A national cause and a local service look the same in a Google Ads account and behave nothing alike. The national one wants reach. The local one wants a few hundred of the right people in one city, and everything it reaches beyond them is a cost.
On a grant account the cost is not money. An animal shelter in one city, targeted nationally, is shown to people four states away who cannot adopt from it. They do not click. The impressions count, the clicks do not, and the account's rate falls towards the threshold the programme measures.
What a local account does differently
- Targets where it actually serves — a city, a county, a radius around the building — rather than the country it is in.
- Says the place in the ad. “Adopt a dog in Chicago” answers a different search from “adopt a dog”, and a reader who sees their own city clicks.
- Uses the place in the keywords, which is also the cheapest way to stop matching the national version of the same search.
- Checks the locations report rather than the setting. Where the clicks came from is the only evidence that the targeting is what you think it is.
The trade to be honest about
A tight radius means a smaller auction and less of the grant spent. That is the right answer for most local services — spending less of it on people who can use the service beats spending all of it on people who cannot — but it should be a decision rather than a surprise when the monthly figure comes in.
Where a service genuinely draws from further out — a specialist clinic, a regional food bank with partner sites — the answer is usually a second campaign for the wider area with its own budget and its own ads, not a wider setting on the campaign that was working.
Questions people ask
People search for our city without saying it. Does the keyword need the place?
Not always — Google uses location for intent as well. Having both a plain and a place-named version of the main keywords lets the report tell you which is doing the work.
Should we exclude places instead of naming ours?
Excluding is quicker when the catchment is awkward, and naming is clearer when it is not. Most accounts end up doing some of each.
What about people searching from elsewhere about our city?
That is the “interest in” setting rather than the “presence in” one, and for a donation campaign it is often exactly who you want. Check which one the campaign is on.