In Google Ads, 'Presence' shows your ads to people who are in, or regularly in, your target locations. 'Presence or interest', the default, adds people anywhere in the world who have shown interest in those locations, for example by searching for them. If your business can only serve people who are physically in the target area, such as a local service, a retailer that ships to one country, or a lead-gen business licensed in one region, switch to Presence. If you sell travel, relocation or anything bought before arriving, keep Presence or interest.

The setting sits under Campaign settings > Locations > Location options, collapsed by default, so accounts often run on the default for years without anyone choosing it. The rest of this guide covers how to measure what it costs, when interest targeting is right, and how location exclusions interact with it.

What each option does

Google Ads offers two options for included locations:

  • Presence or interest (recommended by Google, and the default): people in, regularly in, or who have shown interest in your included locations. Interest comes from signals such as searches that name the location, past visits, and content consumed about the place.
  • Presence: people in or regularly in your included locations. 'Regularly in' covers people who live or work there, so a commuter who lives outside the area and works inside it can still see your ads at home.

The difference shows most on queries that contain a place name. Say an Amsterdam plumber targets Amsterdam with Presence or interest. A person in Rotterdam who searches 'plumber amsterdam' for a relative can see the ad, and so can a person in Spain who searched for Amsterdam flats last week and now searches 'emergency plumber'. With Presence, neither sees it.

The same two options exist on Performance Max and most other campaign types, set per campaign, and Demand Gen campaigns have them too since Google added location options there. Check your account for the campaign types you run. A change applies to the live campaign straight away. If you are unsure, change one campaign first and compare its user location mix and CPA a month later.

How to check whether it is leaking budget

  1. Open the campaign and go to Insights and reports > When and where your ads showed, then the Matched locations tab.
  2. Matched locations mixes where people physically were with locations they showed interest in. To separate the two, build the same table in Report editor and add the Location type dimension, which splits physical location from location of interest.
  3. Set the date range to the last 90 days and sort by Cost.
  4. Filter or scan for countries and regions outside your target. Add Conversions and Cost / conv. columns.
  5. Compare the CPA and conversion rate of out-of-area traffic with in-area traffic, and check with sales whether any out-of-area conversions turned into customers.

Say a lead-gen campaign spends EUR 20,000 a month targeting Germany. The user location view shows EUR 1,400 a month from Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, at a CPA of EUR 190 against EUR 75 inside Germany, and the sales team confirms the business cannot serve those leads. Switching to Presence removes that EUR 1,400, and Smart Bidding spends the budget on German traffic instead.

The report does not always show the full cost. Some traffic has no precise user location and appears under a broader region or as unknown. Treat the figure as a lower bound.

When Presence or interest is the right choice

Interest targeting exists for businesses whose buyers are elsewhere when they buy:

  • Hotels, holiday rentals, tours and attractions: the guest books from home.
  • Relocation, international schools, real estate sold to buyers moving in, and language courses tied to a destination.
  • Event tickets for a venue that draws visitors from other regions.
  • Gifts and deliveries sent to a place, such as flowers delivered in Paris ordered from London.

For these, a common setup is a separate campaign for people outside the area searching about it, with its own budget and target, so its CPA does not blend into the local campaign's numbers. The two campaigns then use Presence and Presence or interest respectively, with exclusions keeping them apart.

Location exclusions

Exclusions have their own option under the same Location options panel:

  • Presence (recommended, and the default): excludes people in your excluded locations.
  • Presence or interest: excludes people in, or who have shown interest in, your excluded locations.

Keep exclusions on Presence in almost every case. With Presence or interest, excluding a city also excludes anyone in your target area who searched about that city, which can block ordinary queries that happen to name it.

Useful exclusions for a national campaign: areas you do not deliver to, such as islands or overseas territories, and, for a multi-country account, the other countries already covered by their own campaigns.

Other location settings to check at the same time

  • Radius targeting set wider than your service area, visible in the targeted locations map.
  • Location bid adjustments on campaigns running Smart Bidding, which ignores them. They look like control and do nothing.
  • Regional performance: in the Matched locations view, filtered to physical location, regions with a CPA twice the campaign average for three months running are candidates for a separate campaign with its own target, or for exclusion if you cannot serve them profitably.

These checks sit in section 4 of the Google Ads audit checklist. Location is also one of the levers in how to lower CPA without cutting volume.

Where GoodLads fits

GoodLads does not check the location option setting, so run this check by hand. On paid plans, its Geography ideas read each campaign's performance by place, counting only where people physically were, and can propose a location bid adjustment or exclusion, delivered as a Google Ads experiment on a copy of the campaign. What its free audit covers is the rest of the wasted-spend picture from the last 30 days: search terms that spent with no conversions, campaigns spending without recording value, and where the budget is concentrated. You can see what a report looks like on the demo, and the search terms guide covers the other large leak.

The case for opening a paused German campaign for the six search terms that return 3,26 ROAS inside a German campaign that blends to 1,43.
A geography idea: six German terms return 3,26 ROAS inside a campaign that blends to 1,43. They get their own campaign, created paused, so nothing spends until you start it. From the demo account

Questions people ask

Should I use Presence or Presence or interest in Google Ads?

Use Presence if you can only serve people physically in your target area. Use Presence or interest for travel, relocation and other businesses whose buyers research the location from elsewhere.

Why are my Google Ads showing in other countries?

The most common reason is the location option 'Presence or interest', the default, which includes people outside your target who have shown interest in it. Switch to Presence under Campaign settings > Locations > Location options.

How do I see where my Google Ads clicks come from?

Open Insights and reports > When and where your ads showed and the Matched locations tab. It mixes physical locations with locations of interest, so to see only where people physically were, add the Location type dimension in Report editor.

Does changing the location option reset Smart Bidding learning?

The auctions the campaign enters change, so expect CPA to move for a week or so while Smart Bidding adjusts. Make the change on its own, with no target change in the same week, so you can read its effect.