LSA to Performance Max migration: the audit checklist

What changes technically

The ads themselves keep their placements in Search and Maps, but the operational mechanics change completely. Weekly budgets convert to daily budgets, manual bid management gives way to automated campaign-level target CPA, and targets that used to be set per service category now consolidate at the campaign level.

This isn't the first specialized tool Google has dissolved into Performance Max: Smart Shopping and part of Hotel Ads went the same way before LSA. The logic is consistent — fewer standalone interfaces, more data feeding one bidding algorithm. For advertisers that means the old precision of per-category settings disappears as a capability, not just as a report, and it has to be replaced by signal quality in the feed and conversions rather than manual bid tweaks.

What to audit before and after the switch

Meagan McLoughlin of CallRail, whose migration breakdown is covered by Search Engine Journal, states the core rule bluntly: "Your historical local service ad performance reporting does not transfer. So make sure you take the time to download those historical reports and save those in advance."

• export and save historical LSA reporting before the migration date;
• verify the preferred campaign tracking number carried over correctly into Google Ads;
• keep LSA and Google Business Profile numbers separate to preserve attribution;
• use dedicated static numbers instead of a dynamic pool pulled from the website;
• after migration, reconcile the converted daily budget and tCPA target against what was agreed with the client;
• judge lead quality from call recordings and transcripts, not just volume — in-house analytics is more reliable than platform numbers right after a migration.

What the last migration like this taught us

A similar shift happened in 2022, when Google folded Smart Shopping into Performance Max: accounts that hadn't preserved historical signals and feed structure beforehand lost performance for several weeks while the algorithm rebuilt its data — that's from our own experience running client accounts through that transition. With LSA the risk is the same but bigger: category-level controls won't just disappear from reporting, they won't exist at all going forward. So agencies with local-business clients in the US, Canada or the UK (LSA itself doesn't run in Ukraine) should assign a migration owner per account now and log the switch date in a tracker rather than wait for an automatic notice from Google. That's the same principle we apply in a contextual advertising audit — lock in the current state first, only then touch the structure.

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