Google Ads Location Targeting: The Complete Guide

Google Ads location targeting is the setting that decides where your ads can show, and the default is almost never the right choice. Out of the box, Google targets people who are in or regularly in your locations or who have shown interest in them. For a plumber in Austin or a dentist in Manchester, that second half means paying for clicks from people who searched “Austin plumber” from another state, another country or a travel blog. Switching to “Presence” is the single most valuable change most local accounts can make.

This guide walks through every location option in Google Ads: country, region, city and postal-code targeting, radius targeting, location exclusions, the presence vs. interest setting, bid adjustments by location and how to structure campaigns when you sell in several countries with different currencies and consent rules. It applies to Search, Shopping and (with some limits) Performance Max campaigns.

Short version: target only where you can actually serve customers, use “Presence” unless you sell travel or relocation, exclude the places that waste money, and split countries into separate campaigns when budgets, languages or margins differ.

How Google Ads location targeting actually works

Google decides a user’s location from several signals: IP address, device location (if permitted), the location terms in the search itself, recent search history and, for signed-in users, Google account data. Then it compares that to your campaign’s targeted and excluded locations using the location options you picked. According to Google’s help documentation, there are two targeting options:

• Presence or interest (default): people in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your targeted locations.
• Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations.

“Regularly in” matters. Someone who lives in your city but is on a weekend trip will still be eligible under “Presence.” That’s usually what you want.

For exclusions there is a parallel choice: exclude people in the excluded location (default), or exclude people in or interested in it. The second is stricter and useful when you keep getting clicks from a country you can’t ship to.

Presence vs. interest: which one to choose

Business type	Recommended setting	Why
Local services (plumbing, HVAC, dental, legal, salons)	Presence	Customers must physically be nearby; interest-based clicks rarely convert.
Local e-commerce with regional shipping	Presence	You can only deliver inside the region; interest clicks create failed checkouts.
National or EU-wide e-commerce	Presence (per country campaign)	Keeps currency, VAT and shipping logic clean per market.
Hotels, tours, destination restaurants, real estate for relocation	Presence or interest	Buyers research the destination from elsewhere before they arrive.
SaaS and B2B services sold remotely	Presence	You still want the buyer in a market you can legally sell and invoice in.

In our experience, a local account that switches from the default to “Presence” typically sees a noticeable drop in impressions and a lower cost per lead, because the removed traffic was mostly non-buyers. Watch the “User locations” report under Locations → “Matched locations vs. user locations” for a week before and after to confirm it in your own data.

Radius targeting vs. city and postal-code targeting

Radius targeting draws a circle (in miles or kilometers) around an address or a map point. It’s a good fit for a service area that doesn’t follow administrative borders, such as “everything within a 25-minute drive of our shop.” The minimum radius is 1 km / 1 mile; very small circles tend to have thin data and poor accuracy.

City, county, state and postal-code targeting follows real borders. Use it when your service area is defined by territory (franchise zones, delivery maps, licensing) or when you want clean per-area reporting. Postal codes (ZIP codes in the US, postcodes in the UK, PLZ in Germany) are available in many countries but not all.

Practical rule: if you can list the towns you serve, target the towns. If your service area is “about 30 miles around here,” use a radius, then add the biggest towns inside it as separate targets so you get a per-town report and can set location bid adjustments.

Location exclusions that stop budget leaks

Exclusions are where most accounts leave money. Common cases:

1. Exclude areas you can’t serve inside a targeted region. Target the state, exclude the counties or cities that are too far away.
2. Exclude low-value postal codes. After a few months, the “User locations” report will show areas that click but never convert.
3. Exclude countries you don’t ship to using “Exclude people in or interested in.” Even with a single-country target, interest-based matching can let outside traffic through if you leave the default on.
4. Exclude your own office and competitor hotspots if you see repeated internal or suspicious clicks in a small radius (combine with IP exclusions in campaign settings).

Exclusions work alongside your negative keywords. If you haven’t audited those yet, start with our negative keywords list for Google Ads — location-related negatives like other city names are often the biggest group.

