What does the 'presence or interest' location setting actually do to my spend?
Presence targets people physically in your area. Presence or interest also targets people anywhere who show interest in your area — searching your city by name, reading about it, or planning to move there. For most service businesses presence is the correct setting, and the interest option is a common source of spend from people who will never be standing in the house you would service.
The setting almost nobody opens
Location options sit behind an expandable link in campaign settings, and campaigns created by wizards or by import frequently keep a default that includes interest. Nothing in the main interface tells you which one is active, and the geographic reports do not shout about it either.
The result is a category of spend that looks geographically correct in one report and obviously wrong in another. Auditing this setting across every campaign takes a few minutes and is one of the highest-yield checks in an unfamiliar account.
How interest targeting actually behaves
Interest is inferred from search content and browsing behavior, not from the device's location. Someone in another state researching a city because they are relocating, buying a rental property, or helping a parent can qualify. So can a person who simply typed your city name for unrelated reasons.
Some of that traffic is genuinely valuable. Out-of-state owners of local rental property really do buy service. But they are a small slice of a large pool, and unless you have a landing experience and a phone script that handles remote owners well, you are paying full price to reach a group you are not equipped to convert.
Diagnosing it from the reports
- Compare the two location reports. One shows where users were, the other shows the locations they showed interest in. Divergence between them is the interest setting at work.
- Look at spend outside the target list. With presence-only targeting, a small amount of out-of-area spend is normal signal imprecision. A large amount usually is not.
- Listen to a sample of calls from suspect areas. The tell is unmistakable: callers who open with the name of a city you do not serve, or who are asking about a property they do not live at.
The exceptions worth keeping
There are real cases for interest targeting. Property managers and investors, snowbird markets where the owner is elsewhere for part of the year, and businesses that sell remote consultations or scheduling for a future move-in date all have legitimate out-of-area demand.
If you keep it, keep it isolated — a separate campaign with its own budget, its own message, and its own tracked phone number, so the performance of that audience is visible instead of blended into your core numbers. Isolating an experiment so it can be judged on its own is the same discipline that makes channel reporting trustworthy, and it depends on knowing what the callers were actually asking about.
Topics: geo targeting · location settings · wasted spend · settings audit
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.