Where your ads should appear is important—but where they shouldn't appear is just as crucial to your campaign's success. Location exclusion can help you prevent your ad from showing in certain parts of your targeted locations, such as a region within a country, or a city within a state. This helps you use your budget wisely by preventing your ad from showing to people who most likely wouldn't have access to what you're offering.
You can exclude locations one-by-one for more control, or for added convenience, you can exclude a large amount of locations all at once with our bulk locations feature.
Benefits
Who might benefit from excluding areas within targeted locations:
- A business that doesn't ship to or provide services in a city or region within a larger area.
- A business that offers a special promotion that isn't eligible in a few regions of a targeted area.
Example
If you run ad campaigns for an independent real estate brokerage in Hawaii, but you don't have a location on Maui, you can target the entire state of Hawaii but exclude Maui only.
Instructions
How to exclude individual areas
Setting up location exclusions is very similar to setting up location targeting, just enter the name of the area that you'd like to exclude.
To exclude areas within the locations you've selected:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns drop down in the section menu.
- Click Campaigns.
- Click Settings.
- Expand the “Locations” section from the settings menu.
- There are two ways you can exclude a location:
- Search for the area that you'd like to exclude in the search box and click Exclude.
- Click Advanced search, search for the Location you'd like to exclude, and click Exclude. Click Save after excluding the location.
- Click Save to save your settings. Your excluded locations will appear under the heading "Excluded locations".
If you select "Show locations on map", your excluded locations will also appear with a red outline on the map.
How to exclude areas in bulk
If you'd like to exclude multiple locations in bulk, Google Ads allows you to add a list of up to 1000 location exclusions at a time, rather than adding each location one-by-one.
To exclude multiple areas within the locations you've selected, follow these steps:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
- Click the Campaigns drop down in the section menu.
- Click Campaigns.
- Click Settings.
- Expand the “Locations” section from the settings menu, and click Advanced search.
- Check the box next to "Add locations in bulk".
- In the box, paste or type the names of up to 1000 locations that you'd like to exclude. Add locations from one country at a time. See the list of targetable locations.
- You can choose to “Restrict locations within a country”.
- Once you've entered your locations, click Search.
- All locations that matched your search will be displayed in the review panel. Review your results, and click Exclude all. Under the section "Excluded locations", you'll see the locations that you've just excluded.
- Click Save.
- Once you've confirmed your changes, click Save on the Settings page.
Tip
Keep in mind that the option to remove all matched locations will remove all locations from the review panel, as well as from your existing location targets or location exclusions.
Exclusion conflict
If an area is both included and excluded in your location targeting settings, exclusion takes priority. For example, if you exclude the state of California but target the city of Los Angeles, Los Angeles will be excluded because it is located in California. If you target and exclude Los Angeles, Los Angeles will not receive traffic because of the exclusion.
Tip
Remember, there's no need to exclude areas that you haven't already targeted—we won't show your ads in places unless you explicitly target them.
The exception is if you target an area by locations that people searched for or showed interest in, and exclude other areas by your customers' likely location. This gets a little more complicated—check out our article on advanced location options for more information.