Chapter 9 drew a local business's service area as two rings: a tight inner radius around the shop with a higher bid, and a wider outer one at the base bid or below. That works while the account bids by hand. It stops working the day the account moves to Smart Bidding, and it never fit a business with more than one address.
This bonus chapter covers what replaces the rings once Google sets the bids, when splitting an area into separate campaigns helps and when it starves them, and how a business with two, five or fifty locations keeps each one's ads, phone number and page pointed at the right place.
The short version: in Google Ads, budgets, service areas and bid strategies are set campaign by campaign, and each campaign can carry its own call number. Anything a business wants handled differently by location belongs in its own campaign, as long as that campaign has enough conversions to learn from.
Once Smart Bidding Takes Over, Google Ignores the Higher Bid You Set for Searches Near the Shop.
The inner ring's higher bid comes from a location bid adjustment, a percentage added to the bid for searches from a chosen area. Google's help page on bid adjustments is direct about what happens under its automated strategies. Target CPA and Maximize conversions "automatically set bids to optimize for the conversion goal," and "If you make a manual bid adjustment to your automated Smart Bidding strategy, it won't be supported."
So when a local account reaches the Exploration stage from Chapter 7 and switches to Smart Bidding, the higher bid on the inner ring stops doing anything. The setting can still sit in the account. Google just doesn't apply it.
Google's argument is that it doesn't need to. Its page on conversion value rules says "Smart Bidding already uses signals like geography, device, and first-party audience lists." If calls from five miles away turn into booked jobs more often than calls from 20 miles away, and the account reports those conversions, Smart Bidding is supposed to bid up the close-in searches on its own.
That leaves two ways to treat the close-in area differently once Google sets the bids:
- A separate campaign for the inner area, with its own budget and its own cost target. For an account bidding on Target CPA, this is the only setting that tells Google one area is worth more.
- Conversion value rules by location, which raise the value of a conversion from a chosen area. Google says these feed value-based bidding, Target ROAS and Maximize conversion value. A local lead account bidding on Target CPA, counting each call as a lead, doesn't bid on value. Google lists only those two value-based strategies, so on Target CPA we'd expect the rule to change the reports, not the bids.
Splitting One Service Area Into Two Campaigns Splits the Conversions Too. We Split Only When Each Gets About 30 Conversions a Month.
A separate campaign for the inner area sounds like the obvious fix. The catch is the same one Chapter 7 set as the gate for Smart Bidding in the first place: about 30 quality conversions a month for the campaign that's learning, the bar we use, not one Google sets.
An Exploration campaign bringing in 40 booked calls a month has enough to learn from. Cut it into an inner campaign with 25 and an outer one with 15, and neither does. Each has its own target to hit with about half the conversions, and the outer one sits well below the 30 a month we use as the bar.
So the rule we use:
- Split only when each piece can hold the volume on its own. If the inner area alone brings in 30 or more quality conversions a month, and the business wants it priced differently, it can stand as its own campaign.
- Otherwise, keep one campaign. Google's bidding already reads location as a signal; check the results by area in the account's location report every month. If the outer towns keep producing calls that don't book, the fix is to tighten the area, not to split it.
- Keep the manual-bid Isolation campaign as it is. The two rings still work there, on the exact match keywords from Chapter 6, because that campaign never moves to Smart Bidding.
Most single-location businesses never need the split. The rings on the Isolation campaign, plus one Exploration campaign that reads location by itself, cover the service area.
Each Location Gets Its Own Campaign, Phone Number and Page, Because Google Sets Budgets and Areas by Campaign.
A second address changes the math. Two locations aren't one service area with a closer part and a farther part. They're two businesses that share a name, each with its own area, staff, hours and phone line.
In Google Ads, the settings that matter for that are campaign settings. The budget is set per campaign. Location targeting is set per campaign. The ad schedule, which Chapter 9 ties to the hours someone answers the phone, is set per campaign. A call asset can carry a different number in each campaign. So the structure the practitioners we studied default to is the one we use: one Google Ads account, one campaign per location, each with its own area, budget, schedule, phone number and landing page.
Separate accounts make sense when the locations don't share an owner or a credit card, as with independently owned franchise locations. Otherwise one account keeps the brand's negative keywords, conversion actions and reporting in one place.
Google also gives multi-location accounts a tool for the address side. Location groups let a business assign specific Business Profile locations to an account, campaign or ad group, and Google calls campaign level "the most common use case." Applied that way, the north location's campaign shows the north location's address and map pin in its ads, not whichever location Google would otherwise pick from the linked profiles.
Each campaign still has to clear the volume bar from the last section before it moves to Smart Bidding. A newer location with 10 calls a month stays on manual bids longer than the original one with 50. Performance Max for store goals, from Chapter 10, is the exception: Google recommends at least five locations in the campaign, or 10 for store visits.
Each Location's Ad Should Open That Location's Own Page. Both Chains We Checked Had Store Links That Missed the Store.
Two of the 12 businesses in our St. Louis sample are multi-location chains: an auto repair and tire chain listing 74 stores, and a gym chain with 18 listed clubs. Each advertises under one name in Google's Ads Transparency Center, and many of their ads show as location cards naming a specific store or club. That's the right instinct. The trouble was in where the store-level links went.
At the gym chain, the Google listing for the club we checked linked its website button to a page that redirected to the all-clubs list. A searcher who picked that club landed on a page asking them to pick a club again. The club's own page showed only the chain's central phone number, not the club number on its Google listing.
At the tire chain, the online scheduler on every page offered a list of 72 shops to choose from. The store we checked wasn't on it, and neither were at least two others. The booking link on that store's Google listing pointed to a booking form we couldn't find on the page.
Neither problem is about the ads. Both are about the step after the click, which is the part Chapter 4 showed decides whether a local ad's click turns into a customer. With one campaign per location, each campaign's final URL should be that location's own page, with that location's number, hours and booking. Then check the Google listing links too, since Chapter 12 showed Local Ads draw on the profile.
When Two Locations Cover the Same Town, Google Picks Which Location's Ad Shows, Not the Business.
Two locations a few miles apart usually reach into some of the same towns. If both campaigns target those towns with the same keywords, they don't bid against each other. Google's page on keyword matching says that even when several of an advertiser's keywords are eligible for the same search, "you'll have only one bid in the ad auction." It picks a keyword identical to the search first, with exact match ahead of phrase and broad, then the most relevant ad group, then the highest Ad Rank.
That avoids a price war, but it hands Google the choice of which location shows. A searcher in a town halfway between the two might see the farther location's ad, call its number and land on its page, because that campaign's ad happened to rank higher that day.
The fix is borders:
- Give each campaign its own towns. Split the shared area by where each location actually serves, usually by drive time from each address.
- Exclude the other location's towns. Google applies exclusions by presence, so people Google judges to be in an excluded town won't see that campaign's ads, though Google doesn't promise 100% accuracy.
- Add the other location's town names as negative keywords where searchers type them, so a search for "dentist [north town]" doesn't go to the south campaign.
The same borders belong on the Business Profiles of locations that list service areas. Google caps those at 20 areas and doesn't accept a radius, so each location's profile should list the towns its campaign targets. When the profile, the campaign and the page all describe the same territory, the right location answers the call.
Next: Google Ads Bills the Click Whether Anyone Picks Up or Not.
The last bonus chapter covers the calls themselves: what a missed call costs a local business on ordinary Search ads, how call length and ad schedules fit who answers, and where answering services, human or AI, fill the gaps.
Every chapter is on the guide's home page. If you run more than one location and want each one's campaigns, numbers and pages set up and kept apart, our Google Ads management builds the account location by location.
