Google Is Retiring the Local Services Ads Dashboard. HVAC Is in the First Wave, and It Starts This Month.

If you run an HVAC company on the South Coast, the little green Google Guaranteed dashboard you log into to check your leads is going away. Not the ads. The dashboard, the manual bid, and the way you have run that budget for years.

Google published the transition notice in a help-centre article with no fanfare and, as far as I can find, no last-updated date on it. The relevant sentence is short:

"Over the upcoming months, existing Local Services Ads campaigns will be automatically migrated to a specialized Performance Max campaign type optimized specifically for pay-per-lead goals."

And the timing sentence names your trade directly:

"August 2026: The first phase of the migration begins for select home and storefront service advertisers in the United States (including plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving)."

That is this month. HVAC is not in a later wave. HVAC is in the first one.

First, the part nobody says out loud#

The HVAC trade on the South Coast is not a group of businesses that needs a lecture about marketing.

In July I measured the seventeen HVAC businesses Google Places returns for "HVAC in Fall River, MA," excluding franchises and chains. Between them they hold 2,593 Google reviews at a 4.86 weighted average. Not one of them sits below three stars. Consistency like that, across seventeen independent businesses, is very hard to manufacture. It is mostly what happens when people crawl through attics in August and drive out at 11pm in February and do right by the person whose furnace died.

So this is not a piece about doing better work. The work is good. This is a piece about a vendor changing the terms without asking, and what you do about it in the next two weeks.

What actually changes#

Four things, from Google's own transition document.

1. Manual bidding is gone. Google's wording: "Manual bidding (such as setting a maximum cost-per-lead) is no longer supported in Google Ads." If you have been capping what you will pay for a lead, that lever is being removed.

2. Vertical-level Target CPA is gone. "Google Ads doesn't support vertical-level Target CPA bidding." This matters most if you run more than one trade under one roof. Plenty of shops in Bristol County do plumbing and HVAC out of the same truck bay. If you want different lead economics for a drain call versus a heat pump quote, that now means separate campaigns, not one campaign with two targets.

3. BBB callouts are dead. "BBB callouts are no longer supported." Google's replacement instruction is specific: go to your campaign's assets tab and select at least six other structured callouts, such as business hours, specialties, or accepted payment methods.

4. Your Google Business Profile now feeds the ad account, one way. "Your business name, physical address, and standard hours sync automatically in one direction from your Google Business Profile to Google Ads." One direction. Whatever is on your Business Profile becomes what is on your ad, and you cannot correct it from the ad side.

Why this is bigger than a dashboard change#

Joy Hawkins runs Sterling Sky and has been tracking local search results at scale for years. In her State of Local SEO in 2026, published this June, she reported that Local Services Ads appeared on roughly 11% of the queries she tracks at the beginning of 2025, and 31% by November. Then she wrote the part most agencies will not say to a client's face:

Yes, I realize this isn’t what anyone wants to hear, however, Google is definitely going pay-to-play based on all this data I’ve been analyzing.

Read the migration in that light and it stops looking like a UI refresh. Pay-per-lead is moving out of its own quiet corner and into the same machine that runs everything else Google sells, with the manual brakes taken off. If you are buying HVAC leads in Fall River, Somerset or Swansea, you are about to be buying them on Google's bidding terms rather than yours.

The part that will actually cost you money#

Here is where the local translation gets uncomfortable.

In that same July measurement of Fall River HVAC websites, this is what the leads were landing on:

Those are mobile Largest Contentful Paint figures from Google PageSpeed Insights, measured 13 July 2026. Real field data was available for only one of the fourteen sites; the rest are lab estimates, and I am telling you that rather than rounding it into a headline. Two more sites blocked the checker entirely and are excluded from every count rather than counted against them.

Now put the two facts next to each other. Google is about to take away your ability to cap what a lead costs, and thirteen of the fourteen sites I could measure are slow enough to fail Google's own "good" threshold, with a nine-and-a-half second median and, for twelve of them, no way to book without calling during business hours.

Do this Monday. It is free and it takes about twenty minutes.#

Open your Google Business Profile and read it like a stranger. Name, address, hours. That is now the source of truth that will be pushed into your ad account in one direction, and you will not be able to fix it from the ads side afterwards. If your hours still say you close at 4pm because you set that in 2019, or the name has "LLC" and "Heating & Air" arranged differently than on your van, fix it before the migration reaches you, not after. Ten minutes.

One caveat Google puts on its own page, and the reason to do this now rather than the week it happens: a significant change to your business name or physical address triggers a standard verification review, which Google says typically takes 24 to 48 hours, and your campaign may pause while that review runs. Hours are safe. Name and address, give yourself runway.

Then check who the account administrator is. The 14-day and 7-day warning emails go to the administrator listed on your profile. If that is an email address belonging to a marketing company you stopped working with in 2023, you will find out about your own migration by noticing your leads changed. Five minutes.

Then, on your phone, tap your own phone number on your own website. Not click. Tap. If it does not start a call, three of the fourteen shops I measured have the same problem, and it is one line of HTML for whoever maintains your site. Two minutes to check.

Then, in the next two weeks#

Write your six structured callouts before Google asks for them. Business hours, specialties, accepted payment methods, emergency availability, financing, licensing. These are free ad real estate and the BBB slot that used to sit there is gone. About thirty minutes with a coffee, and it is worth doing yourself because you know which of these actually wins you jobs. Around here, something like "Mass Save Heat Pump Installer Network participant" or "24-hour emergency service" will often do more work than a line an agency writes without knowing your book.

Split your campaigns if you run more than one trade. Vertical-level Target CPA is gone. If plumbing and HVAC share a campaign, they now share bidding. Separate them so a $180 drain call and a $14,000 heat pump job are not being optimised as if they were the same thing.

Fix the landing page before the lead price goes up, not after. Nine and a half seconds is usually not a design problem. On the sites I measured, the largest single item PageSpeed flagged was unused JavaScript, more than once running past a megabyte of download that the page never used. That is a build problem, not a redesign, and it is the cheapest thing you can do to protect a lead you are now paying a machine-set price for. Ask whoever maintains your site to run pagespeed.web.dev on your own homepage and show you the "reduce unused JavaScript" line. You do not need to understand it to ask for it.

Add online booking. Twelve of fourteen have none. Every one of those is telling a homeowner with no heat at 9pm to wait until morning and call. That is a real chance to lose the job to whoever does let them book at 9pm.

What I could not measure#

I could not verify a current government count of HVAC contractors in Bristol County, so I have not published one. Field-level speed data existed for only one of the fourteen sites, so the median above is mostly lab estimate and labelled as such. And Google's transition page carries no last-updated date, so the schedule above is what it said as of today; if it moves, it moves.

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If you want a second pair of eyes on your Business Profile and your ad account before the migration reaches you, that is a short conversation and I do not charge for it. I would rather you fix the hours yourself in ten minutes than pay anyone to do it.

Joshua Amado, Avalon Partner — Fall River, MA 774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com

Sources: Google Ads Help — Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals · Sterling Sky — The State of Local SEO in 2026 · Avalon Partner Fall River HVAC website measurement, 13 July 2026 (PageSpeed Insights, mobile).