Google Ads location targeting is not just about choosing a city, state, or country. Your location settings also determine whether Google reaches people physically in that area, people showing interest in it, or both. A poorly configured setup can send budget to users your business cannot actually serve. This guide explains how Google Ads geotargeting works, how to set it up correctly, and how to improve location performance over time.
Quick summary:
- Google Ads lets you target locations such as countries, regions, cities, and radius areas, while excluding locations you do not want to reach.
- Presence or Interest and Presence can lead to very different traffic, so the right option depends on how your business serves customers.
- Location targeting is based on multiple signals and is not perfectly precise, which makes regular location reporting and exclusions important.
- Strong geotargeting goes beyond setup: review conversion quality, CPA, ROAS, matched locations, and business coverage before shifting budget or excluding an area.
What is Google Ads location targeting?
Google Ads location targeting is a feature within Google’s advertising platform that allows advertisers to specify the geographic locations where their ads should be displayed.
By default, your advertisements can be displayed to individuals situated within, regularly visiting, or displaying interest in your specified locations.
For instance, if you own a bakery in Paris and designate Paris as your targeted location, your ads may be shown to individuals currently in Paris, those who frequently visit Paris, or individuals who have previously demonstrated interest in Parisian bakeries, whether presently or in the past. Alternatively, you have the option to employ different location settings to narrow down the types of locations you want to reach.
For most types of Google advertising campaigns, you have the flexibility to select the locations where your ads will appear. This includes the ability to choose entire countries, specific regions within a country such as cities or regions, and even a defined radius around a particular location.
Furthermore, you can specify locations to be excluded from your campaigns if there are regions where you prefer your ads not to be displayed.
Why use location targeting in Google Ads
Location targeting is essential for running effective ad campaigns for several important reasons:
Cost savings
The primary motivation for using Google Ads geotargeting lies in the ability to conserve your advertising budget by preventing unnecessary expenditures on individuals who could potentially benefit from your services but are situated outside your operational areas. Geotargeting can be customized to suit your specific needs, whether you require a broad or highly precise focus. For instance:
- An e-commerce retailer can tailor their targeting to encompass the entire United States or opt for specific states with major urban centers.
- A chain of nursing homes operating in New England can exclusively target the states within that region.
- A home service provider has the capability to pinpoint and target specific neighborhoods within their service area.
Show ads to the right people
Imagine you’re a landscaper who wants rich customers. With geotargeting, you can show your ads in the fancier parts of a place. (But remember, some businesses can’t mix age and location targeting.)
Make personalized ads
When you use geotargeting in local advertising, you can make your ads fit the area where people live. For example, if there’s a concert nearby, you can offer a special deal for your nearby restaurant.
Explore new markets
You can try out new places for your business by starting small with a smaller advertising budget. If you see good results, you can invest more in ads that are more likely to lead to sales. Keep in mind that geotargeting is set at the campaign level, so if you want to see how well you do in a new market, create separate campaigns for different locations.
Match what people want
Using geotargeting in Google Ads benefits both you and your customers. It’s a win-win! Research shows:
- 80% of customers want to receive location-based alerts from businesses.
- 70% of customers are willing to share their location if they get something valuable in return.
- 61% of people with smartphones like buying from websites that show them information based on where they are.
Google Ads location targeting options
Google Ads gives you two main ways to control how users qualify for your targeted locations:
- Presence or Interest: Reaches people who are in, regularly in, or have shown interest in your targeted locations.
- Presence: Focuses on people who are in or regularly in your targeted locations.
The better option depends on how your business actually serves customers. Presence or Interest gives you broader reach and can work well when users often research a location before they are physically there. Presence is usually more suitable for businesses that can only serve customers within a specific area, such as local services, delivery businesses, or physical stores.
Pro Tip: We usually start with the customer journey rather than choosing a setting by default. If users need to be physically in the area to convert, Presence often gives cleaner traffic. If location interest is part of the buying process, using Presence or Interest can help you avoid cutting off relevant demand too early.
Geographical targeting
This enables you to focus your ad targeting on a wide range of geographic areas, including:
- Countries: You can direct your ads to particular countries or groups of countries.
- Territories: Target specific political divisions like regions, states, provinces, or territories within a country.
- Regions: Focus on particular regions, which may consist of multiple territories, states, or provinces.
- Cities: Tailor your ads to reach users in specific cities or towns.
- Radius targeting: Direct your ads to users within a defined distance from a specific location, like a store or landmark.
- Location groups: Combine multiple locations into one target group for more convenient management.
Radius targeting
Radius targeting in Google Ads allows you to set a distance around your business location to target nearby searchers. You can set the radius anywhere from 1 to 1000 miles.
This approach is especially successful in:
- Businesses in high-traffic city centers: It’s great for businesses situated in bustling downtown areas, as it helps them connect with people in the immediate vicinity.
- Businesses offering local delivery: If your business provides local delivery services, proximity targeting ensures that you reach customers within a specified radius who can benefit from your delivery options.
- Hyperlocal physical stores: It’s a valuable strategy for brick-and-mortar stores that want to attract foot traffic from their immediate neighborhoods or local communities.
Location assets
Location assets add your business’s address, phone number, and a map preview below your PPC ads:
- Enhances the local presence of your business
- Establishes a sense of recognition and reliability
- Facilitates easy actions like “click to call” or “click for directions”
Exclusion targeting
You have the option to omit specific regions or locations from your targeting:
- Exclude areas outside your service area.
