Open a fresh Search campaign in Google Ads and a long list of choices has already been made for you before you type a keyword. Several of them lean toward the widest possible reach. A plumber, a dentist or a lawn care company wants close to the opposite: the people nearby, during the hours someone can answer the phone, on Google's own search results.
None of the defaults below is hidden. Most of them sit on the campaign settings screen, and each one quietly widens who sees the ad, where it shows or how much it spends. This chapter goes through the ones that matter most for a local business, what Google says each one does, and what we change before launch.
The campaign being launched is the one the earlier chapters built: exact match keywords from Chapter 6 on manual bids from Chapter 7.
Google's Default Location Setting Counts People Who Are Only Interested in Your Town.
When you tell Google to show ads in St. Louis, the default setting doesn't mean only people in St. Louis. Left alone, the setting reaches two kinds of searcher at once. One is the person in or regularly in St. Louis, such as the homeowner. The other is anyone, anywhere, whom Google judges to be interested in St. Louis. Google labels that combination its default and recommended option.
Google detects interest from several signals, including words in a search that name a place, past searches about a place, and searches on Google Maps. Its own example: someone in Paris who searches for a Los Angeles taxi can be counted as interested in Los Angeles. For a taxi company, that might be a customer. For a plumber, a person in another state who looked up the town is less likely to be booking a repair this week.
Google does give evidence for its default: advertisers in travel, real estate and education who switched to it saw about 5% more conversions on Search, by Google's internal data. None of those is a local service business, the data dates from 2022, and on the Google pages we read there's no comparable figure for one. Google itself says Presence fits an advertiser who wants only people in the area, not people elsewhere who are interested in it.
Chapter 6 showed the local side of this. Many city-name searches, like "electrician st louis," run higher across the US than inside the St. Louis market, about twice as high for "electrician st louis." Our guess is that some of those are people about to move or hiring for a relative, and some of them will matter to a business. In our view, most local businesses still do better paying for the people who are there.
Google's narrower choice, called Presence, drops that second kind of searcher and keeps the first. That's our default for local accounts. A business that genuinely serves people moving to town can test the wider setting later, once its conversions show whether those clicks book.
A Search Five Miles From the Shop Deserves a Higher Bid Than the Same Search 20 Miles Out.
The service area itself is a business decision, not an advertising one. It should come from how far the business will actually drive for a job, how long that drive takes, and where the customers have come from so far. A radius around the address is usually the simplest way to draw it. Google allows a radius as small as 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles), though it warns that very small areas may show ads only now and then or not at all.
Inside that area, not every search is worth the same. A job five miles from the shop costs less to reach and fits between other jobs. A job 20 miles out, maybe 40 minutes each way, eats half a morning. So in the first campaign, the one on manual bids, we usually draw two rings: a tight inner radius around the business and a wider outer one. The inner ring gets a higher bid through a location bid adjustment, which Google allows anywhere from minus 90% to plus 900%. The outer ring stays at the base bid or below it.
The two rings work on manual bids, not under Smart Bidding. Google's help page says Smart Bidding strategies don't use manual bid adjustments, and its table marks location adjustments as unsupported for every conversion-based strategy. Once an account moves to Smart Bidding, rings that need different prices become separate campaigns. Chapter 15 covers that setup, along with businesses with several locations.
Google Includes Search Partner Sites in Every New Search Campaign Unless You Turn Them Off.
A Search campaign can show on more than Google's results page. Search partners are other websites, plus some Google properties like YouTube, that show Search ads on their results pages and other pages. Google's help page on the Search Network confirms that a new Search campaign includes them from the start, and that an advertiser can opt out whenever it likes.
We switch search partners off at launch. The reason isn't that partner traffic is always bad. It's that a new local account needs a clean read on what Google Search alone produces: which keywords bring calls, what a lead costs, how the ads compare. Mixing in other sites from day one muddies that read before there's anything to compare it to.
After a few months, when the plumber or dentist knows what a Google Search lead costs, partner traffic can get a trial of its own, measured against that number. On the same settings screen, check the Display Network option too. A local Search campaign at launch belongs on the search results page and nowhere else.
