Target a campaign at Gloucester and you’d expect only people in Gloucester to see your ads. By default, that isn’t how Google Ads works. Unless you change one setting, your ads can also show to people elsewhere whom Google believes have shown an interest in Gloucester. For some businesses that’s useful. For a local service business it can mean paying for clicks from people you could never serve.
In account audits, location settings are one of the first things we check, because they’re easy to overlook and quick to fix.
The two location options
Every campaign has a “Location options” setting, tucked under Locations in the campaign settings. There are now two choices for who you target:
- Presence or interest: people in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your targeted locations. This is the default, and Google marks it as recommended.
- Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations.
There used to be a third option, “Search interest”, which targeted people searching about your chosen locations. Google has retired it, and it can no longer be selected for Search, Display or Shopping campaigns (About advanced location options). Location exclusions have been simplified too. They now work on presence only, so excluding a town blocks people who are likely to be in that town.
If your campaigns were set up a while ago and nobody has checked since, they’re almost certainly on Presence or interest.
How Google decides someone is “interested” in your area
Google works out where someone physically is mainly from their IP address and, where their settings allow, their device’s location. A location of interest is inferred from signals such as:
- place names in the search itself, like “plumber Cheltenham”
- earlier searches that mentioned a place
- places the person has been in the past
- the content of the page they’re looking at
- searches on Google Maps
- a custom location they’ve set for their search results
Google explains this in its page about targeting geographic locations, and it’s open that none of it is perfect: location targeting is a best effort, and 100% accuracy isn’t guaranteed. Google may also show your ads in nearby, closely related areas, such as the suburbs around a city you’ve targeted.
When interest-based targeting helps and when it hurts
This isn’t a case of one good setting and one bad one. Someone in Birmingham searching “plumber Cheltenham” may well be arranging a repair at a parent’s house in Cheltenham. That’s a genuine customer, and Presence on its own would miss them. Holiday lets, venues, estate agents and anyone serving people moving into an area can get real value from interest-based targeting, and Google makes it the default on the basis that it captures more conversions.
The problem is the vaguer signals. A past visit, or a search that mentions your town for reasons that have nothing to do with you, can put your ad in front of someone a hundred miles away who has no use for a local electrician. Google itself suggests considering Presence when you only want to reach people in specific locations, and not people elsewhere who are merely interested in them.
As a rough guide:
- If your customers need to be near you week in, week out (a gym, a dentist, a driving school), Presence is usually the safer choice.
- If the work happens in your area but the person arranging it could live anywhere (property services, holiday accommodation, venues), interest-based targeting may be earning its keep.
Your location report will tell you which is true for your account.
Check the location report before you change anything
In Google Ads, go to Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then “When and where ads showed”. The Locations report has two views: Targeted locations, showing performance by the areas you chose, and Matched locations, showing where your ads actually appeared, which can be people’s physical locations or their locations of interest (viewing location reports).
Look at the Matched locations view for clicks and cost from places you don’t serve, and whether any of them turned into enquiries. If a business covering 20 miles around Stroud is paying for clicks from Manchester and London that never convert, the answer is clear. If some distant clicks do convert, think twice before cutting them off. Either way, this only works if enquiries are being tracked properly, so it’s worth reading our guide to conversion tracking mistakes that skew your data first.
How to change the setting
- In Google Ads, open Campaigns and select the Settings for the campaign you want to change.
- Expand the Locations section, then expand “Location options”.
- Under Target, choose Presence or Presence or interest.
- Save.
The setting sits at campaign level, not account level, so check every campaign. It’s common to find it right on one campaign and wrong on another that was added later or built by someone else.
Google warns that most campaigns see fewer impressions after switching away from the default. That’s rather the point, but keep an eye on enquiries for a few weeks afterwards to make sure you haven’t cut off people who were genuinely likely to buy.
Get the area itself right too
Presence won’t help if the area you’ve targeted is wider than where you work. You can target by town, county, postcode or a radius around a point (the minimum radius is 1 km). Google notes that very small targets may mean your ads show only intermittently, so a slightly larger area is often more practical than a tiny one.
You can also exclude places inside your targeted area that you don’t cover. Where a location is both targeted and excluded, the exclusion wins: exclude a county and you exclude every town in it, even if you’ve also targeted one of those towns by name.
Why this matters beyond the saving
Clicks from people you could never serve don’t just cost money. If you use automated bidding, they’re also part of the data the system learns from, so tightening the targeting means your budget, your reports and your bidding are all based on the customers you actually want.
Want a local expert to check?
We manage Google Ads for businesses in Gloucester, Cheltenham and Bristol. If you’d like us to look over your location settings and tell you what we’d change, get in touch.
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