Location targeting

Showing ads where you cannot serve customers wastes every click there. Location targeting, and the option that says whether interest counts, decides who is in your market.

Mistakes here are common and quiet: a country picked by mistake, or interest targeting that pulls in clicks from abroad.

1. Open a campaign, then Settings, then Locations.
2. Expand Location options to choose Presence or Presence or interest.
3. Add excluded locations where needed.
4. Open Insights and reports, then When and where ads showed, and read the location tabs to see where clicks actually came from.

A Paris restaurant targets Paris with presence or interest. Clicks arrive from tourists planning trips months ahead and from people abroad reading about Paris. Switching to presence, plus a radius, keeps the ads for people nearby.

• Leaving the default presence or interest for a local business.
• Targeting a whole country when you serve one region.
• Picking a neighbouring country by mistake in the list.

The audit checks Oppy runs on this, each with its own page.

• Buying clicks from people who are not in the country
• Places taking money and returning nothing
• A country targeted in a language it does not speak

• Presence or interest: The default location option: ads can show to people in your locations and to people interested in them, wherever they are.
• Radius targeting: Targeting a circle around an address, such as 10 km around a shop.
• Campaign: The level of a Google Ads account that holds the budget, the bid strategy, the networks, the locations and the languages.