A plumber in Asheville, North Carolina, sets up a Google Ads campaign and types "Asheville" into the location box. Every click should come from someone with a leaking pipe within driving distance. Then the calls start: a man in Ohio planning a cabin trip for next summer, a college student in Atlanta reading about the city, a woman in Florida asking if he services Charlotte. None of them can hire him. All of them cost him a click.
Nothing was broken. The campaign did exactly what Google's default location setting tells it to do, which is show ads to people in Asheville and to people who have shown an interest in Asheville, wherever they happen to be. For a hotel, that second group is the whole business. For a plumber, it is money spent on people who will never be customers.
We have said before that geography is the first thing a local business should fix, in our piece on why most Google Ads advice wasn't written for a local business. That article covers the ten-second switch. This one covers the rest: what the setting actually does, the businesses that should leave it alone, how to draw the map, and how to check where your ads really ran.
Google's Default Shows Your Ads to People Who Are Only Curious About Your Town
When you pick locations for a campaign, Google gives you two options, tucked under a link most people never open. You'll find them in your campaign settings under Locations, then Location options:
- Presence or interest: people in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in your targeted locations. This is the default, and Google labels it "recommended."
- Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations.
The difference is the word "interest," and Google is broad about what counts. According to its help pages, a person can show interest in a place through the words they search, because they were recently there, or because of content they've looked at about that place. Someone in Ohio searching "Asheville cabins with hot tubs" is now, in Google's eyes, interested in Asheville. If your keywords are broad enough to match their next search, your ad can show.
How much this costs depends heavily on where you are. A business in a small town nobody visits may see very little leakage. A business in a college town, a tourist area, a city with a famous hospital, or a place people retire to will see a lot, because millions of people outside the area are searching about it every day.
Google's case for the default is that it brings more conversions. Its help page says advertisers who switched from Presence to Presence or interest saw about 5% more conversions on Search, but look at which advertisers: travel, real estate and education, measured on Google's internal data from 2022. Those are businesses whose customers really do live somewhere else. That number tells a plumber nothing.
A Plumber Pays for Clicks Inside the Drive Radius. A Senior Living Community Wants the Daughter Three States Away.
For most local businesses, the answer is to switch to Presence. If you fix roofs, clean teeth, cut hair, repair cars, or run a restaurant, the customer has to be within reach of you, and the people who are merely interested in your town are paying you nothing but costing you clicks. Google itself says Presence makes sense when you only want people in specific locations.
Expect impressions to drop when you switch. Google warns about this on the same page, and it is the point. The impressions you lose are the ones that were going to people you can't serve.
But don't flip it on autopilot, because some local businesses sell to people who don't live there yet:
- Senior living, home care and memory care. The person researching is often an adult child two states away, searching for care near Mom. Presence would hide you from the person making the decision.
- Movers and real estate. Your next customer is planning to come to your area, or leave it, and is searching from where they live now.
- Wedding venues, event spaces and vacation rentals. The booking is made months ahead, from wherever the couple or the traveler lives.
- Specialty clinics and regional medical centers that draw patients from a wide region for a procedure.
If that describes you, keep the default, or better, split it: one campaign on Presence for the local searcher, and a separate campaign on Presence or interest with keywords that only an out-of-town planner would use ("assisted living near Mom in Asheville"). That way you can see what the far-away clicks actually cost.
One more place this hides. If you use AI Max for Search, Google has added an optional ad-group setting called locations of interest, which lets an ad group reach people interested in another place on top of your campaign's location settings. It is useful for a business that genuinely sells to visitors. If you didn't set it up on purpose, check that it is empty.
Your Radius Should Stop Where Your Truck Stops
Once the option is right, look at the map itself. You have three main ways to draw it, and each suits a different business:
- A radius around an address. Best for service businesses that drive to the customer, and for shops whose customers drive to them. Set it to how far you will really travel for a job, not how far you wish people would travel. Jyll Saskin Gales, a former Google employee who now coaches advertisers, points out that the address you use for a radius isn't shown to anyone, so a business run from home can center it on the house.
- ZIP codes. Best when your area has a shape a circle can't follow: a town split by a river, neighborhoods you serve next to ones you don't, or a franchise territory defined by ZIP code.
- Cities or counties. Simple and fine when your area matches a real boundary, but watch big counties. A county line can include an hour of empty road you'd never drive.
