Why do my Google Ads show in cities I do not serve?
Short answer
Usually because of a location setting. Google Ads can show your ads to people who are physically in your target area, or also to people who have only shown interest in it, such as someone in Riverside searching for a plumber in San Diego. A target area drawn too wide, or an imperfect location guess, adds more.
Your Google Ads usually show in cities you don’t serve because the campaign is set to reach people who showed interest in your target area as well as people who are physically in it. The next most common cause is a target area drawn wider than your trucks travel. Both are settings you can read for yourself, and neither means the account is broken.
Being in a place versus being interested in it
Google Ads treats these as different audiences, and a campaign can be set to reach one or both.
| Who the ad can reach | Hypothetical example | Do you want the click? |
|---|---|---|
| People physically in your target area | A homeowner in Chula Vista searching “water heater repair” | Yes |
| People somewhere else who showed interest in your target area | Someone in Riverside searching “plumber San Diego” | Sometimes. It could be a landlord with a rental in Clairemont, or someone planning a move |
Google works out interest from signals such as a place name typed into the search. For a hotel that wider audience is useful. For a company that only earns money when a truck reaches the address, it’s mostly cost. Google has reworded these options over the years, so I won’t quote the labels. Open the campaign’s location settings, find the location options, and read which audience is selected.
A target area wider than your service area
The second cause is the shape you drew. A radius around a shop in Kearny Mesa that is wide enough to reach Escondido also takes in Lakeside and Imperial Beach, whether or not you drive there. Choosing “San Diego” from Google’s list has a similar trap, because the list offers the city, the county and a larger region under similar names. If you serve some cities and not others, it’s cleaner to target those cities or ZIP codes by name and to exclude the places you won’t go. Excluding a place is a separate setting from not targeting it, and it’s the stronger of the two.
The service area on your Google Business Profile has no say in this. That setting belongs to your profile, and it doesn’t limit where a search campaign runs.
Google’s location guess isn’t exact
Some stray impressions will remain whatever you do. Google estimates where a person is from the signals a device and its internet connection give off, and that estimate is sometimes wrong. A device just outside the county line can be placed inside it. Tight settings shrink the problem. They don’t bring it to zero.
How to check where your ads really showed
Google Ads reports where the people who saw and clicked your ads were located, separately from the areas you targeted. Compare the two lists. If the first contains cities that aren’t in the second, the interest setting is the likely reason.
Then read the search terms report, which lists what people typed before they clicked. Searches that name a city you don’t serve can be blocked with negative keywords, which are words that stop an ad from showing. The same report is where most other wasted spend turns up, including the searches behind junk leads from Google Ads.
Check each ad type separately
Fixing one campaign doesn’t fix the others, because every ad type keeps its own location settings. Search ads are set campaign by campaign. Local Services Ads (LSA), the pay-per-lead listings at the top of the page, keep their own list of service areas. Automated campaign types have location settings of their own as well. When I take over an account I check every one against a plain list of the cities the company will drive to, because a single loose campaign is enough to send calls from the wrong end of the county.