In short and in plain language
Google Ads does not only show ads to people near you. The basic setting also reaches people who are only interested in your area. These people can be far away.
If your customers come from nearby, pick the option Presence. Then mainly people who are in your area, or who are there often, see the ad.
You can draw a circle around your business. Or you can pick a list of places. A list works well if your area is not round.
A report shows where the clicks came from. Look at it before and after the change. You can leave out places where you do not work.
Sometimes interest is useful. For example for vacation homes, or for people who will soon move to your area. This kind of case should get its own campaign.
Suppose a painting business in Hildesheim runs search ads for the city and the surrounding area. The monthly budget runs out early, the account shows decent click numbers, yet the phone stays quiet – and a closer look reveals clicks from places the business does not serve at all. One possible reason lies in an inconspicuous setting: by default, location targeting in Google Ads covers both people who are in the target area and people who have merely shown interest in it (Google Ads Help). The default is called “Presence or interest”, and Google explicitly recommends it. For businesses with a fixed service area, the narrower “Presence” option is usually the better fit. This article explains what both options mean, how to switch, when a radius and when a location list maps your service area more accurately, how the locations report shows where clicks came from, and in which cases broader targeting remains justified.
Key takeaways
- By default, Google Ads targets “Presence or interest” and therefore also reaches people who are elsewhere and have only shown interest in your area (Google Ads Help).
- For businesses with a fixed service area, “Presence” is usually the right choice: ads go to people who are in or regularly in the target area, commuters included. The switch is made per campaign under Locations in the settings.
- A radius has to be at least 1 km (Google Ads Help) and suits customers around the business; a location list of cities and postal codes maps an irregular service area more precisely.
- In the “Matched locations” view, the locations report shows where ads were served – at a physical location or a location of interest. Compare periods of equal length before and after the switch.
- By default, exclusions only apply to people in the excluded area, and they win in a conflict. Exceptions where interest matters – people moving in, vacation rentals, education – belong in a separate campaign with its own budget.
What the default setting in Google Ads means
Google Ads separates two criteria for location: where a person is likely or regularly located, and the places that person is interested in (Google Ads Help). The “Presence or interest” option combines both. According to Google, it is the default and recommended setting: it reaches people who are likely to be in or regularly present in the target area, plus people who have shown interest in that area. The “Presence” option limits delivery to the first group. If you have not changed the default, you are also advertising to people who are somewhere else entirely and may have searched for the town name just once.
The help center describes fairly precisely how Google determines physical location: usually from the device’s IP address, for Wi-Fi connections from the network’s address, and on mobile devices – depending on location settings – also via GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or nearby cell towers (Google Ads Help). Google infers interest in a place from, among other things, terms in the search query, earlier searches and earlier locations, the content of a website where an ad appears, searches in Google Maps and a custom location set for search results. One sentence matters most for local businesses: locations of interest are not limited to the user’s country or to the Google domain they use.
There is another effect to keep in mind. If an ad targets a specific region, Google may also show it to potential customers nearby, for example when the population density is too low or the data are insufficient for more precise targeting (Google Ads Help). Google’s example is a campaign targeting the city of Portland that may also show ads to people in nearby suburbs. In principle, location targeting relies on signals about settings, devices and behavior, and Google itself points out that these signals vary. A campaign set to “Presence” can reduce the share of out-of-area clicks, but because of these signals it will not remove it completely.
| Setting | Who it reaches | What it typically suits |
|---|---|---|
| “Presence or interest” (default) | People in or regularly in the target area, plus people interested in the area even if they are elsewhere | Travel, real estate, education and offers for people who plan a place from outside |
| “Presence” | People who are likely to be in or usually in the target area | Trades, medical practices, restaurants, shops and delivery services with a fixed service area |
| “Presence” exclusion (default for exclusions) | Excludes people who are likely to be in the excluded area | Places within the target area that the business does not serve |
Search-interest-only targeting no longer exists
Who “Presence” is the right setting for
Google itself names two cases in which “Presence” targeting may make more sense: businesses in sensitive industries with strict targeting restrictions, and advertisers who only want to reach users in specific regions and not people who are elsewhere but interested in the offer (Google Ads Help). The second case describes the typical local business. An electrician who takes jobs around Hildesheim gains little from a click in Cologne just because someone there searched for an electrician in Hildesheim – unless that person is about to move. For trade businesses, medical practices, restaurants with delivery, driving schools or shops with pickup, “Presence” is therefore usually the obvious choice.
