Presence or interest targeting is a Google Ads location setting that decides who counts as being “in” the area you target. You can show ads only to people who are in, or regularly in, your chosen locations, or also to people elsewhere who have shown interest in those places.
How presence or interest targeting works
When you set up location targeting, Google asks which people to include:
- Presence or interest People in, regularly in, or who have shown interest in your targeted locations. This is Google’s default and recommended setting.
- Presence Only people in, or regularly in, your targeted locations.
“Interest” is inferred from behaviour such as searching for a place by name (“dentist Islington”), looking at it on Google Maps or reading about it. So with the default setting, someone in Leeds searching for “solicitor Kingston upon Thames” can see an ad targeted at Kingston.
“Regularly in” is worth understanding too. Someone who commutes into the City of London every weekday counts as regularly in the City, even when they search from home in Kent at the weekend. For a business in central London that serves office workers, such as a lunchtime gym or a dry cleaner, that is useful. For a business that visits people at home, the commuter’s home address is what matters, so target the areas where customers live.
A matching choice exists for location exclusions. By default Google excludes people physically in the excluded area; the alternative also excludes people who have shown interest in it.
Why it matters
For most London local services, presence-only stops ads reaching people outside the area, and the default can quietly spend money on people who could never become customers. A plumber covering south-west London has no use for clicks from someone in Glasgow researching London house prices, or from a tourist planning a visit.
The default exists for a reason, though. Some businesses sell precisely to people who are not there yet: London hotels, wedding venues, private schools and boarding schools, tourist attractions, estate agents dealing with people relocating, and anyone selling tickets for events. For them, someone in Manchester planning a weekend in London is the target customer, and presence-only would cut them off.
Common mistakes
- Leaving the default in place for a service that can only be delivered locally.
- Switching a destination business to presence-only and losing the visitors it depends on.
- Checking only the targeted location report, which shows where the targeting matched, rather than the user location report, which shows where people actually were.
- Relying on a tight radius while still using presence or interest, which makes the radius far less tight than it looks.
- Forgetting that Performance Max and other campaign types have their own location options, which need checking separately.
How to act on it
Decide where your customers have to be when they buy. If you travel to them or they must visit you within a day or two, use presence. If they plan trips, relocate, or book from elsewhere, keep presence or interest and judge the results.
Then check the evidence. Open the location report in Google Ads, switch to user locations, and look at how much spend went to people outside your area and whether any of it converted. If it did not, change the setting. Every campaign has its own location options, so check each one. Location settings are among the first things I review in an account audit as part of my Google search ads management.