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Google Ads Location Targeting Audit: Where Your Budget Leaks by Geography

Location settings are configured once, when a campaign is built, and then rarely looked at again. That makes geography one of the most reliable places to find wasted spend in a Google Ads account, because the leaks are structural. They do not fix themselves, they do not show up in the metrics most people watch, and they compound quietly for as long as the campaign runs.

This audit takes about an hour and covers the seven checks that matter. Most accounts fail at least two of them.

1. Presence or interest: the setting almost nobody has checked

Every campaign has a location option buried in settings that decides who "in your target location" actually means. The default is "presence or interest", which includes people physically in your location and people who have shown interest in it.

Interest is a wide net. A user in another country researching a trip, comparing suppliers or reading about your city can qualify. For businesses that only serve customers physically in an area, a service company, a clinic, a restaurant group, that traffic is close to worthless, and the default happily buys it.

The check: open each campaign's location options and see which setting is selected. If your business serves people in a place rather than people interested in a place, it should be set to presence only. Then pull the user location report (not the matched location report) for the last 90 days to see where spend actually went. The gap between where you targeted and where clicks physically came from is often the single largest finding in this whole audit.

2. Spend outside your service area

With the location report open, sort by cost and look for anywhere you cannot actually serve. Common finds: spend in countries you do not ship to, clicks from cities hundreds of miles outside a service radius, and traffic from territories included by a careless "United Kingdom" target when the business only covers part of it.

Each line item looks small. Added up over a year, spend in unserviceable locations regularly reaches four or five figures in accounts that have never run this check.

3. Performance spread between locations

Now look at the locations you do serve, and compare them. Cost per conversion by region routinely varies by three to five times within the same campaign, and a single blended target hides all of it.

The question is not whether variation exists, it always does, but whether anyone has acted on it. Are the strong regions constrained by the same budget as the weak ones? Do bid adjustments exist, and were they set from data or left at zero? Under Smart Bidding, location bid adjustments are largely ignored on conversion-based strategies, so the real lever is structure: a market performing very differently may deserve its own campaign with its own target and budget. If every location shares one campaign, one budget and one target, geography is being averaged rather than managed.

4. Overlapping targets competing with each other

Accounts that grew over time often accumulate overlapping geography. A national campaign runs alongside a London campaign, or a radius target sits inside a county target in a different campaign. Google resolves the overlap by its own rules, and the result is that you cannot tell which strategy is winning where, and reporting by campaign quietly stops meaning anything geographic.

The check: list every campaign's targets side by side and look for containment. Overlaps should be deliberate, with exclusions carving the smaller area out of the larger campaign, not accidental.

5. Exclusions that no longer make sense, or never existed

Exclusions deserve their own pass. Two failure modes are common. Accounts with no exclusions at all, meaning nothing was ever done about the known-bad geographies in the data. And accounts with stale exclusions inherited from years ago: a region excluded during a stock problem in 2023, a country blocked before a shipping lane opened, a city excluded on a hunch nobody can remember.

Every exclusion should have a reason someone can state. If nobody can, retest it, because an unjustified exclusion is invisible lost revenue rather than visible wasted spend, which is exactly why it survives.

6. Radius targets set by guesswork

Radius targeting looks precise and usually is not. GPS-level accuracy is only part of how Google places users; IP location and Wi-Fi signals can put someone tens of miles from where they actually are, which matters a great deal for a 10-mile radius. Small radii also throttle volume enough to starve Smart Bidding of data.

The check: for any radius target, compare the radius against where converting customers actually come from in your own sales data, and check the campaign still has enough conversion volume to optimise on. A slightly wider area with location exclusions around it is often more controllable than a tight circle.

7. Distance and ad schedule interaction

Finally, cross-reference geography with time. Multi-region campaigns spanning time zones inherit the account time zone for schedules, so a schedule built for one market runs at the wrong hours in another. UK accounts targeting Australia on a 9-to-5 schedule are a recurring, genuinely expensive version of this.

Reading the results

Score the audit honestly. Presence-only set correctly, spend confined to serviceable areas, performance differences acted on structurally, no accidental overlap, exclusions with reasons, radii sanity-checked against sales data, schedules aligned to local time. Seven passes means geography is managed. Two or more failures means the account has been paying a geography tax, and unlike most optimisation work, fixing these is fast: settings changes and exclusions, not rebuilds.

The reason this audit pays so well is the reason it gets skipped. Location settings sit outside the daily optimisation loop, so no amount of routine account management ever touches them. They only get fixed when someone deliberately goes looking, which is what an audit is for.

If you would rather have a second pair of eyes on it, this is one of the checks included in a full independent Google Ads audit, alongside tracking, structure, bidding and spend.