A builder sets up its first campaign, types in its home metro as the location, and assumes that's who will see the ads: owners within driving distance of its crews. With Google's default setting, that assumption is only partly right.
The default also reaches people who are somewhere else entirely but have shown an interest in your metro. Some of them are worth reaching. Most of them aren't, and a new account can't tell the two apart.
Below: the location choice and why a builder flips it, the owners based in other cities who are worth a campaign of their own, where to draw the map, and four more boxes to look at before a dollar goes out: search partners, AI Max, language and hours. It follows Chapter 8, which wrote the ads.
Google's Default Location Setting Can Show a Builder's Ad to Someone in Phoenix Who Visited Last Week
Every Search campaign has two location choices under its advanced options. Google labels the default Presence or interest. It covers people who are in your chosen area or spend time there routinely, plus people anywhere who Google believes care about that area. The narrower choice, labeled Presence, keeps only the first group: people Google judges likely to be in the area or there regularly.
The difference is the word interest. Google's page says people show interest in a place "through terms used in their searches, if they were recently in a location, or through content they view related to the location." So a person in Phoenix who spent last weekend in your metro, or has been reading about its neighborhoods, can see your ad when they search "general contractor" at home in Arizona. You'd pay for the click if they took it.
Google recommends the broad setting as a best practice on Search, and says most campaigns see fewer impressions when they switch away from it. The same page lists when Presence makes more sense, and one case is an advertiser who wants people in its chosen places and not people elsewhere who are merely interested. For a builder whose crews work within a few counties, that describes the business. Switch the main campaign to Presence before launch.
Fewer impressions is the point. A builder's budget is small and its searches are thin; an impression shown to someone in Phoenix is one not shown to an owner across the river. The switch sits under the campaign's location settings, in the advanced options, and it applies to the whole campaign, which is one more reason the owners based elsewhere get a campaign of their own rather than an exception inside the main one.
Owners Planning From Another City Still Search Your City by Name. A Metro-Only Setting Won't Reach Them.
Presence has one cost for a commercial builder, and it's worth measuring before accepting it. Commercial owners don't always live where they build. A medical group, a franchise, a retail chain or a developer may be planning a building in your metro from an office somewhere else.
Keyword Planner shows where searches come from, so we compared two figures for searches that name our example market, Cincinnati: phrases like "general contractors cincinnati," "construction companies cincinnati" and "commercial contractors cincinnati." Across the whole US, those searches came to about 1,130 a month. From inside the Cincinnati metro, about 840. The difference, about 290 a month or roughly 1 in 4, came from somewhere else.
Read that number carefully. Most of the volume is in broad phrases like "general contractors cincinnati," which homeowners moving to the area, job seekers and suppliers type too. The clearly commercial phrases are small enough that Keyword Planner's rounding makes them hard to split. So the 290 isn't 290 owners. But some of those searchers are exactly the owners from other cities a commercial builder wants, and a Presence campaign set to the metro won't reach them unless they're in the metro or there regularly.
The fix is a second, small campaign built for them:
- Location: Presence, set to a wider area: your state and its neighbors, or the whole US if you build for national clients.
- Keywords: every one names your city or metro: "commercial contractor cincinnati," "commercial general contractor cincinnati." Someone in Chicago typing just "general contractor" shouldn't match on exact match with AI Max off, because the keyword names the city.
- Budget: its own, kept small, so these clicks can't drain the main campaign.
This is a more controlled version of what the default does. Instead of Google guessing who is interested in the metro, the searcher has to say so in the search.
Write that campaign's ads for someone who doesn't know the area. An owner in Chicago planning a clinic in your metro wants to know you're local, that you know the permitting offices and the subcontractors, and that you've built this kind of building nearby. Headlines like "Planning a Site in This City?" or "Your Builder on the Ground Here" speak to that. Send the clicks to a page that shows nearby projects and names a project manager who'll be their contact.
Judge it over a quarter, not a week. City-named searches from out of town trickle in, and one owner planning several sites can justify the whole campaign by itself.
A Service Area Should Cover the Counties Your Crews Actually Drive To, Not a Circle Around the Office
The main campaign's location is a business decision, not a map default. Draw it around the places your crews actually work in, and leave out the ones you'd turn down. A builder in the example market might cover the Ohio counties around the city and the Northern Kentucky counties across the river, and skip the far edges of the metro where it never bids.
Google lets you target areas such as regions, cities or ZIP codes, or a radius around a point. Named areas usually fit commercial work better than a radius, because a radius cuts across a river or a state line the same way it cuts across open farmland.
Excluding areas matters as much as including them. If your firm doesn't bid work across a state line, or skips a county where it has no subcontractors, add those as excluded locations. Google's location options page says an exclusion keeps ads from people likely to be located in the excluded area.
For an outer limit, Google's own Business Profile guidelines are a useful reference, even though they're written for a different product. They say the boundaries of a service area "shouldn't extend farther than about 2 hours of driving time" from where the business is based. If your ads reach farther than that, ask whether you'd really send a crew.
Google Switches Search Partners On in Every New Campaign, and Those Clicks Muddy a Builder's First Months of Data
A new Search campaign doesn't stop at Google's own results page. Per Google's Search Network help page, partner sites come switched on whenever a Search campaign is created. These partners are outside websites with a search box of their own, and Google can place your builder ad beside what they return.
There's nothing wrong with partners in principle. The problem is measurement. A young builder account has few clicks and fewer inquiries, and mixing partner traffic in makes it harder to tell which searches are working. Uncheck "Include Google search partners" in the campaign's network settings at launch. Come back to partners after a few months of project inquiries from Google Search alone, and treat turning them on as a test with its own budget and its own read.
AI Max Writes Extra Headlines and Picks Landing Pages. A Builder With No Inquiry Data Yet Can't Steer It.
AI Max bundles three automations into one switch. One stretches your keywords to cover searches you didn't list. One can land an owner on some other page of the builder's site instead of the build-out page you picked. One drafts additional headlines and descriptions, pulled from the site and the ads already running. Google's AI Max help page says the switch arrives already on in any Search campaign you create today.
The same page adds the catch: Google says those three features need bidding that steers by conversions before they work well. A builder launching with hand-set bids on exact match keywords (Chapters 6 and 7) has no conversion-based bidding yet, and its exact match keywords are there precisely to keep the searches narrow. Switch AI Max off at build. It's the last thing to test, after broad match and target CPA have data behind them.
Two more settings finish the list:
- Language. Google's language help page says the Search campaign language box is on its way out, beginning September 2026. Which searchers see an ad now depends on the words the ad itself is in. For a builder in a metro with Spanish-speaking business owners, reaching them means an ad group with ads written in Spanish, and a landing page to match.
- Ad schedule. If an inquiry comes in by phone, run the ads when someone answers. A builder with an office line staffed weekdays can start on business hours and widen the schedule once form inquiries show when owners search.
Each of these is one click in the settings. Skip them and a builder's first month of budget goes partly to people who were never going to hire a crew from across town. Our Google Ads agency walks through this list with commercial builders on every new account.
Next: Performance Max Can Bid on Searches for Your Own Name
Chapter 10 turns to Performance Max: when a builder is ready for it, and why the first setting to change is a brand exclusion that keeps it off searches for your own company name. The full chapter list is on the Google Ads for Construction Companies guide home.
