Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 3 - Location settings

Why the heck are my Google ads showing outside my target location? Oh, if I had a nickel… Let's go Inside Google Ads to answer your burning questions about location settings.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales, bringing you more than a decade of Google Ads experience. I worked at Google for six years and now I'm a marketing coach, consultant, teacher, content creator, speaker, author and podcast host. I've worked with more than 10,000 Google Ads accounts, showing business owners and marketers how to make more money from paid ads, and now I'm here to do the same for you every week for free.

The way each episode works is this. I pick three of your burning questions to answer in detail from the hundreds of comments I receive on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads. You can find all those links in the show description, and if you want a chance to get your problem solved in a future episode, drop a comment on any of my social media.

Now to our first Google Ads question about location settings. Nasim on TikTok says, I changed my location targeting from Presence or Interest to just Presence, but I'm still receiving calls from outside my target location.

Well, first thing is first. Nasim, you did the right thing. Presence versus Presence or Interest. What is that? When you're setting up your campaign, or editing your campaign settings, under the location settings, there's this hidden option called Presence and Presence or Interest.

Presence means, “I only want to show ads to people who are present in my target location.” Presence or Interest means, “I want to show ads to people who are present in my target location or interested in my target location.” And for most businesses, we don't want that. We only want people who are in the target location.

So that is always the first place to check in your campaign level settings. Check your location settings, and make sure you're only targeting people who are in your target location, present there. 

So, Nasim changed that. Still receiving calls from outside the target location? Why is that? A few different reasons.

The most likely culprit is your Google Business Profile. You mentioned that you're receiving phone calls and one way to do that is by having Conversion Actions tracked through your Google Business Profile and the information from there. 

Now, with the Google Business Profile, you don't actually get to choose the location targeting of your business profile, right? It comes up organically on Search or on Maps. Often, you'll see a lot of calls coming in via your Google Business Profile from people who are not currently in your target location. 

The first thing to check is, are these calls coming specifically from Google Ads or could they be coming organically from your Google Business Profile? Even if they are coming from Google Ads, are you using a format like Performance Max, which relies on your Google Business Profile to create that Local aspect and therefore can also cause this to happen? That's the most likely culprit. 

A few other things I recommend you check. First, you want to go to your Google Analytics and check the user locations for people coming from Google Ads. That will tell you if there's just some kind of issue going on or even when you've set your location targeting in a certain way in Google Ads, if the traffic you're actually getting is coming from different places. Google Analytics is a good place to go to verify. It's also how you may find out you have this Presence or Interest issue in one or more of your campaigns. 

Another thing to check that most people don't know about is your Matched Locations report in Google Ads. You want to go to - this is the new interface - Insights and Reports, When and Where Ads Showed, Matched Locations. This is different from the Locations report, which you'll now find under Audiences, Keywords, and Content, Locations.

So the difference is that Locations is where you can set your location targeting, your targeted locations, but the Matched Locations report, under Insights and Reports, is where your ads actually showed, what locations matched to the locations you're targeting. Kind of like how a Search Terms report shows you which search terms matched to the keywords you selected. So you want to check those Matched Locations, perhaps down to the city level if needed. You can go even further down than that to help show you if you're unintentionally matching to some locations you didn't mean to.

I know it's super confusing, but hey, if Google Ads were easy, I wouldn't have a whole business and podcast around it.

By the way, if you're new to the Inside Google Ads podcast, welcome, and you may not know that you can get the transcript of this episode and future episodes delivered to your inbox each week. Simply follow the link in this episode description to sign up. It's completely free. 

This next question also comes from TikTok. Felix asks how to structure an ad account with 30 locations. Common question, with no one right answer. Let's dive in. 

With the exception of Demand Gen, location is set at the campaign level. Demand Gen, by the way, does a lot of things differently so we will probably have an episode about Demand Gen in the future.

Putting Demand Gen aside, if it's Search or PMax, Shopping or Video, whatever it might be, location is set at the campaign level. So, if you want to target 30 different locations, you will need a separate campaign for each location in order to target each location separately.

