Google Ads Location Targeting: Stop Paying For The Wrong Postcodes

Ethan, Director·29 May 2026·5 min read

When we audit a struggling Google Ads account, the first thing we check isn't the keywords or the ads. It's the map. More trades budgets are quietly bled dry by location settings than by anything else, because the defaults are built for Google's revenue, not yours.

The default setting that costs you

Google's standard location option includes people who have shown "interest" in your area, not just people in it. For a plumber that means someone researching their mum's boiler from 200 miles away can click your ad. The fix takes one click: target presence only, so you pay for people physically in your patch. It's the single most common fix we make in rescued accounts.

Radius targeting lies a little

A 15 mile radius sounds precise, but radiuses don't respect geography. They happily include the far side of an estuary you'd never cross for a job, or a city centre where parking costs more than the call-out. Postcode and town-level targeting takes longer to set up and is worth every minute, because you can exclude the areas that look close on a map and cost a fortune in a van.

Exclusions are half the job

Targeting the right areas is only half of it. The other half is telling Google where not to show you: neighbouring cities that generate calls you always turn down, areas dominated by a competitor you can't out-price, and the postcodes where your kind of work just doesn't exist. Every excluded junk click is budget flowing back to the streets you actually want.

Then check where the money really went

The location report shows where your clicks actually happened, not where you think you targeted. In almost every account we take over, there's at least one town eating 20% of the budget while producing nothing. Ten minutes in that report once a month protects more money than most bid tweaks ever will.

If you suspect your budget is leaking into postcodes you'll never work in, our free audit finds it. No dashboards, no jargon, just where the money went and what we'd change.