You set up your Google Ads to target your service area. You chose the city, or drew a radius on the map, or selected the zip codes you serve. And you assumed that from that point, only people in your service area would see your ads.
That assumption is wrong, and it is costing you money.
Geographic waste is one of the most consistent findings when I audit a local electrical contractor’s account. Clicks coming from towns the electrician does not serve. Calls from people 45 minutes outside the stated radius. Sometimes spend in an entirely different region of the state, or occasionally out of state.
The electrician did not cause this by doing anything wrong. It is caused by a default setting that most people never examine, and by the way Google interprets location targeting in ways that differ from what the interface implies.
The Setting Most Electricians Never Examine
When you set up location targeting in Google Ads, there is a subsection called “Location options” (sometimes labeled differently depending on when the account was created). Inside it is a choice that controls who actually sees your ads.
The two options are:
“Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.” This shows ads to people who are physically present in your area, or who regularly spend time there. It is the closest thing to “people who are actually in your service area.”
“Presence or interest: People in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your targeted locations.” This is the default for most account setups. It also shows ads to people who have shown interest in your location, which can include people planning a trip, someone reading a local news article, someone who searched for something in your city while sitting somewhere else entirely.
The difference is enormous for a local service business. “Interest” casts a wide net that includes many people who have no realistic chance of becoming your customer.
Most accounts are set to “Presence or interest” because it is the default, and because automated setup tools choose it automatically. Nobody changed it. Nobody knew to.
What the Data Looks Like When This Is Happening
In a properly tracked account, you can pull a geographic performance report in Google Ads. This shows where your clicks are coming from, broken down by location. When I pull this report for electrical contractors, I regularly find:
A meaningful percentage of clicks (often 10 to 25 percent) coming from cities or towns that are clearly outside the intended service area.
Some spend in entirely different parts of the state, or in a neighboring state, typically in small amounts per location but adding up collectively.
Clicks from locations the electrician has never heard of, which often prompts a “where even is that?” reaction from the business owner.
This geographic leakage is direct waste. Every dollar going to someone outside the service area is a dollar that cannot produce a booked job.
Radius Targeting Is Not a Hard Wall
A common misconception is that setting a 20-mile radius around your location creates a strict boundary. Ads show inside the circle, nothing outside. This is not how it works.
The radius is a targeting input, not an impenetrable filter. Google’s systems use probabilistic signals to determine whether someone is in a location. Those signals include the device’s GPS, IP address, past location history, and search behavior. Each of these has imprecision.
An IP address, for instance, is often geolocated to the nearest major city or to the headquarters of the internet service provider, which may not accurately reflect where the person is. A person on a mobile device near the edge of your radius may be read as inside or outside based on GPS accuracy at that moment.
The practical effect: even with correct settings, a small amount of spend outside your targeted area is normal. The goal is not to eliminate this entirely, which is not possible, but to avoid the structural causes of large-scale geographic waste.
ZIP Code Targeting as an Alternative
Instead of a radius, some electricians do better with ZIP code targeting. Instead of drawing a circle on a map, you list the specific ZIP codes you serve. This gives you exact control over which areas are included and excludes everything else.
ZIP code targeting is more work to set up and maintain, especially if you serve a large number of codes. But for electricians with oddly shaped service areas, borders defined by terrain or political boundaries rather than distance, or situations where you serve some parts of a county but not others, ZIP code targeting is more precise.
The trade-off: ZIP codes have cleaner geographic boundaries but you have to actively maintain the list as your service area changes. A radius requires less maintenance but is less precise.
Negative Location Targeting
In addition to adjusting the “presence or interest” setting and choosing between radius or ZIP code, negative location targeting is a useful layer of control.
Negative locations are places you explicitly tell Google never to show your ads. If you are based in a city and there is an adjacent city you do not serve, you can add that city as a negative location. This creates an explicit exclusion on top of the general targeting.
Negative location targeting is particularly useful for areas just outside your radius that keep generating clicks due to the imprecision described above. You can specifically exclude those locations as an additional filter.
The Service-Area Ad Extension
Separate from campaign targeting, the location ad extension and service-area information in your ads communicate your coverage to people before they click. An ad that explicitly mentions your city or region (such as “Serving Greater Denver and Surrounding Areas”) helps users self-select. Someone in a town you do not serve, who sees that your ad specifies a different area, is less likely to click.
This is not a substitute for correct targeting settings, but it is an additional layer of waste reduction. Callers who do not read the ad and call anyway are still a problem, but fewer of them click in the first place when the ad is specific about service area.
How Much This Is Costing You
The amount of wasted spend from geographic issues varies by account, but in my experience auditing electrical contractor accounts, geographic waste is rarely negligible.
In a market where cost per click for electrical keywords runs 8 to 15 dollars, 15 percent of clicks going to out-of-area searchers means spending 120 to 225 dollars per thousand clicks on people who will never call you for a job. In a busy account spending 2,000 dollars per month, that is 200 to 400 dollars per month in pure waste.
Over a year, that is money that could have gone to reaching the right people.
Getting This Fixed
Fixing geographic targeting for an electrical contractor is a straightforward part of a broader account audit. It usually takes less than an hour to identify the extent of the problem and correct the settings. The challenge is knowing where to look and what the correct configuration should be.
If you want to find out how much of your current spend is going outside your service area, reach out at adnanagic.com/#contact.
Part of the Google Ads for Electricians series, written for electricians who want their ad budget to bring real jobs, not junk calls.
Related Posts
- A Google Ads Audit for Electricians: What Is Quietly Wasting Your Budget
- Why Your Google Ads Bring Calls but Not the Jobs You Want
- Why Your Competitor Shows Up First and You Do Not
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