Most businesses that I've worked with also have a separate budget for each of their locations, so that works well because if you have a separate campaign, it means each campaign will have its own budget, and each campaign can also have its own bidding goals.

It's likely that some locations are more profitable than others. There might be one location that is brand new and you want to put a lot more brand awareness focus behind that. 

You can also choose separate bid strategies and if you're using bidding targets, separate bidding targets for each campaign, so a campaign for each location works well.

You probably don't want to separate accounts for each location because it's helpful to just have them on one account so they can share data, share the same conversion tracking setup on your website, share the same audience, customer data, etc.

You can do that by having 30 separate accounts all linked under one MCC, but it's just simpler to have it all in one account. All in one account means you are going to have one billing profile, one time zone, one currency. 

So, with your 30 locations, if they are across a bunch of different time zones, and you want to see reporting in your time zone, that could be a reason to split them out.

If they have to have completely separate billing, like charged to different credit cards for example, you can't do that if they're all in the same account – so if it's like, different franchise owners own each one then you would want to separate accounts with separate billing.

And then currency. Maybe you're in…I don't know Europe, and so some is Pounds and some is Euros and you want to be billed in the currency in which you’re spending - again, you can only have one payment currency per account. 

These are just some reasons why you might want to put different locations into different accounts. If they're within different countries or running different currencies, different billing can be helpful.

A kind of in-between solution you can do is potentially location grouping. So maybe you have like, your East Coast locations and your West Coast locations, so you have two separate accounts for those. Or maybe it's still one account, but you have three locations that are all in the greater New York area and three locations in the greater Chicago area. You could have one campaign for the New York area locations combined together, another campaign for the Chicago area locations together. It can be helpful for a campaign like Performance Max where the more consolidation, the better, but it's really ultimately up to you.

So, how to structure an ad account with multiple locations? There are lots of ways to do it. I would say the most common solution is to have one Google Ads account and have a different campaign for each location.

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For our final location question today (I love this feature), Just Me and You on TikTok asks, what is the optimal location radius for a physical business?

First of all, did you know you can do radius location targeting in Google Aads? It's under the Advanced Options. So when you go to your locations, it'll show All Countries and Territories, then it'll say the country are in, so like, United States, then you’ll go to Advanced Settings, open the dialogue window where you can choose Radius, in miles or kilometers, whatever is most helpful to you. And as you pick a Radius around a location, it'll show you visually on a map how small or large that is. This is really great for local businesses, for service businesses, right? How far you want to go for service calls. 

And users won't see what location you chose. Let’s say you work from your house, but you don't want people showing up at your house, that's okay, you can still enter your home address there, just for radius targeting purposes to create that kind of service area.

So, what is the optimal location radius? Wherever you like to do business! You can't do a negative radius, I double-checked that recently on a call and I was like, darn, that would be so cool, but you can exclude certain areas if needed.

Let's say you do a radius, but kind of partway through your radius, there's a river, and you just don't like to work on the other side of the river because the bridge has a lot of traffic. You can exclude the city on the other side of the river, or postal code, or use a radius and exclude certain parts of it. 

Radius targeting is very helpful for physical business and the optimal radius is however far you want to do business. 

Alternatively, if it’s a store where people come to you, you know in your area how far people are likely to travel to come to your business. The radius for a Manhattan-based business, for example, would probably be very different from that radius for a Houston-based business. 

So why are your Google Ads showing in places you don't want them to?

First off, always check your location targeting settings and, repeat after me, ensure it's set to Presence, not Presence or Interest. Other things to help you ensure you're targeting the correct locations are radius targeting, location exclusions, and verify what Google Ads is telling you by checking your location reporting in Google Analytics, and checking your Matched Locations report in Google Ads.

If you're still stumped by a Google Ads issue that you just can't figure out, that's exactly why I offer one hour Google Ads coaching calls. You can check my availability and book a call directly with me by visiting my website. The link is in the episode description.

I make a living helping business owners and marketers get better results from Google Ads and I'd love to do the same for you, one on one, so book a call with me.

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next week Inside Google Ads.

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