The price is also stated in the help center: for most campaigns, impressions decrease when you do not use the default option (Google Ads Help). For a local business, that is intended. Fewer impressions among people who cannot hire the business anyway do not mean fewer inquiries, but fewer paid clicks with no prospect of a job. Whether the math works out is shown by the locations report. How location targeting contributes to the budget alongside keywords and conversion tracking is covered in our article on the ad budget for local businesses.
“Presence” does not mean “lives in the target area”. Google also counts people who are regularly there – and in a commuter region, that is a lot of people. In Lower Saxony, about 2.48 million people commuted across the boundary of their home municipality to work in 2024 (Landesamt für Statistik Niedersachsen). The state capital Hannover alone had 225,394 inbound commuters (Landesamt für Statistik Niedersachsen). Someone who lives in Hildesheim and works in Hannover is regularly present in both places. A Hildesheim campaign set to “Presence” can therefore reach that person while searching from the workplace, and conversely it reaches people from the surrounding area who work in Hildesheim during the day.
The microcensus shows how far these regular trips reach. For 29 percent of employees, the commute was 10 to under 25 kilometers, for 15 percent home and workplace were 25 to under 50 kilometers apart, and 5 percent had a commute of 50 kilometers or more (Destatis). The figures come from the first results for 2024 and cover employees who provided information about their commute. For your campaign, this means that even with “Presence”, clicks will come from people who live outside but work in your area. That is not a flaw in the setting; they may be exactly the customers who drop by at lunchtime or after work.
A few check questions help decide whether “Presence” suits your business. If most of them apply, the narrower option is the better baseline:
- The service is delivered locally – at the customer’s home, in the practice, in the shop or in the workshop.
- You decline jobs from outside the service area or only accept them with a travel surcharge.
- Your customers search at short notice, for example for an emergency service, a repair or an appointment in the next few days.
- A customer who would first have to move to the area is the exception for your offer.
How to switch the location option
The setting belongs to the individual campaign, not to the account. In the API, the field is called Campaign.geo_target_type_setting (Google Ads Help). If you run several search campaigns, check each one separately. Advanced location options apply to ads on the Search Network, the Display Network and Demand Gen campaigns; for hotel campaigns, Google uses “Presence” only (Google Ads Help). If an agency manages your campaigns, ask for the current setting of each campaign – the answer fits in one sentence. In a search campaign, proceed as follows:
- In the Campaigns menu, open the Campaigns overview and select the campaign.
- In the campaign settings, expand the Locations section and check which target locations and exclusions are set.
- Open the location options. For targeting, “Presence or interest” is selected by default.
- Choose the option for people in or regularly in your targeted locations (“Presence”).
- For exclusions, leave the default “Presence” setting in place.
- Save and note the date of the change so the later comparison in the report has a fixed reference point.
The switch does not change anything retroactively: clicks that came in before remain in the report. That is why it pays to record the starting point before saving – target locations, exclusions, location option, budget and bidding strategy. If possible, change nothing else in the campaign in the same week, neither keywords nor ad copy nor budget. Otherwise you will not be able to tell later which change had which effect.
Do not check your own ad by searching
Radius or location list?
There are two ways to define the target area itself. With a radius, you set a center point, usually the business address, and a distance. It must be at least 1 km (Google Ads Help). Google describes the radius as suitable for businesses whose service area is limited to a certain radius and for local businesses with a customer base nearby. A location list consists of cities, municipalities or postal codes; which levels are available depends on the country, and in Germany postal codes are among them. With bulk editing, you can add up to 1,000 geographic targets in one step (Google Ads Help).
