Location targeting: presence only or interest too for a local service?

Google Ads defaults location targeting to "People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations." For a plumber in Austin, that means someone in Dallas reading a blog post about Austin water heaters can still see the ad. Clicks go up, calls don't.

Take a dental clinic running Search in one city. Switching to "People in your targeted location" usually cuts impressions a lot, but what you lose is mostly people researching from far away, not people who can book a chair next Tuesday. Interest-based targeting makes more sense for a national product or a travel brand. For anything you serve in person, I'd go presence only and look at the location report before deciding.

Has anyone seen interest targeting bring in customers who actually converted?

I'm not sold on presence-only for a dental clinic. Cutting impressions from far away is the easy call, but the people on the edge of your catchment are a different story. Someone 25 minutes out searching "emergency dentist" or "dentist near [neighbourhood]" is often about to drive in, and a tight presence-only radius can drop them.

Interest targeting does have a downside: it pulls in people searching your city name from elsewhere, and that's noise when you can only fill a chair in person. So I'd keep the default setting for a few weeks, then compare conversions by location instead of impressions, and only exclude regions that produce no bookings.

Agreed on the edge-of-catchment point, but I'd check the data before changing anything. Rowan's split between "Area of interest" and "Location of presence" is the key. In the geographic report, segment by location type and compare conversions for each. That shows whether the far-away interest clicks ever book. If they don't, you can exclude them without cutting the patients who are physically in range, like the ones 25 minutes away. A clinic with a few real service areas also usually does better with radius targeting around the address than with one broad city-level setting.

I'm not sure the location report will cleanly show which far-away clicks book. For a dental clinic the sample is small. At maybe 15 to 20 bookings a month, with a few of them tagged "area of interest," you can't tell a real pattern from a quiet month, and you could end up excluding a region for no good reason.

The bigger problem is that a lot of dental bookings happen by phone. If calls aren't recorded as conversions, the "zero bookings" segment is partly just missing data. So before comparing segments, make sure calls and form fills are actually being credited to the campaign. Then give the split a full quarter. Interest traffic is usually cheap enough to leave running that long, which beats cutting it on a few weeks of thin numbers.

It comes down to how far your patients actually travel. A general practice where most patients live within 15 minutes can usually cut the far-away interest clicks sooner, since the people who book are close anyway. A clinic doing implants or Invisalign is different, because someone will happily drive 40 minutes for a treatment they've planned for months. Those distant clicks may convert rarely, but when they do the value is high. Pulling patient postcodes from your booking system takes an afternoon and tells you which group you're in, so you don't have to wait a full quarter to find out.

Agreed, and pulling postcodes beats waiting a quarter to find out. Location settings are set per campaign, not per account, which is what makes this easy to fix. Run the general checkups on presence-only targeting, then put implants or Invisalign in their own campaign with interest targeting. That way you only pay for distant clicks where the ticket size can cover them, instead of having them averaged in with everything else.