads every month. Now you eat them. Nobody has published a clean number on what that does to effective cost-per-lead across the industry, but you don't need a study — pull your own dispute credit total from the last twelve months and that's your number. Which brings us to the real problem.

3. Your history doesn't come with you

Your charged leads, your booking rates, your dispute history, your month-over-month cost-per-lead by job type — that lives in the old dashboard. After migration, you can't get it back. You start the new auto-bid campaign with zero baseline.

Why the baseline is the whole ballgame

Here's what happens to the contractor who doesn't export. Two months into the new Performance Max setup, leads feel more expensive. Or they feel cheaper but worse. You're in a meeting with your marketing person or your agency, and you say "this is costing more than before," and they say "more than what?"

And you have nothing. No spreadsheet. No screenshot. Just a feeling.

A feeling loses that argument every single time. Google's automated bidding will have its own reporting that says the campaign is performing, and with no prior-year comparison you have no standing to push back, no way to decide whether to raise target CPA or pull budget into paid search, and no honest answer to the only question that matters: is this channel still making me money?

The migration isn't the risk. Losing the only evidence of what "normal" looked like is the risk.

Export this week. Here's the list.

Block ninety minutes. Not next month — this week, because you might already be inside your 14-day window and not know it. Log into your Local Services Ads account on desktop, not the app.

1. Set the date range to the last 12 months (or longer if you have it). Don't do month-by-month. Pull the full window, then pull it again month-by-month if you want seasonality — HVAC and roofing especially need the monthly split or the averages lie to you.
2. Export the full lead report to CSV. Every lead: date, type (call, message, booking), job category, charged or credited, amount charged, ZIP or city. This is the single most valuable file. Save it twice, in two places.
3. Export your dispute history. Every lead you disputed, the reason code, and whether it was credited. Total up the "geo not serviced" and "job type not serviced" credits specifically. That dollar figure is your projected cost increase under the new rules.
4. Screenshot the monthly performance summary for every month. Leads, cost, average cost-per-lead, budget. CSVs sometimes drop the aggregate view. Screenshots don't.
5. Record your current bid settings. Max cost-per-lead by job type, weekly budget, service areas, job types enabled, business hours, and your current Google Guaranteed status. Write it down in plain text. You'll want it when you're rebuilding targets inside Google Ads.
6. Export your review and response data. Reviews tied to LSA leads, your average rating, your response time — anything the dashboard shows you about ranking factors.
7. Pull your booked-job and revenue numbers from your CRM for the same period. LSA tells you what a lead cost. Only your CRM tells you what it was worth. Match them.

Then build one summary tab. Twelve rows, one per month, with these columns: leads charged, total spend, cost per lead, leads disputed, credits received, net spend, net cost per lead, jobs booked, revenue closed, cost per booked job.

Cost per booked job is the number you defend. Not cost per lead. A landscaping lead at $35 that never books is worse than a roofing lead at $200 that closes at forty percent. If you only track CPL, Google's automation can make your dashboard look great while your calendar stays empty.

What to do in your first 60 days on the new system

Once you're migrated, resist the urge to let it run untouched for a quarter "to let it learn."

• Set your initial target CPA close to your historical average, not your dream number. You have the real number now because you exported it. Start there, adjust in small increments.
• Tighten your service area and job types manually. You can't dispute geo and job-type mismatches anymore, so prevention is your only defense. If you don't do mobile home roofs, turn it off. If you won't drive past the county line, draw the line.
• Track cost per booked job weekly, not monthly. Automated bidding moves faster than you do. Monthly reviews catch problems four weeks late.
• Compare against your exported baseline out loud, in writing, every month. "Last September we paid $X per booked job. This September we're at $Y." That sentence is only possible if you did the export.
• Fix your speed-to-lead before you blame the channel. If a pay-per-lead campaign is sending you leads and you're answering on the third ring or calling back two hours later, the cost per booked job will climb no matter what the bid strategy does.

If you've already migrated

Log in anyway and check. Some accounts retain limited access for a window. Pull whatever you can, today. If the reports are truly gone, rebuild the baseline from your bank statements and your CRM — monthly LSA charges on one side, booked jobs attributed to LSA on the other. It's uglier than a clean CSV but it beats guessing.

How we help

At Alprosper AI we build the layer underneath the ad platform — the part Google can't take away from you. AI receptionists that answer every LSA call in seconds, day or night, so a pay-per-lead charge actually turns into a booked appointment. Speed-to-lead automation that texts the lead back before your competitor's voicemail finishes playing. A CRM that tags every lead by source so you always know your true cost per booked job, no matter which dashboard Google retires next. And review systems that keep your Google Guaranteed profile strong, because ranking still comes down to reviews and responsiveness.

Google changes the rules on a two-week notice. Your own data, your own phone coverage, and your own follow-up don't.

If you want a second set of eyes on your LSA numbers before they disappear — or a plan for what happens after — book a free strategy call at alprosperai.com. Bring the CSV. We'll tell you straight what it says.