Ad Grant campaigns must target locations relevant to what the organisation actually does. Most accounts comply with that in principle and then break it with a default setting nobody changed — the one that shows a local charity's ads to people on the other side of the world.
The rule itself
Google requires grant campaigns to be geographically targeted to the areas the nonprofit serves. A food bank operating in one county should not be advertising nationally. A national helpline can target nationally, because that is genuinely its service area.
The test is simple and it is about your mission, not your ambition: if somebody in this location clicked, could you actually help them? If the honest answer is no, you should not be paying for the impression — and on a grant account, paying with donated budget makes that worse, not better.
The setting that breaks it
In every Google Ads campaign there is a location option buried under the target you chose. It has three states, and the default is the loose one.
| Setting | Who sees your ads |
|---|---|
| Presence or interest (the default) | People in the area, and people anywhere who show interest in it |
| Presence | Only people actually in the area |
| Search interest | Only people searching about the area |
"Presence or interest" is why a shelter targeting one city finds itself paying for clicks from three time zones away. Someone abroad searching about your city counts as interest, and Google serves them the ad.
For almost every nonprofit, set this to Presence. The exceptions are narrow: destination fundraising, disaster appeals seeking donors outside the affected region, and diaspora-facing campaigns. If you are none of those, Presence is correct.
How to change it
- Google Ads → Campaigns → select the campaign.
- Settings → Locations → expand Location options.
- Under "Target", choose Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.
- Under "Exclude", choose Presence: People in your excluded locations.
- Repeat for every campaign. The setting is per campaign, not per account — changing one changes nothing else.
Then check what it was costing you: Campaigns → the campaign → Locations → change the view to User locations rather than Matched locations. That report shows where the people actually were, not which target they were matched to. Accounts on the default setting routinely find 20–40% of impressions came from outside the service area.
Choosing the right target in the first place
Compliance is the floor. The target that performs is usually tighter than the one that complies.
- Radius targeting around your premises works well for services people physically attend — a drop-in centre, a food distribution point, a clinic. Set the radius to the distance people genuinely travel, which is usually smaller than you think.
- City or region targeting suits organisations whose service area follows an administrative boundary — a county-wide programme, a devolved-nation charity.
- National targeting is right for helplines, online services and advocacy, and wrong for almost everything else.
- Exclusions matter as much as targets. If you target a region but cannot serve one city inside it, exclude that city.
Why tighter targeting raises click-through rate
Every impression served to somebody you cannot help is an impression that will not be clicked, and account CTR is impressions divided into clicks. Narrowing geography is one of the fastest ways to lift a struggling account above the 5% floor, because it removes impressions rather than trying to win more clicks.
It also lets the ad copy get specific. An ad that can name the city outperforms a generic one, and you cannot name the city while advertising to the whole country.
The counter-argument, and when it is right
Narrow targeting reduces available impressions, and grant accounts already struggle to spend their budget. If your geography is genuinely small — a market town, a rural district — you may find the account cannot absorb meaningful spend at all.
That is a real trade-off, and the answer is not to widen the geography past your service area. It is to widen the keyword list within it, which is the subject of why most grants never spend past $2,000. Chasing spend by advertising to people you cannot serve is how accounts end up compliant on paper and useless in practice.
The five-minute audit
- For each campaign: is Location options set to Presence?
- Does the target match the service area you would describe to a funder?
- In the User locations report, what share of impressions came from outside it?
- Are there places inside your target you cannot actually serve? Exclude them.
- Does your ad copy mention the location? If the target is tight enough, it should.
The rest of the rulebook is in the Ad Grant policy checklist.