Location bid adjustments

Under Locations, you can set a percentage bid adjustment from -90% to +900% for each targeted location. They are useful in Manual CPC and Enhanced CPC campaigns. With Smart Bidding (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize conversions), Google already factors location into the auction bid, and manual adjustments are largely ignored except for -100% exclusions. If you’ve moved to automated bidding (see our guide to Google Ads Smart Bidding strategies), manage location performance through targeting and exclusions instead of bid modifiers.

Multi-country setup for US and European advertisers

If you sell in several markets, the campaign structure is where location targeting becomes a strategy question rather than a settings question.

One campaign per country (recommended default)

• Budget control. A US campaign and a German campaign rarely deserve the same daily budget; CPCs in English-language US markets are typically higher than in most EU markets, while conversion rates differ as well.
• Currency and pricing. Ad copy can state prices in $, € or £ and the landing page can match.
• Language. Google has been removing the campaign-level language setting from Search, so the language of your ads and landing pages is now a matching signal. Keep one language per ad group and ideally per campaign.
• Consent and measurement. EU and UK traffic requires a consent banner and, for Google’s modeling to work, Consent Mode v2. If your EU campaigns report fewer conversions than your US ones, check our Google Consent Mode v2 guide before changing bids.

Grouped campaigns (when volume is low)

If each country gets only a handful of conversions a month, Smart Bidding will struggle. In that case group markets with the same language and currency (for example Germany + Austria, or Belgium-NL + the Netherlands) into one campaign and use location-level reporting to watch each country.

Performance Max limits

Performance Max supports the same location targeting and the presence option, but it doesn’t give you location bid adjustments and the reporting is coarser. For multi-country Shopping, many advertisers run one Performance Max campaign per market with the matching Merchant Center feed country; our multi-country Performance Max playbook for EU brands walks through that structure.

Location targeting checklist

1. Open each campaign → Settings → Locations → Location options. Set Presence unless you sell travel or relocation.
2. Set exclusions to “Presence or interest” for countries you never serve.
3. Replace a broad target (whole state or country) with the actual service area, or add exclusions inside it.
4. Add the biggest cities inside a radius as separate targets for reporting.
5. Review the User locations report monthly; exclude areas with spend but no conversions over 90 days.
6. Split countries into separate campaigns when budget, currency, language or margin differ.
7. Check that landing pages, currency and consent banners match each targeted market.
8. For local service businesses, compare results with Local Services Ads vs. Google Ads, which use a different, service-area based model.

FAQ

Does Google Ads location targeting work with VPNs?

Imperfectly. Google uses the IP address among other signals, so a VPN user may appear in a different location. The share of such traffic is usually small for consumer businesses but can be higher for B2B and tech audiences.

Why do I see clicks from outside my targeted area?

Most often because the default “Presence or interest” option is on, or because Google matched someone who is “regularly in” your area but was elsewhere when they searched. Check the Matched locations vs. User locations report to see which one applies.

Can I target a specific street or neighborhood?

Not precisely. The smallest units are postal codes, cities and a radius with a 1 km / 1 mile minimum. Very small areas also have low accuracy and little data, so expect noisy results.

Should I target the whole country for e-commerce?

If you ship nationwide, yes — but still review the user locations report. Many stores find a few regions that convert poorly (long shipping times, lower income areas) and exclude them or move them to a separate campaign with a lower budget.

Do location bid adjustments work with Smart Bidding?

Google treats most manual bid adjustments as signals rather than multipliers under Smart Bidding, and ignores them in several strategies. Use targeting and exclusions, or split campaigns, to control spend by location.

How is this different for Shopping campaigns?

Shopping and Performance Max for retail use the same location targeting, but your Merchant Center feed must also list the target country and shipping settings for that country, or products won’t be eligible there.

Need help with your campaigns?

Location settings are one of the first things we check in every audit, and they are often the fastest fix for wasted spend. Our Google Ads Audit (€349) reviews targeting, bidding, keywords and tracking and gives you a prioritized fix list, or we can build the right multi-market structure from scratch with a Google Search Ads Setup (€490).

Not sure where your budget is leaking? Start with a free mini-audit or book a 30-minute call.