The setting matters and we'll cover it properly. But three other things decide whether local ads reach your service area, and they get almost no attention.
The setting, and the part nobody mentions
Google Ads defaults every new campaign to Presence or interest — people in your targeted area, regularly in it, or who have simply shown search interest in it from anywhere in the world.
For a plumber in Leeds, that means someone in Sydney searching "plumber Leeds prices" is eligible to see and click your ad. Estimates of the resulting waste commonly land in the range of 20–35% of budget on out-of-area clicks.
Two implementation details that catch people out:
- It's a per-campaign setting. There is no account-level switch. Every Search, Performance Max, Display and Demand Gen campaign needs changing individually.
- The exclusion dropdown is separate and carries its own default. Setting your targeting to Presence doesn't change how your exclusions behave — that's a second decision on the same screen.
Now the part almost nobody states, and it matters if you're relying on this as a clean filter.
What "Presence" actually means People in or regularly in your targeted location. Google has never publicly defined "regularly," and states outright that complete location accuracy isn't guaranteed. This is a large improvement, not a precise boundary.
So make the switch — it removes the biggest single source of waste in local accounts — and then keep verifying, rather than assuming the problem is solved.
One honest caveat on the other side: the default isn't wrong for everyone. Google's own data found advertisers in travel, real estate and education saw more conversions on Presence or interest, because someone in New York genuinely can be a buyer for a London estate agent. If your customer must be physically present to be served, that logic doesn't apply to you. If they don't, check before you narrow.
Your radius is the wrong shape
The second problem, and the one that survives the setting fix.
A circle is a poor model of a service area. Fifteen miles across a city is forty-five minutes; fifteen miles of open road is twenty. Circles cut through towns, cross rivers with no bridge, ignore motorway access, and include places your vans genuinely won't go while excluding places they happily do.
The alternatives, roughly in order of preference:
- A list of named locations. Postcodes, towns, districts, council areas. Tedious to build once, and it matches how you actually think about coverage. It also lets you exclude a specific awkward area without shrinking everything else.
- Multiple overlapping radii. A tight circle on each depot or branch rather than one large one on head office. Closer to reality for multi-site businesses, and it pairs with the structure logic in scaling local rankings across branches.
- A radius, if the geography is genuinely uniform. Fine for a dense urban area with even road access. Rarely fine for anywhere else. Note the minimum is 1 km, which is smaller than most people need but occasionally useful.
And it's centred on the wrong point
Almost everyone centres the radius on their business address. That's where you are. It is not where your customers are.
The same exercise usually surfaces something else worth knowing: the areas where you win jobs and the areas where you merely quote for them. Those deserve different bids, not the same one.
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The budget problem specific to local
Here's the one nobody writes about, and it's the reason a lot of technically well-configured local accounts still underperform.
A small geography produces few conversions. Automated bidding strategies need a reasonable volume of conversion data within a rolling window to learn. A single-town service business generating six leads a week is not supplying that, so the strategy never stabilises — it stays in a permanent state of undertrained guessing, and its results look erratic in a way that gets blamed on the ads rather than on the data volume.
Four ways out, in rough order of preference:
- Count an earlier action as the conversion. A qualified form start, a call over 60 seconds, a booking-page view. More volume, still meaningful, provided your conversion tracking is sound enough to trust the proxy.
- Consolidate rather than split. The instinct is a campaign per town. That divides your already-thin data into portions too small to learn from. One campaign covering the whole area, with location bid adjustments, keeps the signal together — the general principle in structuring an account for scale and control.
- Use a simpler bidding approach until volume supports more. Maximise clicks with a bid cap is unfashionable and frequently better than a conversion-based strategy with nothing to learn from.
- Widen the geography deliberately, if the economics allow it. Sometimes the honest answer is that the area is too small to advertise into profitably at all, and the money belongs in local organic instead.
That last point deserves saying plainly. For a genuinely small service area, local SEO and a properly optimised Google Business Profile often return more per pound than paid search does, because the auction is expensive and the volume is thin. Paid works best as an accelerant on top of that, not as a substitute for it.
Bid adjustments are the real lever
Once the radius roughly matches reality, stop adjusting the radius and start adjusting the bids inside it.
Three tiers is usually enough:
| Tier | What it is | Typical treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Core | Where you win most jobs, shortest travel | Bid up |
| Standard | Reliable but unremarkable | Baseline |
| Edge | Long travel, lower win rate, awkward access | Bid down, or exclude |
The advantage over shrinking the radius is that you keep the edge areas available at a price that makes them worthwhile, rather than losing them entirely. A job forty minutes away isn't worthless — it's worth less, which is a bid adjustment rather than an exclusion.
Verify where the ads actually went
The diagnostic step that almost nobody runs, and it settles most arguments.
Google Ads geographic reporting offers two views, and the difference between them is the whole point. Matched locations shows the areas your targeting matched people to. User locations shows where people physically were. These frequently differ, and the gap is where the waste lives.
Read the user locations report monthly, cross-referenced against conversions. It answers three questions at once: whether your targeting is holding, which areas convert well enough to bid up, and which are quietly consuming budget without producing anything.
Two things it commonly reveals. First, automated campaign types drift — Performance Max and broad match will find people at the edges of and beyond your intent, which is worth watching if you run Performance Max alongside search. Second, a surprising share of out-of-area clicks come from search terms containing another town's name — which is a negative keyword problem rather than a location problem, and no location setting will fix it.