You can't draw a ring, meaning a radius with a hole in the middle. As Saskin Gales notes, there is no negative radius. What you can do is exclude specific places inside your radius. If you serve a 25-mile radius but won't cross the toll bridge to the island side, keep the radius and exclude the ZIP codes on the far side.
Excluding the Next County Is a Second Fence. Switching Off Presence or Interest Is the First.
Some advertisers respond to out-of-area clicks by excluding every surrounding county, or every other state. That can help, but it should come after the Location options fix, not instead of it, because of how exclusions work now.
Google changed exclusions so they only apply to presence: an excluded area keeps your ads from people who are likely located there. If you search for advice on this, you will still find videos telling you to set exclusions to "presence or interest." That option no longer exists for Search, Display, Shopping or Performance Max campaigns; Google migrated every account and returns an error if you try to set it. So an exclusion can stop a person standing in the next county, but it does nothing about a person in Ohio who is interested in your town. Only the Presence setting on your targeting handles that.
Also keep in mind that location matching is Google's best estimate, not a guarantee. Google says plainly that it uses signals from people's settings, devices and behavior, and that 100% accuracy isn't guaranteed. You will see the occasional click from just over the line even when everything is set correctly. A handful is normal. A steady stream is a setting problem.
Two smaller tools help at the edges:
- Location-flavored negative keywords. If your town is famous for something that has nothing to do with you, such as a university, a stadium, a festival or a resort, add those words as negatives so a plumber's ad doesn't match "places to stay near the stadium."
- A wider fence, only when you need it. If the report in the next section still shows clicks from a particular neighboring area after you've switched to Presence, exclude that area specifically. Don't wall off three states on day one; people who live just outside the line but work inside it can be real customers.
The Matched Locations Report Shows Where Your Ads Really Ran
Your location settings tell you where you asked Google to show your ads. They don't tell you where Google actually showed them. For that, go to Campaigns, then Insights & reports, then When and where your ads showed, and open the Matched locations tab.
Think of it as the search terms report for geography. Your keywords are what you chose; your search terms are what actually matched. Your targeted locations are what you chose; your matched locations are where the clicks came from. Google notes these matched locations can be people's physical locations or locations of interest, which is exactly why it's worth reading after you change the setting.
Run it for the last 30 days and sort by cost. Look for cities, metros or regions outside your service area that are spending real money. If you find them on a campaign set to Presence or interest, you've found the reason to switch. If you find them on a campaign already set to Presence, those are the specific places worth excluding.
You can cross-check in Google Analytics by looking at where your Google Ads visitors are located. If both reports show a cluster of traffic from somewhere you don't serve, believe it.
Out-of-Town Calls Often Come From Your Map Listing, Not Your Ads
Before you change anything because of a call from out of town, find out where the call came from. Saskin Gales makes this point well: the most common source of out-of-area calls often isn't the ads at all.
Your Google Business Profile, the free listing that shows on Maps and in local results, isn't controlled by your ad settings. Anyone, anywhere, can find it and call you. If you count calls from that listing as conversions, or if you're running Performance Max, which can use your Business Profile to show your business on Maps, some of those calls will come from people your Search campaign's settings would never have reached.
So check the source first. If the call came through a Search ad and your Matched locations report confirms out-of-area spend, fix the settings. If it came from your free listing, the ad settings aren't the problem, and changing them won't stop it. We covered how map listing calls have shifted in Google moving the call button onto a paid ad.
Meta has its own version of this problem, with a box that quietly sends local ads out of town. If you advertise there too, the fix is in our Meta piece on location targeting.
Five Minutes in Your Location Settings Stops the Clicks You Can't Serve
- Open each campaign's settings, go to Locations, then Location options, and see whether it says Presence or interest.
- If your customers have to be near you, switch it to Presence. If they plan from far away, keep the default or split the campaign.
- Make your map match the jobs you'll take: a radius set to how far you really drive, ZIP codes for odd shapes, and exclusions for places inside the circle you won't serve.
- If you use AI Max, check that no ad group has a location of interest you didn't add on purpose.
- Add negative keywords for the famous things in your town that have nothing to do with you.
- Read the Matched locations report monthly, sorted by cost, and exclude only the specific areas that keep showing up.
- Before blaming the ads for an out-of-town call, check whether it came from your free listing.
Location settings are one of the first things we check in any local account, because the default quietly spends part of the budget outside the area the business can serve. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on yours, our Google Ads management team does this every week. And if you'd rather do it yourself, step one takes about a minute per campaign.
