You’ve put in the time and work to set up your Google Ads campaigns, and they are running great. You are receiving leads, and at some point, you start noticing that more and more form submissions on your site are from outside your area. You offer roofing services on the East Coast, and somehow, now you are receiving Google-sourced conversions out of LA. Some of the leads are legitimate, just not possible for you to perform the actual work. This continues, and you are not entirely sure what the issue is because you’ve selected exactly the correct area in your location setting with the radius or communities that you serve. So, what are the next steps, and is there any way to resolve this issue? The answer is yes, and these solutions will get you back on the right track.
How to stop Google Ads conversions coming from outside the service area?
STEP1
Although you are 100% positive you set up the location targeting correctly, just double-check it. Sometimes, since the original setting defaults to the United States, you may have simply not deleted it. Since you are here reading the article, it is very unlikely, but just in case, take a second look at the location.
You can verify it under Campaigns > Audiences, Keywords and Content > Locations
STEP 2
Even if the location looks good, you definitely still don’t want to skip this step. When creating Google ads, this area in the locations section always defaults to the setting that will cause you all of the problems. Make sure you go back to your Campaign Settings (gear on the right site of the screen or right next to your campaign in the campaign view) and adjust this to Presence: People in or regularly in your included locations. To see this section you have to expand the Location options dropdown.
If this selection was incorrect and set to include interest, you will continuously see out of area submissions. This is the most common cause of out of the area submissions.
STEP 3
Set up dayparting on your ads. Don’t run your ads overnight and just stick with 5AM till 10 or 11PM time blocks each day. There is a good chance that the form submissions are spam and come from overseas which is in an opposite time zone. This helps tremendously with not just form submits, but also untargeted clicks.
You can find the schedule adjustment setting under Campaigns > Audiences, keywords and content > Ad schedule. It is best practice to set this up for all your campaigns.
These techniques work very well and should resolve any location targeting issues. If you still see visits and conversions from other US locations, you may try this last option but it should be unnecessary if the first three steps were covered.
STEP 4
This step is time consuming and should not be necessary but if you are still seeing spam and out of the area visits, this may help you minimize it. Start by looking at visits from other countries and exclude these countries in your locations settings under Campaigns > Audiences, Keywords and Content > Locations. This is a tab named “Location Exclusions”. If you are seeing consistent form fills from the same area, exclude this area as well. This might be a good start. It’s time consuming to exclude all communities you are not serving so starting with the most unwanted visitor locations is the best approach.
Google Ads still continue to bring conversions for our clients and we frequently recommend them even for the top SEO performers. This approach helps protect your advertising space and as long as your ROI is favorable, adding Google Ads to the marketing mix is a good decision. If you have any questions about digital advertising or looking to update your overall presence with a new website, please contact our team.
