Google Ads Calls From Outside Your Service Area: The Five Causes and the Fix for Each

You're on a job site, the phone rings, and the caller wants a quote on a property two hours from your yard. Then it happens again the next day. If your ads bring in calls from all over the place, and it feels like half of them come from way out of your area, the cause is almost always on a short list. The biggest item on it is one setting Google picks for you.

Here is the answer up front. Switch each campaign's location option from "Presence or interest" to "Presence," name your real towns in the ad text, draw the radius from your yard to where your crew actually drives, and check whether the out-of-area calls came from the ads at all. Then let your form ask where the property is before anyone calls back.

The five causes, in the order they usually show up

1. The location option is still on Google's default. "Presence or interest" shows your ad to people who only showed interest in your area.
2. Your ads never name your towns. Some print the searcher's own city back at them.
3. The radius is wider than your crew drives.
4. The calls never came from the ads. Your Google Business Profile, organic search and directories ring the same phone.
5. Carrier IP noise. A small share of mobile searchers get placed in the wrong city.

Work through them in that order. The first two take minutes to fix, and in the contractor account we read most closely this year, they did most of the damage.

1. The location setting Google picks for you

Every new Search campaign starts on "Presence or interest," which Google labels the default and recommended option. It reaches people in your targeted area plus people who have shown interest in it. Google reads interest from the terms in someone's searches and from places they were recently, among other signals.

For a contractor, that means a homeowner two hours away who owns a cottage near you, or who once searched your town's name, can see your ad from their kitchen table. They call, you drive nowhere, and you paid for the click anyway.

Fix it in each campaign. Google's steps are on its page about clicks outside your targeted locations:

• Open Campaigns, select the campaign, and click Settings.
• Expand Locations, then Location options.
• Under Target, choose Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.
• Click Save, and repeat for every campaign.

Two notes from the field. Check the setting again a week later: in one contractor account we read this year, it was back on the default a week after it was changed. And hold off on excluding the far-off town that keeps calling. An exclusion blocks that one town and leaves every other town open. Presence closes them all at once.

2. Ads that never name your towns

Google offers a location insertion code, {LOCATION(City)}, that drops a city name into your headline. Google says those ads are localized based on physical location or area of interest. Paired with "Presence or interest," the headline can print the searcher's own city.

In one contractor account we read this year, almost every ad used that code and not one named a real town in the service area. A homeowner far outside the area searched for the service and saw their own town in the headline, from a one-crew company that would never drive there. The out-of-area share of leads was flat across every keyword, so no keyword was the leak. The ad copy and the location option were doing it together.

Google's own advice for out-of-area clicks is to add your targeted areas to your ad text. A reader who sees towns that aren't theirs doesn't tap.

• Replace every {LOCATION(City)} headline with your real town names, such as "Septic Installs in [Town A] and [Town B]."
• Pin one town-name headline to position 1, so Google can't rotate it out.
• Write a description line that lists your towns and the work you take on, and says what you don't do.
• Add sitelinks to town pages, so the click lands on a page for that town and that service.

3. A radius wider than your crew drives

If you set the radius around a town name, the circle is centered on that town, which may sit well away from your yard. Overlapping circles stack up, and a generous radius reaches into the next county.

Draw it from where your trucks start. Following Google's radius steps: click Campaigns, open Audiences, keywords, and content, choose Locations, click the campaign, click the pencil icon and select Radius. Enter your yard's street address and the distance your crew will drive, then check the map before you save.

If you take far-off work only for big jobs, say so in the ad and on the form, and keep the circle where your everyday work is.

4. Calls that never came from your ads

This is the cause most owners never hear about. Your phone number lives on your Google Business Profile, your website's organic listings, directories and old copies of your pages. None of those calls pass through your ad settings, and no change in Google Ads touches them.

In one contractor account we read this year, pump-out requests and calls meant for other companies almost never came through the form on the ad landing page. They came by phone, through paths the ad account can't see: the Business Profile, organic results and directories. Some of your out-of-area calls take the same routes. Until calls are tracked, every call looks the same, and "half are out of area" stays a feeling.

• Turn on call reporting and put a Google forwarding number on your ads, so ad calls are counted apart from the rest. Our guide to tracking calls from Google Ads walks through it.
• Compare that count with the calls on your Business Profile, which counts taps on the call button on your profile.
• Rewrite your Business Profile description to name the towns you serve and the jobs you take.

5. Carrier IP noise

Google places most searchers by IP address and device location, and for some mobile traffic it may use the carrier's IP, which can sit in a city far from the person holding the phone. Google says plainly that 100% accuracy isn't guaranteed. This is a small share of calls, and no setting in your account changes it. Note it and move on.

Wrong job, right town: a different leak

If the calls come from inside your area but for work you don't do, such as pump-outs when you install, or people who meant to call a competitor, the cause sits in the search terms. Broad match reaches widely, and Google lets phrase and exact keywords match close variants with the same meaning, with no opt-out. The fix is a negative keyword list built from your own search terms report, plus ad copy that names the jobs you take.

Let the form ask where the property is

The ads decide who sees you. The form decides who reaches you. Put two questions first: what do you need, and where is the property (town or postal code). Send out-of-area and wrong-service answers to a polite closing message with no thank-you page, so no conversion fires and Google doesn't learn to find more of them.

Thor Construction, a new Ontario contractor that did $1.5M in revenue in 2025 on $35K of ad spend (Canadian dollars), runs a septic form that asks the job type and property location first, with location targeting limited to people in its service area. Out-of-area and wrong-service requests sort themselves before anyone calls back. If you run a septic business, our page for septic companies shows how the pieces fit together.

Measure the out-of-area share before and after

Pull a baseline the day you change the settings, then pull the same reports 30 days later.

1. Where people were standing. In Insights & reports, open Report editor and build a table with the user-location city as the row and the location type column added. Location type splits a searcher's physical location from places they only showed interest in. Column names shift between versions of the interface, so search the column picker for "User location" and "Location type."
2. Where the ads matched. Campaigns > Insights & reports > When and where your ads showed > Matched locations lists the places that triggered your ads, physical or interest (Google's steps). A town that shows up here but never as a physical location was an interest match, and Presence removes it.
3. Who called. With call reporting on, Report editor > Ads and assets > Call details lists each call with its caller area code, duration and keyword. Sort 30 days by area code. Mobile numbers travel, though. People keep their number when they move, so a city area code can belong to someone living down the road from you. Pair the report with a two-week log by the phone: for each wrong call, the town and what they wanted.
4. What the form says. Count the property-location answers outside your area, month by month.

When the share drops, you'll see it in all four, and you'll know which fix did the work.

If you would rather hand this to a team

Our team builds and runs Google Ads for home service businesses and counts results at the booked estimate and the signed job. See how we work with contractors and home service companies, or book a call and we'll read your location settings, ad copy and call data with you.