New Search Campaigns Start With AI Max On, Rewriting Ads and Picking Pages Before the Account Has Any Data.
Google's newest default is the biggest one. For a plumber building a first campaign, AI Max arrives already selected, and with it come three features working at once. Search term matching widens which searches the keywords can match, using broad match and keywordless technology. Text customization lets Google write or adjust ad text from your site. Final URL expansion lets Google route a click to a different page of the site than the one the advertiser picked, when Google expects it to do better.
For a local account just starting out, all three run against the plan. Search term matching widens matching beyond the keywords you picked, which is the opposite of the exact match start in Chapter 6. Text customization can change the wording Chapter 8 built from what the page proves. And Final URL expansion can send the town searcher from Chapter 4 somewhere other than the town page built for them.
We untick it while building the campaign, or switch it off later in the campaign's settings, where one toggle opts out of every AI Max setting at once. There's a second reason in Google's own setup notes: the three features are designed around Smart Bidding that bids for conversions, and a launch on manual bids has none to give them. AI Max comes back much later, as the last step of the rollout, in Chapter 13.
A Campaign That Only Runs Monday to Friday Now Aims to Spend a Full Month's Budget Anyway.
Many local businesses run ads only on the days they work. Since June 1, 2026, that no longer shrinks the monthly spend the way it used to. Google's ad scheduling page now says a scheduled campaign paces toward 30.4 times its daily budget each month, however many days it actually runs.
Take a business that advertises only on weekdays, about 22 days a month, with a $100 daily budget. Under the old pacing it would have aimed at about $2,200 for the month. Now it aims at about $3,040, the same as a campaign that runs every day. Google still caps any single day at double the daily budget, and a day the schedule switches off stays off. For campaigns scheduled 15 days or fewer, Google says the real ceiling is twice the daily budget times the active days.
For a weekday business, the fix is arithmetic. Decide what the month should cost, then divide by 30.4, not by the number of days the ads will run.
A business that wants to spend $1,500 a month, the starting point from Chapter 3, sets a daily budget of about $49, whether it advertises five days a week or seven.
Google Ads Run All Day Until You Set a Schedule. A Call After Closing Time Goes to Voicemail, and the Click Still Costs.
Unless someone sets a schedule, Google can show the ads around the clock, every day. For a business with someone answering the phone at 2 a.m., that's fine. For most local businesses, it means paying for clicks at hours when the call goes to voicemail.
The schedule should match when the phones are actually answered, not the hours printed somewhere. In our sample, 9 of the 12 businesses gave conflicting hours, or around-the-clock claims their hours didn't back up, somewhere among the website, its code, the Google listing and the ads. Before setting the ad schedule, settle on one set of real hours and fix the places that disagree.
Google allows up to six schedule windows per day for each campaign, set in the account's time zone, so check that the time zone matches the business. A call asset, the phone number shown with the ad, can be scheduled separately so the number appears only when someone can answer it. A business that does answer after hours, through an on-call technician or an answering service, can leave those hours on. Chapter 16 covers answering services and missed calls.
Before the first dollar goes out, the settings screen for a new local Search campaign should read:
- Locations: Presence, with the service area drawn as one or two radius rings.
- Networks: Google Search only, with search partners and Display off.
- AI Max: off, including text customization and Final URL expansion.
- Budget: the monthly target divided by 30.4.
- Ad schedule: the hours someone answers, in the right time zone, with the call asset on the same hours.
Our plumbers guide walks through the same launch settings for one trade.
Next: Performance Max for Store Goals Wants Five Locations or More.
With the settings in place, the Search campaign is ready to run. Chapter 10 covers Performance Max, Google's campaign type that spans Search, Maps, YouTube and more, and why its store goals, which Google recommends only for businesses with five or more locations, don't fit a business with one.
Every chapter is on the guide's home page. If you'd rather hand this off, our Google Ads management sets presence targeting, networks, AI Max, budget and schedule on every new local campaign before launch.
