Google Ads Location Targeting in Metro Vancouver: Presence vs Interest

Geographic settings are the quietest source of wasted spend in a local Google Ads account. Nothing breaks, no disapproval appears, and the account keeps reporting conversions. What changes is the composition of the traffic: a share of the budget goes to people who are researching Vancouver from elsewhere, or who are outside the area you can actually serve, and the cost per qualified enquiry drifts upward without an obvious cause.

This page covers one thing properly: geographic eligibility and geographic reporting for Metro Vancouver advertisers. It is based on current Google Ads Help documentation for geographic targeting, advanced location options, matched-location reporting and out-of-area clicks. Query expansion and URL controls are a separate subject with its own failure modes, covered in our AI Max search-term matching guide. Keeping the two apart is deliberate: if you change geography and query matching in the same week, neither result tells you anything.

What the two advanced location options actually mean

Google Ads Help documents advanced location options that determine who becomes eligible in a targeted location.

Presence targets people who are regularly in your targeted locations, or who show signals that they are currently in them. Someone in Burnaby searching for a service in Burnaby is the intended case.

Presence or interest keeps that group and adds people who show interest in your targeted locations while being somewhere else. Someone in Calgary planning a Vancouver renovation, or researching on behalf of a Vancouver office, is the intended case.

Neither is correct in the abstract. A business that can only deliver inside a service radius usually wants presence, because interest traffic cannot convert into serviceable work. A business that sells to decision-makers who are not physically local, or that handles relocation, travel or remote work, may legitimately want interest included. The error is not choosing one; the error is not knowing which one is active.

Why out-of-area clicks still happen

The documentation is clear that location is inferred rather than known exactly. Signals include device location, the network in use and previously shown behaviour and interests. Inference is imperfect, which is why Google Ads Help addresses out-of-area clicks as an expected outcome rather than a fault to be eliminated.

The practical consequence is a reporting one. If you set presence and expect the matched-location report to contain only your service area, you will read normal inference noise as a broken setting. The right expectation is a materially smaller share of out-of-area matches, visible as a change against a baseline you recorded before the switch.

Draw the service boundary before touching the account

Metro Vancouver punishes lazy geography, because the region is a set of distinct municipalities with real travel constraints between them. A radius drawn around downtown will include areas your crews will not cross a bridge for, and will exclude areas you serve daily.

Write the boundary down as a business fact before it becomes a setting. List the municipalities you serve without qualification, those you serve with a condition such as a minimum job size or a travel charge, and those you do not serve at all. Then decide how the conditional group is handled: targeted with messaging that states the condition, or excluded because the enquiries are not worth the handling time. That decision belongs to operations, not to the ads account, and it is the input the account needs.

Record a baseline before you change anything

A targeting change without a baseline cannot be evaluated, only asserted. Before the change, export the matched-location report for a recent period long enough to be representative of your account, and record four things per location: impressions, clicks, cost and conversions. Record the current advanced location option for every campaign, because accounts frequently differ campaign to campaign after years of edits. Record any existing exclusions. Note the reporting period exactly.

That baseline is also the artefact that makes the later conversation honest. Our marketing reporting work treats the pre-change export as part of the change record, so that a result can be stated as a period comparison against known figures rather than as an unsupported improvement claim.

A controlled Metro Vancouver test

The change to test is narrow: move from presence or interest to presence on campaigns serving a fixed service area, or add exclusions for areas outside it, and hold everything else still.

Change one variable. Do not adjust bids, budgets, keyword match types, query expansion settings or landing pages during the test window. Keep the window long enough to cover complete weekly cycles and to accumulate volume comparable to the baseline; the required duration depends on your traffic, which we cannot see, so derive it from your own recent click and conversion counts rather than from a figure in an article.

Then compare like with like. Read the matched-location report for the test window against the baseline window and look at four measures: the share of impressions matched inside the service area, the share of cost spent outside it, cost per conversion overall, and enquiry quality as recorded by whoever answers the phone. The fourth is the one that decides the question, and it is the one no platform report contains. If your intake notes do not distinguish serviceable from unserviceable enquiries, fixing that is a prerequisite, not an optional extra.

Targeted locations and matched locations are different lists

This distinction causes more misreadings than any setting. The targeted locations list is your instruction. The matched locations report is what happened. Judging a geography change by looking at the targeting list is like judging a delivery by reading the address you wrote on the box.

Read the matched view in three passes. First, locations inside your service area, checking that the distribution matches where your demand should be. Second, locations just outside it, which is where inference noise and commuter behaviour show up, and where a travel-charge decision may be worth making rather than an exclusion. Third, locations far outside it, which under presence targeting should be a small residual and under presence or interest may be a substantial and sometimes legitimate share.

Exclusions and language controls

Exclusions are blunt and useful. Apply them to areas you have decided not to serve, and revisit them when the service boundary changes, because stale exclusions quietly suppress areas you later started serving.

Language settings are a separate control that is often confused with geography, because both narrow eligibility. Language targeting in Google Ads relates to the user's language settings, not to the language of your ads or your ability to serve them, and the interaction with geography is worth checking deliberately rather than assuming. We treat it as its own review item, covered in our language targeting guide.

Make it a monthly review, not a one-time fix

Geography drifts. Service areas expand, crews change, a new competitor changes what is worth travelling for, and campaign settings get edited by whoever was in the account last. A short monthly review keeps the setting aligned with the business.

Each month, confirm the advanced location option on every campaign, read the matched-location report for the period, check the share of cost outside the service area against the prior month, confirm exclusions still reflect the boundary, and ask intake whether the enquiries coming through are serviceable. Record the answers, because the value of the review comes from the series, not from any single month.

What we cannot tell you here

This article contains no search volumes, cost-per-click figures, ranking data, account performance numbers or projected savings. Fresh Search Console data was unavailable when this was written, and nothing has been estimated to fill the gap. Whether presence targeting reduces your cost per qualified enquiry is an empirical question about your account, answerable only by running the comparison above against your own baseline.

If you would rather this was managed

Our Vancouver PPC team works in this region and knows which municipal boundaries matter operationally, our PPC management service runs the targeting reviews as a standing item, and our reporting keeps before and after periods labelled so that a change can be defended with figures. For query-side controls, read the AI Max search-term matching guide and change one side at a time.