Both approaches have limits worth knowing. A very small radius or a very small region can mean that ads are shown only occasionally or not at all, because such areas do not meet the targeting criteria (Google Ads Help). And a circle is a circle: it follows neither the Leine river nor the highway nor the routes your technicians actually drive. An example from the region: a 25-kilometer circle around central Hildesheim includes Sarstedt, Bad Salzdetfurth, Elze and Alfeld as well as the centers of Laatzen and Sehnde, while central Hannover lies just outside. Whether that matches your service area is a business question, not a technical one.
| Criterion | Radius | Location list (cities, municipalities, postal codes) |
|---|---|---|
| Shape of the area | Circle around a center point, radius at least 1 km | Any combination, including elongated areas or areas with gaps |
| Suits | Shops, practices and restaurants with customers around the location | Trades and service providers with fixed travel areas, delivery services |
| Reporting | The report shows the places where ads were served | The report shows performance per listed place, and individual places can be removed specifically |
| Maintenance | One value, quickly changed | More entries, but consistent with the business profile and location pages |
| Typical risk | The circle cuts into places you do not serve | New places are missing because the list is not kept up to date |
Use the service area in your business profile as a template
Core and outer areas can also be managed separately. Google suggests creating separate campaigns for regions with particularly strong performance so you can raise bids and budgets there, and a separate campaign for areas outside with the same keywords but lower bids (Google Ads Help). For a business in Hildesheim, that can mean one campaign for the city and the neighboring towns and a second one for the wider surrounding area. Google also recommends location-specific landing pages so that searchers from a given town land directly on the matching page. How to build such pages without them counting as doorway pages is explained in our article on location pages for the surrounding area; the places we have pages for are listed under Regions.
Reading the locations report
Whether clicks come from outside is shown in the Locations report. It becomes useful once campaigns with location targeting have been running for a while, and it has two views (Google Ads Help). The “Targeted locations” view shows performance by the targets you set, that is, per place on your list or per radius. The “Matched locations” view shows performance for the places where your ads appeared; these can be places where people were physically present or places they showed interest in. For the question of out-of-area clicks, the second view is the one that matters, because only it shows where delivery actually took place.
The “Most specific location” column shows the most detailed information available about the location used to match your ads (Google Ads Help). Rows marked “Unspecified” appear when Google could neither determine the location from the IP address nor find a place in the search query, or when a Google Maps search covered a large area with several cities. Two more notes from the help center prevent wrong conclusions: values below the country level do not necessarily add up to the campaign total, and the numbers differ from web analytics tools, partly because Google filters out invalid clicks and detects locations of interest that other sources cannot capture.
If you use location assets, that is, show your address in the ad, you also get the Distance report. It organizes performance by the distance between the location that triggered the ad and your closest business location (Google Ads Help). Google also explains why the report can show distances greater than the radius you set: the distance may be measured from a location the user was interested in rather than from where they physically were. Under “Presence or interest”, such rows are a clear sign of delivery based on interest.
For reporting through the API, Google distinguishes two views. The geographic view reports metrics either for the user’s actual physical location or for an area of interest and marks this in the location_type field with LOCATION_OF_PRESENCE or AREA_OF_INTEREST (Google Ads API). The user location view reports the physical location and indicates whether that location was targeted or not (Google Ads API). Both aggregate at the country level and return several rows per country as soon as other segments are added. For monthly reporting, this makes it possible to separate the share of clicks that comes from presence from the share that comes from interest.
For a before-and-after comparison in the interface, a short routine is enough:
- Choose two periods of equal length: one before and one after the date of the switch.
- In the “Matched locations” view, sort by clicks and mark every place that lies outside your service area.
- For these places, add up clicks, cost and conversions, separately for both periods.
- Note places inside the area with many clicks and no inquiries separately: that is a question of the ad or the landing page, not the location – more on this under conversion optimization.
- Record the result and the date in a note so the next check can pick up from there.
Setting exclusions deliberately
Exclusions complement the target area; they do not replace the location option. By default, Google only excludes people who are likely to be in the excluded locations; people outside them may still see your ads (Google Ads Help). Excluding Cologne therefore does not stop anyone in Bremen who searches for a business in Hildesheim, as long as targeting is set to “Presence or interest”. That is exactly what the “Presence” targeting option is for.
