# Location targeting

URL: https://tnb-tech.com/en/glossary/location-targeting/

## What is location targeting?

Location targeting decides where your ads can appear: a country, a region, a town, a postcode, or a radius drawn around an address. Google offers two settings — people who are in or regularly in the chosen place, and people who are in it, regularly in it, or show interest in it, for example by typing the town’s name into a search.

**Example**

A cleaning company in Ruse draws a 30 km radius around its address and leaves the default setting, people in or interested in the area. On €400 of spend, the user location report shows 26% of clicks coming from outside the region: some of those people typed the town’s name into a search, the rest saw the ad because of an interest signal. If a quarter of the budget buys enquiries nobody can serve, that is about €104 a month.

Switching to presence only cuts most of them out. The next month, at the same €0.625 a click, there are 500 clicks instead of 640, spend is €312.50 instead of €400, and enquiries hold at 21 against 22. Cost per enquiry falls from €18.18 to €14.88.

**Why it matters for a business**

Location targeting is the first setting that spends money unnoticed. A shop that delivers nationwide and a repair service that works in one town need different borders, and the mistake is a quiet one: the campaign runs, clicks arrive, and some of them could never become customers.

Three details are worth knowing. The default setting is the wider of the two and includes people who merely show interest in the area. Exclusions work the same way and are used for places you do not serve. And Google infers location from device signals and from the search itself, so the boundary is an estimate rather than a line on a map.

For a business with an address, targeting works alongside the Google Business Profile and the local pages on the site — advertising adds to them rather than replacing them. If you are paying for clicks outside your area, look at cost per lead by location; the gap is usually visible.

**What to ask**

- Which setting is on — presence, or presence and interest?
- What does the user location report show for the last three months?
- Are there excluded areas where we do not serve customers?
- Does the offer change in districts where distance adds cost?We set the boundaries to the area you actually serve when configuring Google Ads.

- Services: [Google Ads](https://tnb-tech.com/en/services/google-ads/)
- Glossary: https://tnb-tech.com/en/glossary/