Key facts
- Google Ads location targeting lets you set a radius in miles or kilometers around an address, or draw a custom shape, instead of only choosing a whole city or region.
- Local Services Ads, a separate Google product from standard Search campaigns, defines its own service area during setup and is built specifically around a business's real coverage area.
- A mobile trade that sets its radius wider than it is actually willing to drive ends up paying for clicks it has to turn away once the caller gives an address.
- A destination business, like a specialty dental practice or a med spa offering a procedure not every clinic performs, often has customers who already travel across a city or region for the visit.
- The Locations report inside Google Ads Insights and reports breaks down clicks and conversions by city, region, and postal code, showing where your paying customers are actually coming from rather than where you assumed.
When a Radius Around Your Location Wins
A radius makes sense for any business that shows up at the customer's door or has a hard limit on how far it will travel. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, and cleaners all have a real edge to their service area, past which a job simply is not worth the drive time and gas. Targeting the whole city in these cases means paying for clicks from people you will end up turning down.
Setting the radius honestly, based on how far you are actually willing to send a truck, keeps your budget spent on leads you can accept. It also tends to lower your cost per click, since a tighter, more relevant audience usually earns a better Quality Score than a broad one padded with clicks that never convert.
If you operate from more than one location, radius targeting also stops two of your own locations from bidding against each other for the same searcher, which can happen when two city-wide campaigns overlap in the middle.
When the Whole City Is the Right Target
Some businesses are worth the drive. A patient looking for a specific dental implant specialist, a med spa offering a treatment other clinics do not, or a boutique gym with a method people specifically seek out, are examples of a business people will cross a city for. Shrinking the targeting to a tight radius in these cases just cuts off customers who were always willing to travel.
The same logic applies to any service that gets delivered remotely or shipped rather than performed in person at a fixed radius, since the physical distance between the business and the customer stops being the limiting factor.
A newer or smaller brand without name recognition also usually needs the wider reach of city-wide targeting simply to find enough search volume to work with, since a very tight radius around a small business can leave too few searches to spend a reasonable budget against.
What Actually Decides the Radius
Three things settle this: how far you will genuinely travel or how far a customer will genuinely travel to you, how many competitors are already targeting your city with a similar budget, and how much budget you have to spread across a wider area without going thin.
A small budget spread across a whole large city usually gets outbid or shown so rarely that it barely moves the needle. That same budget, focused tightly on a neighborhood or a handful of postal codes, can dominate the searches that matter most to a local trade.
For multi-location businesses, set the radius per location and review it separately, since one location's ideal radius rarely matches another's, especially if the locations sit in cities of different sizes or have different levels of local competition.
Check the Data Before You Set It
Open the Locations report under Insights and reports in Google Ads, and make sure it is set to show where your customers are, not just where the person searching happened to be standing. That distinction matters, since someone searching your business name while traveling should not count the same as someone searching for your service near their home.
Look at conversions by city, region, and postal code over the last several months. If conversions cluster tightly around your address, a radius is probably already the right shape, maybe tighter than what you currently have set. If conversions are spread evenly across the whole metro area, city-wide targeting is doing its job and a radius would just cut off business.
Our pricing for Google Ads work sits at 10% of ad spend, never less than $600 a month, and getting your location targeting right is usually one of the first levers we pull on a new account, since it often changes cost per lead more than any single keyword decision does.
Related questions
Start with the honest limit of how far you will actually send a technician or accept a job, in minutes of drive time or miles, rather than picking a round number. Then check the Locations report in Google Ads after a few weeks to see if conversions are landing inside that radius or further out, and adjust from there.
Yes. Google Ads location targeting supports excluding specific areas the same way it supports including them, so you can target a whole city and carve out a zone you do not want to serve, whether that is because of distance, low intent, or any other reason specific to your business.
Often, but not always. A tighter radius tends to raise relevance and can improve Quality Score, which helps cost per click, but if very few people search your terms inside that small radius, you may end up bidding against the same handful of competitors for limited volume, which can push cost per click back up.
Not necessarily. Local Services Ads defines its own service area separately during setup, and it is worth reviewing on its own terms rather than copying whatever radius you use in a standard Search campaign, since the two products can perform differently even when covering the same geography.
A budget spread across too wide an area often shows up too rarely to compete for the searches that matter, since a small daily budget divided across a large population is thin everywhere rather than strong anywhere. Narrowing the radius, even if it means covering less ground, usually produces more consistent results for a limited budget.
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