- Prevent your ads from appearing to your competitors’ customer base.
- Eliminate regions with a poor conversion rate from your targeting.
Make use of these potent choices to refine your location-targeting strategy.
How to set up Google Ads location targeting
Setting up location targeting starts with choosing where you want your ads to appear, then refining who Google should consider relevant to those locations.
Step 1: Open Locations
In your Google Ads account, go to: Campaigns > Audiences, keywords, and content > Locations
Step 2: Select the campaign
Click the pencil icon, then choose the campaign you want to update. Google Ads will show the locations currently included in that campaign and let you add new ones.
Step 3: Add your target locations
Search for the country, region, city, or other supported location you want to reach, then add it to the campaign.
If your business serves a specific area around a physical location, you can also use radius targeting instead of targeting an entire city or region.
Step 4: Add location exclusions
Exclude locations where you do not want your ads to appear, such as areas outside your delivery or service coverage.
This is particularly useful when your broader target region contains smaller areas your business cannot serve.
Step 5: Review your location options
Next, open the campaign Settings, expand Locations, and review Location options.
Choose between:
- Presence or Interest for broader reach.
- Presence when users need to be physically in or regularly in your target area.
This setting can significantly affect where your traffic comes from, so choose it based on how your business actually serves customers.
Step 6: Review and save
Before saving, check your included locations, exclusions, radius settings, and location option one more time.
Once everything matches your actual service area and campaign objective, save the changes and monitor location performance after the campaign starts running.
5 Google Ads location targeting best practices
Location targeting should not be treated as a one-time campaign setting. Once your ads start running, geographic performance can reveal where budget is being wasted, where demand is stronger, and whether your targeting setup still matches the way your business serves customers.
1. Compare actual performance by location
Do not evaluate geotargeting only by the locations you selected during setup. Google Ads provides both Targeted locations and Matched locations reports, which can show where your ads actually matched users.
Focus on metrics that connect directly to business performance, such as conversions, CPA, conversion value, and ROAS, rather than looking only at clicks or impressions.
Tip: A large target area can hide very different results underneath. Before reducing budget across an entire state or region, check whether a few cities are responsible for most of the inefficient spend.
2. Use location exclusions before relying on negative keywords
If your business cannot serve a particular area, exclude that location directly instead of trying to block it through negative keywords. Location exclusions are designed to prevent your campaign from reaching areas that are outside your coverage.
Negative keywords still have a role when the unwanted location appears in the search intent. For example, a Chicago pet grooming business could exclude “Los Angeles” as a keyword if users frequently search for services there.
The key is to use each control for the right job: location exclusions control geography, while negative keywords control search queries.
3. Don’t rely on location bid adjustments with Smart Bidding
Location bid adjustments can still be useful when your bidding strategy supports them, but they are not the right optimization tool for most Smart Bidding campaigns.
With strategies such as Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, and Maximize Conversion Value, Google already considers location and other auction-time signals when setting bids. Most automated bidding strategies therefore ignore manual location bid adjustments; Maximize Clicks is a notable exception.
Tip: With Smart Bidding, we focus more on whether a location should stay in the campaign, be excluded, or receive its own campaign and budget. Manually increasing a city’s bid by a percentage is usually less useful than giving Google clean conversion data and the right geographic structure.
4. Exclude locations based on enough data
Location exclusions are useful for areas your business cannot serve or regions that consistently produce poor-quality conversions. However, avoid excluding a location simply because it had a bad few days.
Smaller geographic areas may generate limited conversion volume, so short-term performance can be misleading. Look for a consistent pattern across cost, conversions, CPA, and customer quality before making a permanent exclusion.
For service-area businesses, operational limits are the exception: if you simply cannot serve customers in an area, excluding it upfront makes sense.
5. Use Google Trends to validate regional demand
Google Trends can help you compare search interest for products, services, or topics across different regions before you expand geographic targeting.
For example, if one state consistently shows stronger search interest for a relevant topic, it may be worth testing that market separately.
However, treat Trends as a demand signal, not proof of advertising performance. A region with high search interest will not necessarily deliver a better CPA or ROAS, so validate the opportunity with your actual Google Ads data after launch.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my Google Ads location targeting not working?
One potential reason your Google Ads location targeting not working is the insufficient keyword search traffic originating from the specific geographic region you’ve chosen to target. A scheduling or targeting error may have occurred. Navigate to the Ad Schedule tab, and you’ll also find the location targeting settings for your campaign right beside it.
How to change my targeting location on Google Ads?
To make changes or remove locations in your campaign, follow these steps:
- Choose a campaign from the tree view.
- Go to Keywords and Targeting > Locations in the type list.
- You’ll see the list of locations in the data view.
- To switch between targeted and excluded locations, use the options for Locations and Locations, Negatives.
- To edit or remove a location, simply select it in the data view.
Read more: Google Ads Audience Targeting: Types, Setup & Best Practices
Final words
In conclusion, Google Ads location targeting is a powerful tool that allows advertisers to reach the right audience in precisely the places that matter most. By tailoring your ads to specific geographic locations, you can enhance relevance, improve cost efficiency, and boost the overall performance of your campaigns. Whether you’re running a local business or aiming for global reach, mastering location targeting in Google Ads can significantly impact the success of your campaigns.
