A maintenance company in Curitiba, Brazil, receives an inquiry from someone working in São Paulo. Before marking the inquiry as outside its service area, the company needs one piece of information: which facility needs the repair? If the São Paulo headquarters is hiring a contractor for its Curitiba branch, the campaign may have reached precisely the right buyer.
This hypothetical example illustrates a paid search decision: limit ads based on the searcher's likely location, or let people elsewhere find the business when they show interest in the area it serves. Here's how to make that decision for Google Ads Search campaigns.
Identify the address that determines whether you can deliver
Describe your coverage in one sentence your team can verify. For example: “We provide on-site maintenance for equipment installed in Curitiba and São José dos Pinhais.” That statement identifies the detail that matters for evaluating acquisition: the city where the equipment is installed. Headquarters, billing addresses, and phone area codes can all point to different cities.
Now consider a business renting meeting rooms by the hour to professionals who need space that day. The searcher's proximity is likely to be more useful here. Even so, an assistant in another city might book a room for a colleague. How common and valuable those bookings are should inform any decision to narrow the campaign's reach.
How Presence differs from Presence or Interest
In the Google Ads location options, Presence covers people likely to be in or regularly in a selected area. Presence or Interest, the default for Search, also includes people who have expressed interest in that area. A search mentioning the city can provide that signal.
Selecting Curitiba and allowing interest keeps Curitiba as the geographic target. That differs from adding São Paulo as a second market: in the first case, interest in Curitiba can make a search eligible. With either setting, the platform estimates location. It cannot certify where someone is at the moment of a click or where they want the service delivered.
Consider testing Presence when being in the area is a useful indication that someone can use the offer. Consider Presence or Interest when buyers can plan from elsewhere, such as booking ahead, sourcing services for a branch, or renting equipment for an out-of-town event. If the business delivers remotely nationwide, first examine why the campaign is limited to the city where its headquarters is located.
Investigate out-of-area inquiries
Start with one campaign, one offer, and one date range. Check the included locations, active location option, and exclusions. Then read the ad and landing page from the perspective of someone in another city. Can they tell where the service is available before completing the form? Clearly stating the service area saves people from having to ask whether their site is covered.
The Google Ads geographic performance report offers two views. Targeted locations group performance by the areas selected in the campaign. Matched locations show areas associated with ad delivery, which can reflect presence or interest. A row for Curitiba therefore cannot establish that every inquiry in that row was for a Curitiba address.
Compare the report with information tied to fulfillment. In the maintenance example, the form could ask, “What city is the equipment in?” For paid media analysis, aggregate counts by campaign are enough: requests inside the service area, requests outside it, and requests with no city recorded. Keep the last group separate so that missing information does not become grounds for an exclusion.
If the city is right but the requested service falls outside the company's portfolio, investigate the query that triggered the ad. Our guide to Google Ads negative keywords addresses that specific problem.
Compare two settings using the same measure
Consider two hypothetical campaign periods, each with R$1,200 in ad spend. In the first, the company received 24 requests: 12 inside its service area, eight outside, and four with an unknown location. In the second, it received 16 requests: 12 inside, two outside, and two with an unknown location.
Cost per request rose from R$50 to R$75. Cost per confirmed in-area request held steady at R$100 in both periods: R$1,200 divided by 12. Known out-of-area requests declined, but these figures show no increase in the volume of confirmed in-area demand. What matters depends on the decision at hand: reducing unsuitable inquiries or acquiring more customers in the region.
Before changing the setting, record your hypothesis and choose a primary measure. At review time, check whether the budget, offer, landing page, and classification criteria remained comparable. Making the city field mandatory, for example, changes the share of requests with unknown locations. Comparing two periods alone cannot isolate the effect of targeting.
What to ask for in your next campaign review
Ask to see three things together: the locations your business can serve, the location option active in each campaign, and the amount spent per request within your service area. If few requests have been classified, improving the information you collect about service delivery may be a better first step than narrowing your reach.
Leads to Growth's paid media management service connects campaign settings to the demand your business can serve. If you advertise across several markets and cannot tell whether inquiries are coming in for the right service areas, request a campaign assessment.
