Are you tired of burning through your Google Ads budget without seeing a real return?
If you are running a local, regional, or national business, you need more than just great ad copy. You need to show your ads to the right people in the right places.
Think about it.
Showing a plumbing ad for a Nottingham-based business to someone searching in Derby? That is a surefire way to torch your marketing budget. You will get zero return.
This is where location targeting comes into play.
When you set it up correctly, it ensures your marketing budget is spent effectively. It drives highly relevant traffic straight to your site.
Today, I am going to show you everything you need to know about setting up and optimising location targeting for your Google Ads campaigns.
Let’s dive in.
What is Location Targeting?
Location targeting is a core feature within Google Ads. It allows you to specify the exact geographic areas where you want your ads to appear.
By selecting specific locations, your ads only show to users who are physically located in those areas, or who are showing active interest in them.
But here is the part most marketers miss: location exclusions.
You can (and should) use exclusions to ensure your ads explicitly do not show in specific areas. Exclusions are vital. They protect your budget and prevent audience overlap if you run multiple campaigns for different regional branches of your business.
Why is Location Targeting So Important?
At its core, location targeting is about one thing: budget efficiency.
It all comes down to your ROI. Even if your business operates within a 20-mile radius, your advertising will probably cover 4 to 8 major locations where you are not actually based.
Think about it.
Would you ring a Nottingham plumber if you live in Derby or Leicester?
No, of course not. Because of this, your advertising spend is not efficiently spent if you are paying for clicks in neighbouring cities that will never convert.
By narrowing down your audience geographically, you can:
- Make your copy hyper-relevant: You can mention their specific city or county right in the ad. You should also use local STD codes in your ads and have those same local numbers appear on your site, making you look local everywhere.
- Stop wasting money: You avoid paying for clicks that will never convert into actual business.
- Scale what works: You can analyse performance by region and allocate more budget to the areas that drive the most profitable leads.
- Track the right metrics: You can monitor location-specific metrics like Average CPC (which reflects the cost of living and competition in an area) and local CTRs.
What Location Targeting Options Do We Have in the UK?
Google Ads offers a massive amount of flexibility. Depending on your business model, you can target the UK by:
- Country: The entire United Kingdom.
- Region/County: E.g., East Midlands, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire.
- City/Town: E.g., Nottingham, Derby, Leicester.
- Postcode: Highly specific targeting down to the postcode prefix (e.g., NG1, NG2) or the full postcode.
- Radius (Proximity): A custom distance around your exact business location (e.g., a 15-mile radius around your physical store).
But what if you could take those locations and automatically inject them straight into your marketing?
Discover ALD (Advanced Location Dynamics).
This tool is an absolute game changer. ALD is a unique software that links a user’s exact geographic location and dynamically inserts their specific town or city directly into your ad copy and your website.
Not only does the town dynamically appear in your Google Ads, but when you click the ad, it dynamically inserts a local STD code number for Derby, Leicester, Loughborough, or any other location you want to target.
Hey presto, you look local anywhere you want business from. ALD creates online offices or depots anywhere, and the results are instant!
The result? You look like a local business to every single searcher, no matter where they are in the country. Locality is a massive buying motive, and ALD lets you harness it at scale.
The numbers speak for themselves. By delivering a truly hyper-local experience, ALD can boost your Click-Through Rates by up to 123%, skyrocket your conversion rates by up to 400%, and slash your cost per lead by up to 65%.
The Game Changer: Smart Bidding (And the August 2026 Update)
Back in the day, we relied heavily on manual location bid adjustments.
If London was converting well, you might manually increase your bids by 20% for that city, and decrease them by 10% for a less profitable town.
Those days are over.
Once Smart Bidding (like Target CPA or Target ROAS) took over, everything changed. Smart Bidding algorithms automatically factor in a user's location at the exact time of the auction to hit your performance goals.
As a result, your manual location bid adjustments are now largely ignored by the algorithm. (The only exception is setting a -100% adjustment to exclude a location entirely).
This dynamic just got even stricter.
With Google’s August 2026 bidding update, campaigns that are limited by budget while using Target CPA or Target ROAS will now strictly adhere to your set bid targets. The algorithm is no longer given the freedom to overperform or explore.
Because the system now relies entirely on your specific targets and historical data, setting up your targeting correctly from day one is more crucial than ever.
You Need Bulletproof Conversion Tracking
Because Smart Bidding algorithms rely entirely on the data you feed them, I cannot overstate this point:
You must have bulletproof, detailed conversion tracking.
If your conversion tracking is broken, you are in trouble. If you are counting duplicate leads, or tracking low-value actions (like simple page views) as equal to high-value form submissions, the algorithm will optimise for the wrong things in the wrong locations.
To make your location data useful, your Google Ads account must clearly understand exactly what a valuable lead looks like. Feed it good data, and it will find you good customers.
The Secret Sauce: Keep Your Setup Granular
Here is my top recommendation for you today.
Set up your location targeting as granularly and as detailed as possible. Instead of just targeting the "United Kingdom," break your targeting down by major cities, counties, or key regions.
Including granular locations doesn't restrict your reach. But it does split your data out in the backend.
This is huge.
It allows you to look at your location reports and make informed, macro-level business decisions based on real lead generation ROI and ROAS data. You might discover that leads from Birmingham close at twice the rate of leads from Manchester.
Once you know that, you can restructure your campaigns and win.
How to Marry Location Data with Real-Life Value
To truly take your location targeting to the next level, you have to look beyond the Google Ads dashboard.
Google can tell you where a lead came from. But it doesn't always know if that lead turned into a massive contract or a total dead end.
That is why you need to invest in tools like Air Insight.
AirInsight marries the location targeting data within Google Ads with your real-life lead generation and quote values. By connecting offline sales data with your PPC location metrics, you find out exactly which areas perform best in terms of actual revenue, not just click volume.
Then? You confidently push more ad spend towards the regions that actively grow your bottom line.
Conclusion
Location targeting isn't just a setting you check off when launching a campaign. It is a fundamental growth strategy. Stop paying for clicks outside your profitable zones. Fix your tracking, get granular with your locations, and connect your offline sales data to your ad account.
Do you want more revenue out of your Google Ads campaigns?
Simply fill in your details, and we will arrange a meeting to get a FREE audit of your Google Ads account, including your location targeting organised for you.
