Call-Only Ads Are Going Away: Your Migration Plan

Call-only ads are being retired, and the clock is already running. Google removed the ability to create new call-only ads in February 2026, and every existing one stops serving entirely in February 2027. If you’re still running them, the move now is to add your business phone numbers as call assets to your responsive search ads (RSAs) and enable Call Reporting with calls set as a primary conversion action.

Do this in whatever order works for your account, but do it soon: build call assets into your top RSAs, confirm Call Reporting is switched on, and make sure your bidding strategy actually sees phone calls as the valuable action they are. Google’s stated reason for the change is straightforward. It wants ad formats consolidated into RSAs so its systems can mix and match assets at auction time based on device, intent, and context, rather than locking an entire ad into a single call button. Done right, that flexibility can outperform the old rigid format. Done sloppily, it can quietly drain your call volume for months before anyone notices.

Key Takeaways

Migrating off call-only ads before February 2027 requires adding call assets to RSAs, enabling Call Reporting, and marking calls as primary conversions before adjusting bids.

Point	Details
Know the real deadline	New call-only ads stopped being creatable in February 2026; all existing ones stop serving in February 2027.
Migrate call assets first	Add phone numbers as call assets to your highest-call-volume RSAs before touching lower-priority ad groups.
Track before you bid	Enable Call Reporting and set calls as a primary conversion before switching to Smart Bidding strategies.
Overlap, then cut	Run legacy call-only ads alongside new RSAs for two to four weeks before removing the old format.
Get expert migration help	Tradewinds United Media manages the full transition, from phone asset setup to conversion tracking, inside its Google Ads management service.

What the Call-Only Ads Timeline Means for Your Account
How Do You Migrate Call-Only Ads to Call Assets?
Why Call Assets Behave Differently Than Call-Only Ads Did
Bidding and Scheduling Tactics That Protect Call Volume
How Do You Track and Prove Call Value?
Why Are You Getting Clicks but No Calls or Sales?
How an Agency Approaches This Migration for Clients
Where to Verify These Changes Yourself
What Actually Matters in This Migration
Get Help Migrating Without Losing Call Volume
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources

What the Call-Only Ads Timeline Means for Your Account

Two dates matter, and they’re not the same event. As of February 2026, Google removed the option to create new call-only ads altogether. Any campaign that still needs a fresh call-only ad group simply can’t get one anymore. The second date is the one with teeth: in February 2027, existing call-only ads stop receiving impressions completely. They don’t get deprioritized or throttled. They stop.

Between those two milestones sits a window that’s easy to misjudge. Advertisers who treat this as a “we’ll deal with it later in 2026” problem are setting up a scramble for early 2027, right when competitors who migrated early already have RSAs with call assets that have been running long enough to accumulate performance history and earn Smart Bidding’s trust.

The short-term risk is subtler than the long-term one. Run legacy call-only ads and new RSAs with call assets in the same ad group during a botched transition, and you can end up with auction overlap, where your own ads compete against each other, or reporting gaps where call data gets split across two ad types and neither dataset looks strong enough to optimize against. The long-term risk is simpler: no migration means no calls after February 2027.

Prioritize migration by call volume, not by campaign age. Pull your call reporting data and rank ad groups by historical call counts. The ones generating the most calls today carry the most revenue risk if the cutover goes wrong, so migrate those first, watch them stabilize, then move down the list. Service-area businesses and local operations, plumbers, HVAC techs, locksmiths, dentists, tend to have call volume concentrated in a handful of ad groups. Find those first.

How Do You Migrate Call-Only Ads to Call Assets?

Migration isn’t complicated, but it’s easy to do out of order and lose call volume in the gap. Follow this sequence.

Inventory your phone numbers. List every number currently live in a call-only ad, confirm which business entity or location each one routes to, and check that your call forwarding is set up correctly before you touch a single ad group.
Confirm your verification setup. Google needs to associate the number with your business, so make sure your business name is accurate in the account and that any verification URL actually displays the phone number on the page. Mismatches here are a quiet cause of assets getting rejected or under-served.
Create or modify RSAs in the targeted ad groups. Rather than building new campaigns from scratch, add call assets directly to the RSAs already running in the ad groups where your call-only ads lived. In Google Ads, this means going into “More asset types” at the ad group or campaign level and adding the phone number as a call asset, the same way Google’s own migration guidance walks through.
Carry over what worked, but adapt it. If your call-only headlines and descriptions converted well, don’t throw them away. Feed that language into your RSA headlines and descriptions, but remember an RSA can also show a “Visit website” link alongside the call asset, so write copy that still reads naturally if a user lands on your site instead of dialing.
Wait before you cut anything. Let the new RSAs get approved and run long enough to show real call performance. Google’s own recommendation is to confirm stable call volume before removing the legacy ads, since pulling them too early can create a coverage gap while the new assets are still ramping.
Remove the legacy call-only ads. Once the RSAs are consistently generating calls at a rate comparable to or better than the old format, pause and then remove the deprecated call-only ads. Don’t do this on day one of testing.

