Google Ads campaigns start on a location setting called “Presence or interest”. It can show your ads to people in your area, people who are often there and people who have only shown interest in it. Switching every campaign to “Presence” is the first fix. Then check your Locations report, your town names and your radius.
You get a lead from a town you've never worked in. Or a call from someone three hours away who wants a quote next week. You set the ads up for your area, so how did they get there?
A disclosure first: Osprey runs Google Ads for contractors, so we have a stake in this. How the settings work comes from Google's own help pages, and we link them so you can read them yourself. Where something is our opinion, we say so.
Why Are Your Ads Showing to People Outside Your Area?
Most of the time it's the default. Google's page on location options says: “By default, location targeting includes both physical locations and locations of interest.” In your campaign settings, that default is called Presence or interest. Google describes it as a way to “reach people in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in your targeted locations”.
Showing interest doesn't take much. Google's page on geographic targeting lists the signals it uses, including:
- Words in a search that name a place
- Past searches that named a place
- “A person's past physical locations”
- Searches on Google Maps
- A custom location someone set for their Google search results
- The content of a website where your ad shows
So someone in Calgary who looked up Kelowna last month could be a match for your Kelowna campaign. Google's own example is a bakery in Paris. Its ads “can show to people located or regularly in Paris, or to people who have expressed interest in Paris bakeries (now or in the past).”
Two other reasons, from the same pages
- Nearby areas. When you target a place, Google says “we may also show your ad to customers in nearby, closely related areas”. Its example is ads aimed at Portland also showing in Portland's suburbs.
- Location is a best guess. Google uses a device's location when it can, and an IP address a lot of the time. A phone on mobile data may be placed by the carrier's IP address. Google says “100% accuracy is not guaranteed in every situation.”
You can't switch those two off. The default setting you can.
How Do You Check Where Your Clicks Came From?
Look before you change anything. You want to know how big the problem is, so you can tell later whether the fix worked.
- Open the Locations report. In Google Ads, go to Locations in the Campaigns menu. Google's page on geographic performance describes two views. “Targeted locations” shows results by the places you picked. “Matched locations” shows results by “the locations where your ads appeared”.
- Pick Matched locations and sort by cost. Set the dates to the last 90 days so one odd week doesn't fool you. Look for towns you don't serve near the top.
- Read it carefully. Google says a matched location “could be users' physical locations or locations of interest.” A Calgary row might be a person in Calgary, or a person somewhere else who searched about Calgary. Rows marked “Unspecified” are ones Google couldn't place.
- Check your search terms. In the Search terms report, look for the names of towns you don't work in. “Roofer Penticton” in a Vernon campaign is probably a click you didn't want.
- Check your real leads. This step is our addition, and it's the one we trust most. Pull your last 20 to 30 leads from the ads and write down the job address for each. If a real share are outside your area, the report was right.
How Do You Fix It?
Work through these in order. The first one does most of the work.
1. Switch every campaign to Presence
Open the campaign's settings, then Locations, then Location options. Pick Presence. Google's page describes it as reaching “people in or regularly in your targeted locations”.
Do it in every campaign. Each campaign has its own setting, so fixing one doesn't fix the rest. Google's FAQ lists Performance Max among the campaign types with these location settings, so check those too.
Expect fewer impressions. Google says “most campaigns will notice a decrease in impressions when switching away from the default targeting option.” That's the point. You want fewer people seeing ads for a job you can't drive to.
2. Check the town names you picked
Town names repeat. There's a Vernon in BC and a Vernon in Texas. Google's tip on its location targeting page: “If you're entering a city name, add the country name as well.” Its example is not selling cowboy hats in Paris, France when you meant Paris, Texas. Open the map in your location settings and make sure the shaded area is the one you work in.
3. Size your radius to the jobs you take
Google lists radius targeting as a good fit for “a local business whose customer base is within a radius around the business”. It gives two limits. The smallest radius it allows is 1 km. And “if you target a small radius or very small location, your ads might only show intermittently or not at all.”
Our view: a circle doesn't follow highways or lakes. It can take in places that look close on the map and are a long drive in the truck. A list of the towns you serve can fit better. Build it from where last year's jobs came from, not where you'd like them to come from.
4. Exclude the pockets you don't serve
If there's a town inside your area that you skip, exclude it. Google's exclusion page says “exclusion takes priority” when an area is both targeted and excluded. Exclusions use Presence by default, so they block people located in those places.
5. Add other towns as negative keywords
The location setting decides who can see your ad. It doesn't stop someone in your area from searching for a roofer in another town. If your search terms show town names you don't serve, add them as negative keywords. That one is our fix, not a Google rule, and it works well alongside the switch to Presence.
6. Put your towns in the ad and on the page
Say where you work in the ad and on the page it sends people to. Google suggests location-specific landing pages, so people “don't have to spend time searching for the information that's relevant to them.” In our experience, a visitor who reads the towns you serve before calling will often tell you up front that they're too far away. We don't send ad clicks to a home page for the same reason. A page for the service and the area does more of the sorting. Here's how we build service area pages.
Not sure where your ad money goes? Book a free 20-minute call. Share your screen with Google Ads open, and we'll go through your location settings and your Locations report together, even if someone else runs your ads.
Book a Free Ads Check →Is Presence or Interest Ever the Right Choice?
Sometimes. Google recommends it, and its case is a number. Advertisers who switched to it “in the Travel, Real Estate, and Education verticals find +5% more conversions on Search campaigns.” That's Google's internal data from May 21 to June 1, 2022. None of those are trades.
Google also says when Presence makes sense: when “you only want to target users in specific locations and not users who may be in other locations but are still interested in your product or service.” That fits most contractors. Somebody has to drive to the house.
There are real exceptions. A cabin owner in Calgary might need a roof fixed in Vernon. A family moving to Kelowna might want a bathroom quote before they arrive. Adult kids hire contractors for their parents from out of town. If those jobs matter to you, here's how we'd handle it:
- Keep your main campaigns on Presence.
- Run a second, small campaign on Presence or interest, with keywords that all name your towns, like “roofer vernon”.
- Judge it on booked jobs after 60 to 90 days, and turn it off if the leads don't close.
If you use AI Max for Search, Google also has an ad group setting called Locations of interest. It matches people searching about the places you pick. We'd test it the same way, on booked jobs. Our guide to AI Max for contractors covers the rest of that campaign type.
What Should You Expect After You Switch?
- Fewer impressions. Google says so, as above. Probably fewer clicks too.
- A few stray clicks still. Location is a best guess, and nearby areas can still show up. A handful of rows outside your area doesn't mean the fix failed.
- Time to settle. Our view: give it a few weeks before you judge it, and change one thing at a time so you know what worked.
- The real test is jobs. Compare booked jobs and the cost per booked job for a month before and a month after. A cheap click from a town you don't serve was never cheap. Our guide to tracking marketing ROI covers how to count them.
If the out-of-town leads stop but the junk doesn't, the problem may be somewhere else. Bots and sales pitches through your form can look like leads too. Here's how to check for form spam.
How This Guide Was Put Together
This guide is built from five Google Ads Help pages: advanced location options, targeting geographic locations, targeting ads to locations, excluding locations and measuring geographic performance, plus Google's page on refining location targeting. We read them all on November 11, 2026. Google moves its menus around, so the names in your account may differ a little.
We didn't run a test for this post, so you won't find a wasted-spend percentage here. The town examples, the lead check and the second-campaign test are ours, and we've marked our opinions.