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Geotargeting in Google Search – Presence or Interest in. new way to waste money!
Word to the wise. Just wanted to flag, in case anyone else had this problem. We had an agency run a few campaigns that were supposed to be geotargeted to particular regions as the offering was different depending on the region.
There is a new setting Presence or Interest in when geotargeting which means you may start paying for clicks and impressions for users who have simply googled that region or shown a passing interest in it.
You have to select Presence only in campaign settings in order to avoid this.
We accidentally spent 16% of our budget in totally wrong regions because of this! Thank you, overlords! -
1 Reply
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Surprised your agency didn’t know this. Sorry to hear that!
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This setting has been around for a long time and is set to the default when setting up campaigns so a lot of people forget to switch it to Presence Only. Definitely important to catch though except in the few cases where it makes sense to test it.
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I feel like this is common knowledge amongst PPC veterans. For people newer to Google Ads, it’s a setting that gets missed a lot since they set Presence or Interest as the default option and it’s hidden in a collapsible menu.
Something that gives even the PPC veterans the slip though is Performance Max campaigns — since you can’t set the location option till **after** the campaign’s created ([video showcasing this](https://youtu.be/cc94NDdXwNU?si=ZH93neFn3kLRGQ45)). I’m amazed I haven’t seen more people complaining about it, to be honest.
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This is not new at all.
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