Pro Tip: Run the overlap period for two to four weeks minimum. A shorter test window often looks fine on the surface but hasn’t given Smart Bidding enough conversion data to actually optimize the new call assets.

Why Call Assets Behave Differently Than Call-Only Ads Did

A call-only ad had one job: get the phone to ring. There was no link to a website, no alternate action, just a number and a reason to dial. RSAs with call assets work on a completely different logic, and that difference changes how you should think about performance.

Google treats the phone number as one asset among several, deciding at auction time whether to surface it based on the device, the user’s likely intent, and the ad group’s other assets.
A “Visit website” option can appear alongside the call asset, giving users who aren’t ready to talk on the phone somewhere else to go instead of tapping a number impulsively.
That optionality tends to filter out some of the accidental or low-intent taps that call-only ads used to generate, since a user with a genuine question can browse instead of calling and hanging up confused.
The trade-off is less determinism. You can’t force the phone number to show every time the way you could with a dedicated call-only ad, which means call volume from any single ad group can be less predictable in the first few weeks.
Overall conversions across an RSA, calls plus site actions combined, often land higher than a single-purpose call-only ad ever produced, because the ad format isn’t leaving other conversion paths on the table.

If your business genuinely depends on the phone ringing, you can bias the system toward calls without abandoning the RSA format. Load call assets into every eligible ad group, mark phone calls as a primary conversion action so Smart Bidding weighs them properly, and use call bid adjustments to push serving toward calls during the hours when your team can actually answer. None of that forces the phone number to appear on every impression, but together it tilts the auction in your favor.

Bidding and Scheduling Tactics That Protect Call Volume

Migrating the ad format is half the job. The other half is making sure your bidding and scheduling actually reward the phone calls you’re trying to generate. A handful of levers do most of the work here.

Apply call bid adjustments so Google leans toward showing the phone number when a call is the more likely valuable outcome for that auction.
Turn on Smart Bidding, but only after calls are tracked correctly. Maximize Conversions or Target CPA can optimize toward calls effectively, but only once phone calls are set as a primary conversion action. Flip the bidding strategy before tracking is solid and you’re optimizing toward noise.
Restrict ad scheduling to your actual answering hours. Google’s own optimization guidance recommends limiting call-focused serving to business hours, since a call that rings out to voicemail at 11 p.m. is a wasted click, not a lead.
Route calls to trained staff, not whoever picks up. A missed or mishandled call after the ad has already done its job is the most expensive kind of waste in this channel.
Split call-heavy keywords into their own ad groups or campaigns when volume justifies it, so you can tune bids and schedules specifically around phone intent instead of averaging them in with click-through traffic.

Ad copy matters here too. A clear, direct call-to-action, “Call now for a free quote,” “Talk to a technician today,” still outperforms vague phrasing, and pairing that with a clickable phone number on your landing page removes friction for anyone who does click through to the site first.

How Do You Track and Prove Call Value?

Tracking is where most migrations quietly fail. An RSA can generate plenty of calls, but if Google Ads doesn’t know those calls matter, Smart Bidding has no reason to chase more of them.

Enable Call Reporting in your account and set phone calls as a primary conversion action, not a secondary one, so bidding algorithms treat them as the goal rather than a side effect.
Connect call outcomes to revenue. Import call data or match it against your CRM to see which calls actually turned into paying customers, not just which calls happened. Our guide on Google Ads conversion tracking walks through the setup in more detail.
Segment performance by click type. Break out call conversions from website conversions in your reporting so you can see exactly which ad groups are earning their keep on the phone versus on-site.
Consider third-party call tracking if you need call recording, keyword-level attribution, or deeper CRM integration than Google Ads provides natively.

Feeding real revenue signals back into the account, not just raw call counts, is what lets Smart Bidding optimize toward business outcomes instead of vanity metrics.

Why Are You Getting Clicks but No Calls or Sales?

When call volume drops or clicks aren’t converting, work through this in order rather than guessing.

