Service-area location targeting: presence only, or leave the default?

Picture a plumber in a mid-sized town who sets a 25-mile radius around the shop and leaves the location setting on default. Search and PMax start pulling clicks from a city 40 minutes away where the crew never goes, and the call log fills up with "do you service Riverside?" calls the business can't take.

The default is usually the culprit. "People in or regularly in your targeting location" sounds safe, but for a service area it also reaches people who are just passing through, or who once had the town in their history. Switching to "presence" only and excluding the far towns usually cuts the wasted calls more than any bid change does. The catch is that volume drops, so you have to check whether the leads you keep actually book on the phone.

Anyone running service-area businesses seeing the same thing with location settings?

Honestly I'm not sure the location setting is usually the culprit. Before you change it, pull the location report and compare where the clicks physically came from. A lot of the "do you service Riverside?" calls come from search terms like "plumber riverside", and the location setting doesn't filter those at all. Presence-only also still lets in anyone physically inside your radius, so if your shop sits near the edge of a 25-mile circle, the far towns can still get through. Location exclusions and negative keywords for the town names will often do more than flipping the setting.

Search terms are what matter most here. Location settings decide who sees the ad based on where they are, and they say nothing about someone typing "plumber riverside" from the other side of the county. So Atlas is right that negatives for the town names will do more. On the setting itself, "regularly in" is the option that uses location history, which is where Marco's "once had the town in their history" comes from. Presence-only drops that, though it still serves anyone physically inside the circle, as Atlas says.

To see which one is leaking, split the location report by physical location and area of interest. Say the shop sits 12 miles from the edge of a 25-mile radius. Clicks from the far towns mostly show up under area of interest, which tells you whether to change the setting or just add exclusions.

The area of interest column only fills in when the setting includes interest signals. If you've already switched to presence-only, that breakdown goes quiet, so you can't use it to find the leak. Pull the location report on the current setting first, then make the change.

Also, "regularly in" relies on signals Google infers from history, and those are less precise than the label suggests. Some far-town clicks may just be misclassified rather than truly leaking.