Exclusions make sense within the target area. Google names typical cases: cities or regions within a larger area that are not supplied or served, and special offers that do not apply everywhere (Google Ads Help). In a conflict, the exclusion wins: if a state is excluded and a city within it is targeted, the city is excluded. Locations that are not targeted at all do not need to be excluded – with one exception Google itself names: campaigns that target by interest while excluding by physical location. For lists: up to 1,000 locations can be excluded in one step, and the number of exclusions must not exceed the number of targeted locations (Google Ads Help).
IP address exclusions are a special case. You can exclude up to 500 IP addresses per campaign (Google Ads Help), for example your own company network, so that staff checking search results do not trigger impressions and clicks. For regions they are the wrong tool: Google explicitly advises excluding regions through location exclusions rather than IP addresses. That leaves three levers for where your ads appear, in a fixed order: first the location option, then the target area, and finally the exclusions.
Justified exceptions: when interest counts
The default is Google’s recommendation for a reason. According to the help center, advertisers in the travel, real estate and education verticals who switched from “Presence” to “Presence or interest” saw at least 5 percent more conversions in search campaigns (Google Ads Help, Google internal data 2022). The figure is based on Google’s internal global data from May 21 to June 1, 2022; it is not an independent survey and says nothing about other industries. It does fit a simple observation, though: for some offers, customers are not in the area at the time they make their decision.
People moving in and real estate
People moving to the region often search for an apartment, a real estate agent, movers or a daycare from their old home. Within Germany, a total of 1,004,000 moves across state borders were registered in 2024 (Destatis). Suitable pages are shown in our section on web design for real estate.
Vacation rentals and hosts
Guests plan and book from home. Overnight stays by domestic guests rose to 413.7 million in 2025 (Destatis), counted in establishments with at least ten beds, provisional result. For hotel campaigns, however, Google uses “Presence” only.
Education and courses
Continuing education, exam preparation or language courses attract participants from a wider area who research the course location in advance. Education is one of the three verticals for which Google cites the benefit of broad targeting.
Events and day-trip destinations
Anyone planning an outing, a celebration or a trade fair visit searches for the destination from home. For providers whose customers travel in for a date, interest in the region can be a useful signal.
If you have such an exception, you do not need to loosen your core campaign for it. A separate campaign with “Presence or interest”, its own budget and ad copy that names the place explicitly – so people from outside see at once what it is about – keeps things clearer. The campaign for regular customers stays on “Presence”. That way both groups can be assessed separately in the locations report, and an expensive click from far away does not eat into the budget for the emergency service around the corner.
A place name in the search term can be enough
Checking the effect of the switch
A switch without measurement is a guess. Before you change the option, save the starting point. Then change only the location option and not keywords or ads at the same time, otherwise the effect cannot be attributed. How long you measure depends on the number of clicks: a campaign with few clicks per week needs considerably longer than one with many before a difference is more than chance. There is no fixed period after which the result is settled.
- Save the starting point: export the “Matched locations” view for the period before the switch.
- Change only the location option and note the date.
- After a period of equal length, export the same view again.
- Compare clicks and cost from places outside the service area, as well as inquiries and calls from within it.
- If places outside remain visible, check the Distance report and exclusions; if inquiries drop noticeably, consider a separate campaign for the justified exception.
This check does not replace an evaluation of the inquiries themselves. If you track calls and forms as conversions, you can see whether less money is spent per inquiry after the switch – which is what matters in the end. Why ads and organic search complement each other is explained in our article Google Ads or SEO; which numbers Search Console provides on the organic side is covered in the article on Search Console data.
You pay for the click, not the postal code: if you do not check the location option, you are funding reach outside your own service area.
The location option is one of the few settings that can be changed in minutes and whose effect shows up in the report. We set up Google Ads campaigns for businesses in Hildesheim and the surrounding area so that target area, location option, business profile and location pages fit together, and we go through the locations report with you regularly. On the organic side, local SEO complements the ads. If you first want to know how your own campaign is set up today, write to us via the contact form.
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