Most local service businesses set their Google Ads radius to cover everywhere they would say yes to, which is not the same as everywhere they can make money. The result is a steady trickle of expensive calls from an hour away that either get turned down or get taken at a loss. Your radius is a profitability decision, and there is one location setting underneath it that is wrong in the majority of accounts I audit.
Fix the location setting before you touch the radius
Google Ads has two location options and the default is the loose one. Presence or interest shows your ads to people who are physically in your area and to people anywhere who show interest in it. Presence shows them only to people actually in the area.
For a business that has to drive to the job, presence is almost always what you want. The default is why a plumber targeting Fort Collins gets calls from a landlord in Phoenix and from somebody researching a move to Windsor next spring. Change that setting first, because tightening a radius while the loose setting is on fixes very little.
While you are in there, add exclusions for the places you will never serve. Exclusions are stronger than hoping the radius holds.
Radius is a drive time decision, not a mileage decision
A twenty five mile radius drawn around a shop near Harmony and Timberline looks tidy on the map and tells you almost nothing useful. Twenty five miles north is open road. Twenty five miles south in afternoon traffic on I-25 is a different business entirely.
Think in terms of the longest drive that still leaves the job profitable, at the time of day your crews actually travel. For most trades operating out of Fort Collins or Loveland, that is comfortable through Windsor, Greeley, and Berthoud, and gets questionable somewhere around Longmont unless the ticket is large.
The honest number depends on two things: what an average job is worth and whether a truck can fit two of them in a day at that distance. If a drive to Thornton means one job instead of two, that job needs to be worth roughly double to break even.
How to actually set it
- Switch the location option from presence or interest to presence.
- Pull your last ninety days of jobs and sort them by city. You are looking for where the work actually came from, not where you hoped it would.
- Work out your average job value, and the one for the far cities separately. They are often different, and sometimes the far ones are bigger.
- Target by city or ZIP code rather than drawing a circle. Cities match how people describe where they live and let you treat Greeley differently from Erie.
- Set the core area at full bid, the edge cities at a lower bid adjustment, and exclude everything past the edge.
- Check the geographic report every two weeks for the first two months. It will show you where Google is actually finding people, which is rarely where you assumed.
City and ZIP targeting beats a radius for almost every business that charges by the job. A circle cuts neighborhoods in half and puts you in Erie and Lafayette without you ever deciding to be there.
What to do about the good leads just outside the line
Some of the best jobs come from the places you decided not to advertise in. That is not a reason to widen the radius. It is a reason to have a minimum job size for those areas and to quote them accordingly.
Two practical moves. Put a trip charge or a stated minimum on anything past your core area, so the work that comes in from there is work worth doing. And give your office a simple script for the far call, because turning someone down badly costs you the referral they would have made anyway.
If the far area keeps producing good work, that is a signal to consider real presence there eventually, which is a different project than a wider circle. It usually means a physical address, because map pack visibility runs on proximity. That distinction is covered in why service area pages do not rank.
Bid adjustments, and why the algorithm will fight you
If you use smart bidding, location bid adjustments are mostly ignored. The system optimizes toward conversions wherever it finds them cheapest, and the cheapest form fill is often the furthest, least serious one.
Which means your controls are different. Separate campaigns by geography if the economics genuinely differ, feed the system a conversion that means something closer to a booked job rather than any form submission, and use exclusions instead of adjustments. This is the same failure pattern described in why Google Ads lead quality drops the moment you scale.
If you are running Local Services Ads alongside this, note that its service area is set separately and does not inherit anything from your Google Ads setup. Businesses routinely tighten one and leave the other wide open. Which of the two to prioritize is covered in Local Services Ads or Google Ads.
How this fits with the rest of your local visibility
Paid targeting and organic reach are different problems and should not be set to match each other. Your ads can and should be narrower than your service area page says, because every mile costs money in ads and costs nothing organically.
Meanwhile your Google Business Profile service area can list the full territory you will travel to. That listing does not help you rank in those cities, but it does tell a person reading your profile that you will come to them. Treat ads as the paid edge of a broader local visibility plan rather than the whole of it.
Common questions
Why am I getting calls from Denver when I only target Fort Collins?
Almost always the presence or interest setting, which shows your ads to people anywhere who search in a way that suggests interest in your area. Switch to presence only. If the calls continue, check whether a campaign has a separate location setting you did not change.
Is it better to target by radius or by city?
City or ZIP code, for almost every business that sends a truck. Cities let you bid differently on Greeley than on Louisville and let you exclude cleanly. A radius is reasonable only when your service area genuinely is a circle with no traffic or terrain in it.
Should my ad radius match my Google Business Profile service area?
No, and they do different jobs. Your profile service area is free to be generous because it costs you nothing. Your ad targeting should be as tight as the economics demand, because every extra city spends real money.
How do I know if a far away city is worth advertising in?
Run the geographic report and look at cost per lead and close rate by city, not just lead volume. A city with cheap leads that never close is the most expensive line in the account. Give it at least a few weeks of data before you decide.
Most of my clients run out of one or two locations and serve a strip of the Front Range from Fort Collins down to the south Denver suburbs, which makes this exact tradeoff a monthly conversation. If you want another set of eyes on the targeting, the local service business marketing page explains how I work, the paid ads page covers the account side, and Holland Health Marketing has the rest.