Google Turns On Local Inventory in Every Shopping Campaign on 31 August. Half of It Will Be Unmeasured.
On 31 August, Google enables Local Inventory Ads by default in every Shopping campaign and removes the setting that let you turn them off. It confirmed the change on its Ads Developer Blog on 20 July.
The Local products setting switches on automatically for any Shopping campaign linked to a Merchant Center account with the Local Inventory Ads add-on active. The enable_local field is overridden to true. On API version 25.1 and later, code that tries to set it to false returns a hard error. Control moves to the Inventory filter, set to Channel = Local or Channel = Online.
The scope is narrow. Shopping campaigns only. Performance Max and Demand Gen keep the field as it works today.
The problem is not the format. It is that one campaign now runs two businesses out of one budget. The online journey ends in a delivered order with a recorded value. The local journey ends in a person walking into a building. Same campaign, same bid strategy, one blended ROAS.
The math, on a mid-size retail account: $10,000 a month returning $40,000 online is a reported ROAS of 4.0. After the flip, 30 per cent of clicks route local and online revenue falls to $28,000. Reported ROAS drops to 2.8. If that local traffic produces 20 in-store sales at a $1,500 average order value, that is $30,000 the account never records. Real ROAS is 5.8.
Our read: the reported number says cut and the real number says double, and most accounts will act on the reported number because it is the only one on the dashboard. This is not a settings change. It is a measurement change wearing a settings change as a disguise. Retailers with shops need offline conversion tracking live before 31 August, or the Inventory filter used to keep local and online in separate campaigns. Online-only retailers who switched the add-on on years ago and forgot need to check now, because from 31 August their budget starts chasing shops that do not exist.
A blended ROAS with an unmeasured half is not a number. It is the average of a fact and a guess, and knowing which half is which is where a pipeline audit starts.
Sources: Google Ads Developer Blog, "Enabling Local Inventory Ads by Default for Shopping Campaigns starting on August 31, 2026" (ads-developers.googleblog.com); Search Engine Land. Last verified 27 July 2026.
Written by P&C. We are a marketing accountability firm run by Yasmin and Arsen. We built the 5-Stage Pipeline Audit and we read platform changes so owner-operators do not have to. Connect on LinkedIn