Where the click lands matters as much as where it came from
A correctly targeted click that arrives on a generic homepage is a half-wasted click.
If someone in a specific town clicks an ad mentioning that town, the page should confirm you cover it — ideally by name, above the fold. That's not a trick; it's the answer to the only question they have, and its absence is the most common reason local ads produce traffic without calls.
The construction of those pages is covered in building local landing pages that rank and convert, and the testing discipline in post-click optimisation. If you need one page per town and don't have the capacity to build them, that's a website build question worth resolving before you scale spend, not after.
Local Service Ads are a different product
Worth separating because they get lumped in with search ads and shouldn't be.
Local Service Ads run on a pay-per-lead rather than pay-per-click model, appear above conventional search ads, and involve verification. The targeting logic is different, the economics are different, and for several service categories they take the position your search ad used to occupy — which is the subject of how local service ads are taking over the local SERP.
If they're available in your category and region, test them before scaling conventional search. Paying per lead rather than per click transfers a meaningful amount of risk away from you, and for a low-volume local advertiser that matters more than it does at scale.
The mistakes that survive a good setup
Three things that keep producing out-of-area enquiries even after everything above is correct.
Your Google Business Profile service area disagrees with your ads. If the profile lists a wider set of areas than the campaigns target, you'll take calls from places the ads never served — and someone will conclude the ads are broken. Reconcile the two so the business has one answer about where it works.
Callers ask before they read. A meaningful share of local enquiries are people who saw the ad, called immediately, and never looked at the page. Nothing in the targeting stops that, so the first question on the call should be the postcode, and whoever answers should have the coverage list to hand. Cheap fix, and it stops out-of-area leads being logged as marketing failures when they were correctly-targeted people who happened to be travelling.
You're bidding on competitor towns without meaning to. Broad match will happily serve a search containing a neighbouring town's name to someone sitting inside your target area — correct on location, wrong on intent. That's the negative keyword layer doing its job, and it needs reviewing on the same monthly rhythm as the geographic report rather than being set once at launch.
A setup order that works
- Plot your last 150–200 jobs and find the real centre and shape.
- Build targeting from named locations rather than a circle, unless the geography is genuinely uniform.
- Switch every campaign to Presence, and check the exclusion dropdown separately.
- Consolidate into fewer campaigns to keep conversion data together.
- Pick a conversion action with enough volume for the bidding strategy to learn from.
- Add location bid adjustments in three tiers once you have thirty days of data.
- Read the user locations report monthly and act on it.
- Make sure the landing page names the town.
If you're building the account from scratch rather than fixing one, structuring your first profitable campaign covers the foundations this sits on, and setting and scaling budgets covers what to do once it works.
The short version
Switch every campaign to Presence and check the exclusion setting separately — but understand that Presence means "in or regularly in," that Google has never defined "regularly," and that it's an improvement rather than a boundary. Stop drawing circles: a list of postcodes or towns matches a real service area far better, and where a radius is right, centre it on the middle of your last two hundred jobs rather than on your office. Consolidate campaigns instead of splitting by town, because a small geography already struggles to give automated bidding enough conversions to learn from. Use location bid adjustments rather than radius changes to handle the edges. Read the user locations report monthly, not the matched locations one. And make the landing page say the town's name.
Most local accounts are fixed by an afternoon with a map and an export, not by another targeting setting.
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Audit my local targeting →Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Presence and Presence or Interest targeting?
Presence or Interest, which remains the default, reaches people in your targeted area, regularly in it, or who have merely shown search interest in it from anywhere. Presence narrows that to people in or regularly in the area. For a local service business the default means someone in another country researching your city is eligible to see and click your ad. The setting must be changed per campaign rather than at account level, and the exclusion dropdown carries its own separate default.
Does Presence targeting guarantee people are physically in my service area?
No, and this is worth understanding before relying on it. Presence covers people who are in or regularly in the targeted location, and Google has never publicly defined what counts as regularly. Google also states that complete location accuracy is not guaranteed. Switching to Presence removes the largest category of waste, but it is a substantial improvement rather than a precise filter, and campaigns still need geographic reporting to verify where impressions actually landed.
Should you use radius targeting for a service area business?
Often not, because a circle rarely matches a real service area. Fifteen miles across a city is a very different journey from fifteen miles of open road, and circles ignore rivers, motorways, administrative boundaries and the routes vehicles actually take. Targeting by a list of postcodes, towns or council areas usually matches reality more closely. Where a radius is genuinely appropriate, it should be centred on where customers are rather than on the business address.
Why do local campaigns struggle with automated bidding?
Because a small geography produces too few conversions for the bidding system to learn from. Automated strategies need a reasonable volume of conversion data within a rolling window, and a single-town service business may generate a handful of leads a week. Options include counting a valuable earlier action as the conversion signal, consolidating campaigns rather than splitting by area, or using a simpler bidding approach until volume supports something more sophisticated.
How do you check where your local ads are actually showing?
Use the geographic reporting in Google Ads and read the user locations view, which shows where people physically were, rather than the matched locations view, which shows the areas your targeting matched them to. The two frequently differ, and the gap between them is where wasted spend hides. Cross-referencing that report against conversions also reveals which parts of the area are worth bidding up and which are quietly consuming budget.
