Something I keep running into when reviewing Google Ads accounts — almost everyone assumes that switching from "Presence or interest" to "Presence only" locks their ads down to people who are physically in their target area. It doesn't.
"Presence only" actually means people who are in or regularly in your targeted location. That word "regularly" is carrying a lot of weight, and Google never actually defines it. No timeframe. No frequency. No published criteria. They decide who qualifies based on signals they don't share — and they even say so themselves:
"Because these signals vary, 100% accuracy is not guaranteed in every situation."
That's straight from their own documentation. So the setting most people switch to thinking it's the precise option — isn't. It's better than the default, definitely. But it's still an approximation, and a lot of small business owners flip that toggle and never question it again.
What I've found helps in practice:
Cross-referencing the Matched locations report with actual leads data is probably the most useful thing. Not just where clicks came from — where real customers came from. If a city keeps appearing in the report but never in your CRM or inquiry log, that's your exclusion. That alone tends to clean things up more than people expect.
Building ad groups around searches like "near me," "open now," or "same day" also helps. They're not perfect but they're about as close as the platform gets to signalling that someone is actually there right now and ready to act.
And honestly, just looking at your ad schedule. If your business needs someone to physically show up, running ads at 2am to people who "regularly visit" your area isn't doing much for anyone.
These things help narrow the gap — but they don't close it. The platform genuinely doesn't give you a clean fix for this, which I think a lot of advertisers don't realise until they dig into it.
Curious what others do to compensate. Is there something that actually moves the needle that I'm not thinking of?