Your ads are showing to people outside your service area because of a default setting. Google Ads targets "presence or interest" unless you change it. That means people physically in your area, plus people who've searched for, viewed or shown interest in it. A person in another state who keeps looking up your town can see your ad and click it.
The account isn't broken, and you're not being cheated. The setting is just wider than most owners assume. You can tighten it in a few minutes, and the fix only works if you check where your clicks are actually coming from first.
Why a default setting reaches so far
When you pick a location, say a city or a radius around your shop, Google offers two ways to read it. The wide way is presence or interest: people in the area, regularly in it, or showing interest in it. The narrow way is presence only: people who are actually in or regularly in the area.
Google explains the options in its location targeting guide. The wide version exists because it helps some advertisers, like a hotel that wants people planning a trip. For a plumber, a dentist or a gym, it mostly adds clicks from people who can't use what you sell.
Those clicks cost the same as any other. And a form fill from three states away still looks like a conversion in your report, so the account can look healthy while part of the budget goes to people who were never going to call.
How to see where your ads are really showing
Look before you change anything. The location report shows where clicks and conversions came from, and it takes a couple of minutes.
- In Google Ads, open the locations view for your campaign and look at the report on where people were when they saw your ad.
- Sort by spend. Note any city, region or country you don't serve that's taking real budget.
- Check whether those places produced leads you could actually work. A few stray clicks are noise. A pattern is a leak.
- Check the campaign's location options and see whether it's set to presence or interest.
Google's page on how location targeting works covers the settings if you want the details behind each choice.
How to tighten it
Once you know where the waste is, there are three changes, in the order most worth making:
- Switch the campaign's location option to presence only, so the ad shows to people who are in or regularly in your area.
- Set your locations to the places you genuinely serve. A radius around a single address often reaches further than you'd guess, so a list of towns or postal codes is usually safer.
- Add locations you don't serve as exclusions, so a neighbouring city that keeps showing up stops getting your budget.
Don't swing too far the other way. If you serve people who travel in, such as a venue, a clinic or a tourist business, the wide setting may be right for you. The test is who becomes a customer, not how tidy the map looks.
Why this matters more for some businesses
Distance decides whether the click is worth anything for a senior living community, where families research close to home, and for a property business tied to one market. We cover both in how to advertise a senior living community and how to advertise a real estate business locally.
If your account is paying for out-of-area traffic, it's rarely the only leak. An account audit looks at location settings alongside keywords, tracking and where the money actually goes. Our Google Ads management work locks geography to the real service area and checks the location report to confirm the ads are showing there. Bolo is based in Philadelphia, but the same setting applies to a business anywhere.