Confirm Call Reporting is actually enabled and that calls are marked as a primary conversion, not buried as a secondary action nobody’s bidding toward.
Check whether interaction coverage is low. If your phone number just isn’t showing often, raise your call bid adjustments or isolate the highest-intent keywords into their own ad group.
Audit staff availability and call routing. A call that rings unanswered counts as a missed lead even if Google Ads logs it as a success.
If calls are connecting but not closing, the problem may be quality, not volume. Review your landing page for mismatched intent and listen to a sample of recorded calls if you have them.
Run periodic test calls yourself and cross-check a sample against your CRM. It’s the fastest way to confirm your tracking numbers match reality. If your leads consistently feel unqualified once they’re on the phone, that’s often a targeting issue worth diagnosing separately, and it’s worth reading through why leads turn into price shoppers before assuming the ad platform is at fault.

How an Agency Approaches This Migration for Clients

Handling this transition for multiple accounts exposes patterns that don’t show up when you’re only watching one campaign. The first move is always a full phone number inventory: every number tied to every call-only ad, cross-checked against verification pages, because a mismatched business name or a broken verification URL quietly tanks call asset performance before anyone notices.

From there, the priority is closing the loop between ad platform and business outcome. That means importing call data into Google Ads and reconciling it against CRM records to confirm which calls actually became paying jobs, not just which calls connected. A call script and a defined answering window matter here too. An ad that generates a call at 7 p.m. to a business that closes at 5 is a wasted conversion regardless of how well the RSA performed.

Pro Tip: Set an internal service level agreement for answering ad-driven calls, ideally under three rings, and track missed-call rate as its own metric alongside conversion rate.

Where to Verify These Changes Yourself

About call ads — Google’s official overview of the transition to call assets.
How to transition from call ads to call assets — step-by-step migration timeline and instructions.
Google to phase out Call-Only Ads by 2027 — industry context on why Google made this call.

What Actually Matters in This Migration

The conventional advice floating around right now treats this as a checklist problem: add the asset, flip a setting, done. That undersells what’s actually at stake. The accounts that come out ahead treat conversion tracking as the real project and the asset migration as the easy part.

Here’s what gets overlooked. Plenty of advertisers will dutifully add call assets to their RSAs, pat themselves on the back, and leave Call Reporting configured the way it was for years, with calls treated as a nice-to-have secondary signal instead of the primary conversion action. Smart Bidding can’t optimize for something it isn’t told matters. That single misconfiguration will quietly cost more call volume over a year than the format change itself.

If you do one thing first, make it this: fix your conversion tracking before you touch bidding strategy. Everything else, the creative tweaks, the schedule adjustments, the bid modifiers, only works once Google’s algorithm actually understands what a valuable call looks like in your business.

Get Help Migrating Without Losing Call Volume

Tradewinds United Media runs this exact migration for local service businesses that can’t afford a quiet drop in phone leads. Where a DIY approach risks a gap between pausing legacy call-only ads and getting new RSAs fully optimized, our Google Ads team handles the phone number inventory, call asset setup, and conversion tracking configuration as one coordinated project, not a rushed weekend fix.

We work directly inside your account to set calls as a primary conversion, tune bid adjustments around your actual answering hours, and confirm real call-to-revenue data before recommending any changes to your bidding strategy. If your business runs on the phone ringing, this is exactly the kind of transition where a managed Google Ads management partnership pays for itself in preserved lead volume alone. Reach out today and we’ll audit your current call-only setup and map out a migration timeline before the February 2027 sunset catches your account off guard.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are call-only ads being completely removed from Google Ads?
Yes. Creating new call-only ads stopped being possible in February 2026, and every existing call-only ad will stop receiving impressions in February 2027. There’s no option to keep running them past that date.

What replaces call-only ads?
Responsive search ads with call assets added. Instead of a single-purpose call-only creative, your phone number becomes one asset Google can display alongside headlines, descriptions, and other assets depending on device and user intent.

Will I lose call volume by switching to call assets in RSAs?
Not if you migrate correctly. Call volume dips typically happen when advertisers remove call-only ads before the new RSAs have gathered enough performance data, or when calls aren’t set as a primary conversion so Smart Bidding never learns to prioritize them.

Do I need call bid adjustments if I’m using call assets?
They help significantly. Since Google decides at auction time whether to show your phone number, call bid adjustments increase the likelihood it appears during the hours and contexts where a call is genuinely the best outcome.

Should I remove call-only ads immediately after setting up call assets?
No. Run both formats in parallel for a few weeks so the new RSAs can get approved and build a call performance history before you pause and remove the legacy ads.