Check your location targeting setting first — the default includes people merely showing interest in your area, not only people in it. That single setting causes most of these, and it is one click.

On this page

• Which location targeting setting causes out-of-area leads?
• Should I use radius or postcode targeting?
• What goes wrong with postcode-level targeting?
• Could my service area definition itself be wrong?
• Why do some out-of-area leads survive correct targeting?

Which location targeting setting causes out-of-area leads?

Google offers a "presence" option and a "presence or interest" option. The broader one is the historical default and it will serve to someone in another state researching your city.

Set it to presence — people in or regularly in your targeted locations — and a large share of out-of-area leads disappears immediately.

Also set the exclusion side to presence, or you will fail to exclude people you meant to.

Should I use radius or postcode targeting?

Radius targeting overshoots. A radius drawn around a pin includes places you do not serve and excludes places you do, because service areas are not circles.

Postcode targeting is more precise and is what most trades should use. It maps to how the business actually thinks about coverage.

What goes wrong with postcode-level targeting?

From a deployment across 20 accounts and 60 campaigns:

• Same-digit foreign collisions are real. A postcode string can resolve to another country entirely. Constrain resolution to the right country explicitly.
• Some codes are flagged for removal. They resolve but cannot be targeted, and the failure is not obvious.
• Roughly a third of a raw postal list may have no targetable identifier at all — PO boxes, rural routes, military addresses. Expect the gap rather than treating it as an error.
• Never touch negative criteria while doing this. A code that exists as a pre-existing exclusion cannot simply be flipped positive, and it is usually excluded for a reason somebody had.

Could my service area definition itself be wrong?

Sometimes the targeting is correct and the service area definition is wrong — the office thinks in terms of one town, the account is set to another, and the boundary between them was never reconciled. On one network, a location's real catchment was centred on a different town from the one its campaigns were named after.

Check what the business actually serves against what the account targets before assuming the account is broken.

Why do some out-of-area leads survive correct targeting?

Some leakage survives all of this. People travel, people search from work about a job at home, phone location signals are imperfect. If you have set presence-only and precise geography, treat what is left as a cost of doing business and handle it at intake.

Related questions

Why am I getting fake leads and spam form fills from Google Ads, and how do I stop them?

Most spam form fills are bots harvesting public forms, not a Google Ads problem — but if they are counted as conversions they corrupt your bidding, which turns a nuisance into a real cost. Read the full answer.

Should I target ZIP codes or cities for my service area, and how big should the area be?

Postcodes, and as tight as your lead volume allows. Cities are administrative boundaries that rarely match a service area, and radius targeting overshoots in every direction at once. Read the full answer.

If I don't mark my LSA leads as booked or archived, will Google stop sending me leads?

Lead marking is a signal Google uses, and neglecting it degrades what you are sent over time. It is not an immediate switch, but it is the cheapest thing in your account and most contractors do not do it. Read the full answer.

Written by Usama Khan, who runs Google Ads for e-commerce brands and home-services companies at AdventurAds. Figures are from accounts under active management and are anonymised. Last reviewed 2026-08-26.