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 allow you to 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.
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.
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:
- Sign in to your new Search Ads 360.
- From the page menu, click Campaigns.
- Click the name of the campaign you wish to edit.
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(Optional) If you’re in a Microsoft Advertising campaign, you can click an ad group and create exclusions that apply at the ad group level.
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- From the page menu, click Settings.
- Under "Targeting", click Locations to expand the section.
- Enter a location that you'd like to exclude in the search line, and then click Exclude.
- See more details on the settings:
- Click Save to save your settings. Your excluded locations will appear under the heading "Excluded locations."
How to exclude areas in bulk
If you'd like to exclude multiple locations in bulk, you can 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:
- Sign in to your new Search Ads 360.
- From the page menu, click Campaigns.
- Click the name of the campaign you wish to edit.
- From the page menu, click Settings.
- Under "Targeting", click Locations to expand the section.
- Google Ads: Click Advanced search, and then check the box next to “Add locations in bulk”.
- Microsoft Advertising: Click Add locations in bulk.
- In the box, paste or type the names of up to 1,000 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, then click Exclude all. Under the section "Excluded locations", you'll see the locations that you've just excluded.
- See more details on the settings:
- Click Save.
There's no need to exclude areas that you haven't already targeted — your ads won’t be shown 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.
Keep in mind
Location targeting is based on a variety of signals, including users' settings, devices, and behavior on our platform, and is Google’s best effort to serve ads to users who meet your location settings. Because these signals vary, 100% accuracy is not guaranteed in every situation.
As always, you should check your overall performance metrics to help ensure your settings are meeting your advertising goals and change them accordingly.