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.

On this page

• Why is postcode targeting better than city targeting?
• How big should my service area be?
• Which presence setting should I use for location targeting?
• What goes wrong with postcode-level targeting?
• Should I check my service area definition first?
• Should I use location bid adjustments?

Why is postcode targeting better than city targeting?

They map to how the business actually thinks about coverage — the streets you will drive to. A city boundary includes areas you avoid and excludes suburbs you serve, and neither is visible in the interface.

How big should my service area be?

Start from drive time, not distance. A job 20 minutes away on a motorway is closer than one 8 miles away through traffic, and your crews already know which is which.

Then let volume decide the rest. Tight enough that the leads are jobs you actually want, wide enough to produce enough conversions for the bidder to steer — roughly 15 a month as a working floor. If tight targeting starves the account, widen deliberately and price the extra travel.

Which presence setting should I use for location targeting?

The broader targeting option serves to people merely showing interest in your area. Set targeting to presence — people in or regularly in your locations — and set the exclusion side the same way.

This single setting causes most out-of-area leads.

What goes wrong with postcode-level targeting?

From a deployment across 20 accounts and 60 campaigns:

• Constrain resolution to the right country. Same-digit codes collide internationally — one resolved to Germany.
• Some codes are flagged for removal. They resolve but cannot be targeted, and fail unhelpfully.
• Roughly a third of a raw postal list may have no targetable identifier — PO boxes, rural routes, military. Expect it.
• Never touch negative criteria in the same pass. A code sitting as an existing exclusion cannot be flipped positive, and it is usually excluded deliberately.
• On newer campaigns, an unrelated declaration setting can block location edits entirely until it is set. Not a targeting issue, but it will stop the work.

Should I check my service area definition first?

Reconcile what the business serves against what the account targets. On one network a location's real catchment centred on a different town from the one its campaigns were named after — the targeting was "wrong" only relative to a name nobody had checked.

Should I use location bid adjustments?

Do not layer location bid adjustments on top under Smart Bidding. Include or exclude. The bidder handles the rest, and adjustments mostly give you the illusion of control.

Related questions

My Google Ads location targeting is set to my service area, but I keep getting leads from outside it. Why, and how do I stop it?

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. Read the full answer.

How do I work out what target ROAS to actually set for my store?

Derive it from contribution margin and your fixed per-order costs, not from a benchmark. The formula everyone uses — 1 ÷ gross margin — is a breakeven floor, not a target, and it ignores the per-order costs that decide whether an order is actually worth having. Read the full answer.

I added a target ROAS and the campaign stopped spending. Should I lower the target?

Whether to lower the target depends entirely on when the campaign stopped spending. A campaign that strangled within about 24 hours of the target being added and one that drifted into it over weeks look identical in the interface, and the fixes are opposite — lowering the target is the wrong move in one of them. 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.