Location Targeting in Google Ads: How to Stop Wasting Budget

Geographic targeting (also called location targeting) determines where Google shows your ads: an entire country, a province, a city or a radius around your address. Short answer: the gain does not come from picking an area, but from the setting underneath it. The default “presence or interest” also shows your ad to people outside your area who are only searching for something about it, and that costs money without producing leads. Set that option correctly and exclude the areas you do not serve anyway. In this guide you will read how to do exactly that, with a Belgian angle for Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia.

Planning your budget: calculate clicks, leads and cost per lead with the free Google Ads budget calculator.

What is geographic targeting in Google Ads?

Geographic targeting lets you decide in which regions your ads appear. You target one or more locations (countries, regions, cities, postal codes) or a radius around a point, for example 25 kilometres around your office. As Google’s documentation on location targeting describes, Google determines a user’s location based on things like IP address, GPS signal and the search query itself.

That sounds simple, but the setting underneath does the real work. For a Belgian B2B company, that is no detail. Do you only deliver in Flanders, or do you work nationally but in two languages? That difference determines what your targeting and your SEA campaign should look like. If you want to revisit the basics of setting things up, our guide on building a Google Ads campaign will help.

Location targeting works on two levels that you should not mix up: which areas you include, and how Google decides whether someone falls “inside” that area. That second level is exactly where most budget waste comes from.

What is the difference between presence and interest?

This is the setting most accounts leave configured incorrectly. Under “Location options”, Google gives you two choices for who gets to see your ad.

• Presence or interest (the default): people who are in your area, who are regularly in your area, or who show interest in it. That last part is the trap. Someone in Madrid searching for “office cleaning Brussels” falls into this group, even though they will never become your customer.
• Presence: only people who are actually in your area or who are there regularly. For most B2B companies with a physical service area, this is the right choice.

Google removed the separate option that let you reach exclusively people who show interest in your area. If you still want to speak to people searching for your area from elsewhere, for example for tourism or events, that is now only possible through the broader default setting “presence or interest”.

According to Google on search campaigns, the default is set to “presence or interest”. That means that if you change nothing, your ads also run for people far outside your market. For a service provider that only delivers in Belgium, that is wasted budget. Google promotes the broad setting as a best practice, but for B2B with a clearly defined service area, the risk of waste weighs heavier. Our stance is simple: set it to “presence” unless you have a very good reason not to.

The effect can be significant. If you send a fixed budget towards searchers who will never become customers, your effective cost per lead gets worse without you seeing it right away in the standard reports. The traffic looks healthy, but the leads lag behind.

How do you target countries, regions, cities or a radius?

Google lets you target at different levels, and you are allowed to combine them.

• Country: the broadest level. For anyone who only serves Belgium, “Belgium” is a logical starting point. If you work internationally, first read our guide on international Google Ads, because language, currency and competition differ strongly from country to country.
• Region or province: handy for approaching Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia separately. In Belgium that is often smarter than it seems, because the language region determines which ad copy and landing page you show.
• City or municipality: useful if your service area is concentrated around a few cities, for example Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels.
• Radius: a circle around an address, for example 30 kilometres around your location. Practical for companies with a local service area that does not neatly follow provincial borders.

A good approach for Belgium: split your campaigns or ad groups along the language border. A Dutch-language campaign for Flanders, a French-language one for Wallonia, and Brussels separately because it is bilingual. That way you keep your copy and bids under control per region instead of accepting an average across the whole country.

Why are location exclusions just as important?

Targeting determines where you do appear, exclusions determine where you definitely do not. People often forget that second part, even though it protects your budget directly.

Say you target Belgium but do not deliver in Wallonia because you have no French-language support. Then you explicitly exclude Wallonia, even though it falls within “Belgium”. Or you work nationally, but one specific region has been generating expensive clicks for months without a single enquiry. Exclude it and move that budget to what does work.

Exclusions also work at a fine-grained level. You can target a country and exclude individual cities or regions within it. Combine this with negative keywords and you cut away two sources of waste at once: irrelevant locations and irrelevant search terms. That is exactly the kind of clean-up work that, in a PPC account, makes the difference between an account that buys clicks and an account that delivers customers.

A practical habit: check the “Locations” report every month to see where your impressions and conversions really come from. You will often spot areas that generate costs without ever producing a lead. Those are your first candidates for exclusion.

How do you use bid adjustments per region?

Not every region is equally valuable. With bid adjustments per location, you pay more where the leads are better and less where they disappoint, without overhauling your entire campaign.

A bid adjustment is a percentage on top of your regular bid. If Antwerp consistently delivers cheap, high-quality leads, you can set for example +20 percent there to appear at the top more often. If another region performs poorly but you do not want to exclude it entirely, you set a negative adjustment of for example -30 percent. The channel stays open, but at a price that matches the value.

This only works if you measure conversions reliably. Without clean data you do not know which region really converts better, and you are guessing just as much as with a badly configured bidding strategy. So first read how to align your bidding strategy with your goal, because regional bid adjustments and your overall bidding logic need to work together.

For B2B this is more valuable than for a webshop. Your audience is small, your lead value is high, and a handful of qualified enquiries from the right region weighs heavier than a lot of cheap clicks from an area where you will not end up working anyway. If you want to extend that thinking to your whole lead approach, our guide on lead generation with Google Ads will help.

Frequently asked questions about geographic targeting

What is the best location setting for a B2B company in Belgium?

For most Belgian B2B companies with a physical or national service area, “presence” is the right setting. Your ads then run for people who are genuinely in your area, not for those who are merely searching for something about it. If you serve a specific language region, split your campaigns by region and language.

Does the default setting really waste budget?

Often it does. The default “presence or interest” also shows your ads to people outside your market who show interest in your area. For a service provider that only delivers locally or nationally, that budget goes to clicks that will never become customers. Check this setting first in every account.

Should I target by province or by city?

That depends on your service area. If you deliver across all of Flanders, region targeting is enough. If your work is concentrated around a few cities, city or radius targeting is more precise. The advantage of finer targeting is that you can tailor your copy, bid and landing page per area.

Can I target a region and exclude cities within it?

Yes. You can, for example, target all of Belgium and exclude Wallonia within it if you do not offer French-language service there. Targeting and exclusions work together, and the combination keeps your traffic tightly inside what you can actually serve.

How do I know whether my location targeting is working?

Look at the “Locations” report in your account for impressions, clicks and conversions per area. That shows you which regions deliver leads and which only generate costs. Based on that, you adjust your exclusions and bid adjustments, and you steer on cost per lead instead of click volume.

Ready to send your budget to the right regions?

Geographic targeting is one of the fastest ways to take waste out of a Google Ads account, but only if the setting under the hood is right. A wrongly set location option costs you months of budget without you noticing it straight away. At Customer Impact we work as a small team, honestly and focused on customers and revenue, not on pretty click figures. We set up your Google Ads so that your budget goes to qualified leads in your area. Want to know where you are losing budget today? Book your free intake