Category: Google Ads
You run a business in Salisbury. You set your Google Ads to show “within 30 miles”, the clicks start coming in, and the phone stays quiet. Then you look a bit closer and find people clicking from Southampton, Bournemouth and Winchester, places your vans never go. Or worse, from someone at the other end of the country who once looked up a holiday cottage near Stonehenge.
Every one of those clicks costs you money, and Google is quite happy to take it.
Most of this comes down to three settings and one report:
- Change who counts as being “in” your area. For most local businesses that means switching from “Presence or interest” to “Presence”.
- Draw your area the way your customers actually live, using named towns or postcode districts rather than a big circle.
- Exclude the places that fall inside your area but that you don’t serve.
- Check the user location report every month to see where clicks are really coming from, and adjust.
If you only do the first one, you’ll probably still save money.
Why your ads show to people outside your area
When you choose a location in Google Ads, Google doesn’t just show your ads to people standing in it. By default it uses a setting called “Presence or interest”, which means your ads can show to:
- people who are in, or regularly in, the area you picked
- people anywhere else who have shown an interest in that area
Google decides someone has shown an interest from the words they search with, places they have recently been and the pages they have looked at. So if you target Salisbury and somebody in Manchester searches for “plumber Salisbury”, your ad can appear for them.
Sometimes that is exactly what you want. A daughter in Leeds looking for a carer for her mum in Laverstock is a genuine customer, wherever she happens to be sitting. But a lot of the time it means paying for people who are researching, daydreaming or simply in the wrong place.
It’s also worth knowing that Google has removed some of the choices it used to offer here. The old “Search interest” option has gone from Search campaigns, and location exclusions now only work on “Presence”. That means excluding Southampton stops your ads showing to people in Southampton, not to people elsewhere who are searching about it. If you set your account up a few years ago, it’s worth opening the settings again rather than assuming they still say what you chose.
Presence or “presence or interest”: which should a local business use?
Google recommends “Presence or interest” as the best option for most advertisers, and its help pages point to Google’s own figures showing more conversions for travel, property and education advertisers who made the switch. That may well be true for a national hotel chain. But it’s worth remembering who is giving the advice. As we said in our post on getting the most out of your PPC, Google earns money every time someone clicks your ad, so broader settings suit Google whether or not they suit you.
For a business in Salisbury, the honest answer depends on whether your customers come to you from far away or whether you go to them.
- If you go to the customer, as an electrician, cleaner, roofer or mobile mechanic does, we would start with “Presence”. Someone 40 miles away can’t use you, however interested they are.
- If local customers come to you, at a garage, hairdresser, dentist or gym, we would also start with “Presence”. Most people choose somewhere close to home or work.
- If customers come to you but plan from a distance, as they do for a hotel, B&B, wedding venue, restaurant or attraction, “Presence or interest” makes more sense. Visitors to Salisbury and Stonehenge often book weeks ahead from home.
- If you serve local people who have family elsewhere, such as care services, removals or estate agents, test both. Some of your best enquiries may come from relatives living outside the area.
If you’re not sure, start with “Presence”, run it for a month, and look at the numbers. It is much easier to widen a campaign that is working than to work out which of last month’s clicks were wasted.
Radius or named towns?
Once you’ve decided who counts, you need to decide what your area actually is. Google gives you two main ways to draw it.
A radius around your business
This is the one most people pick first, because it’s quick. You put in your postcode, type “20 miles” and you’re done.
The trouble is that a circle doesn’t care about roads, rivers or how people actually travel. Draw 30 miles around New Canal and you’ll cover Southampton, Bournemouth and Winchester, which are all big places with plenty of their own businesses doing exactly what you do. Your circle might also take in a large chunk of Salisbury Plain, where there are very few customers but you’re still in the auction for anyone passing through.
Radius targeting works well when your area genuinely is roughly round and you’re happy to go anywhere inside it. Google won’t let you go below 1 km, and very small areas may mean your ads only show now and then because there aren’t enough people in them.
Named towns or postcode districts
This takes ten minutes longer and is usually worth it. Instead of a circle, you add the specific towns, villages or postcode districts you serve.
For a business based in Salisbury that might look something like this:
- SP1 and SP2 for Salisbury itself and Wilton
- SP4 for Amesbury, Durrington and the villages around them
- SP5 for Downton, Alderbury and the villages to the south and east
- any further towns you’re happy to travel to, such as Andover or Romsey
Add them one at a time, or paste a list in using the bulk option, and check the map to make sure each one is the area you meant.
One thing to watch for here. Salisbury isn’t the only place with that name, and the others appear in the location search too. Always check that the location you’ve added says England, and not just “Salisbury”. It sounds obvious, but it is a very easy mistake to make when you’re setting up a campaign in a hurry.
The same goes for targeting a whole county. “Wiltshire” includes Swindon, which is over an hour’s drive from Salisbury. If you don’t work there, don’t pay to be seen there.
Use exclusions for the places you don’t serve
Exclusions are for the areas that fall inside your targeting but that you don’t want. If you’re happy with a radius but don’t want to compete in Southampton, add Southampton as an excluded location. If you serve most of the SP5 district but never go out as far as the New Forest edge, exclude the villages you don’t cover.
Remember that exclusions now only stop people who are in the excluded area. They won’t stop someone in Southampton seeing your ad if they search for something in Salisbury and your campaign is still set to “Presence or interest”. That is one more reason the first setting matters most.
Check where your clicks are really coming from
Settings are only half the job. The other half is checking what actually happened.
In Google Ads, the Locations report has two views:
- “Targeted locations” shows how each area you chose has performed.
- “Matched locations” shows the places your ads matched, which can be where the person was or the place they were interested in. This is where a lot of people get caught out. Someone in Bournemouth searching “electrician Salisbury” may show up here as Salisbury.
To see where people physically were, build a report by user location in the report editor. It takes a few minutes to set up, and once it’s saved you can come back to it every month.
When you have it, look for three things:
- Clicks and cost from places you don’t serve at all. These are straightforward to exclude.
- Areas that get plenty of clicks but very few calls or enquiries. You might lower the budget there, or remove them.
- Areas inside your patch that are doing better than you expected. Those could be worth a bigger share of the budget.
Have a look at the report editor before you change anything. It’s quite common to find a good number of clicks coming from towns nobody remembers adding.
If you track phone calls from your ads, and you should, put calls next to clicks in the same report. A town that sends you lots of clicks and no calls is telling you something.
A few other places spend can leak
Location settings belong to each campaign, not to your whole account. If you run more than one campaign, or you’ve added Performance Max at some point, check the location settings in every one. We often see an account where the main Search campaign is set up carefully and a newer campaign has been left on the defaults.
It also helps to link your Google Business Profile so your ads can show your address and how far away you are. People in Amesbury are more likely to click an ad that says you’re eight miles down the road than one that just says “Salisbury”.
What we’d do this week
If you only have half an hour:
- Open each campaign’s settings and check the location option. For most local service businesses, switch it to “Presence”.
- Look at the locations you’re targeting and check each one says England.
- Replace any large radius with the towns or postcode districts you actually serve.
- Run a user location report for the last 90 days and exclude anywhere that is costing you money and sending you nothing.
Then come back in a month and run the report again. Location settings aren’t something you set once and forget, especially as Google keeps changing the options.
If you’d rather someone else took a look, the friendly team at Spire Digital manage pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns for businesses in Salisbury and the surrounding area. Give us a call on 01722 320 500 and we’ll happily look over your location settings and tell you what we find.