Audit advertising waste outside your real service area

A service area is an operational promise

Write down what 'we can serve this area' means. Delivery, travel time, minimum order, installer availability and remote service can produce different boundaries. A circle on a map may be a poor description of routes, islands, postal coverage or commercial exceptions. Ask operations for accepted, conditional and unsupported areas, plus the reason and review date. This operational map is the reference for the audit, not a prescription for targeting settings.

Keep three geographic concepts apart: campaign settings, platform-reported location and the customer's requested service location. Google documents location options involving likely presence and interest, and explains that location signals are not perfectly accurate. A person planning a service for another city can be legitimate demand. Before suggesting a setting change, determine whether it would exclude such customers as well as the requests the business genuinely cannot fulfil.

In an educational example, two regions each generate ten enquiries after $500 of spend. Region A has eight serviceable enquiries; region B has two, with the rest outside delivery coverage. The observed cost per serviceable enquiry is $62.50 versus $250. That difference supports an investigation. It does not prove that the region setting caused the mismatch, especially when destinations, products or enquiry handling differ between the regions.

Classify unsupported enquiries by cause. Some are genuinely outside coverage; some arise from an unclear delivery page; others request a product unavailable locally. Preserve an unknown-location bucket when the request lacks information. Use aggregate categories in the advertising review, not names, addresses or message transcripts. Record how many enquiries were checked and how many could not be classified, because selective feedback can exaggerate geographic waste.

Three maps for a geographic decision

• Coverage map: serviceable, conditional and unsupported areas, with business reasons. It lets an analyst distinguish geography from an operational restriction that could change next month.
• Outcome map: qualified or serviceable enquiries by requested area, including unknowns. It describes whether the business could help rather than merely where a device seemed to be.
• Action map: clarify the offer, investigate location options or test a bounded exclusion. Each option should name the useful demand it could also remove.

Reconcile geography with fulfilment

1. Get the current fulfilment rules from operations. Note exceptions for higher-value orders, remote work or collection instead of relying on an old targeting radius.
2. Collect the campaign settings and aggregate geographic reports for matching mature dates. Label the source of each geography field so they cannot be mistaken for one another.
3. Summarise requested service locations from an approved business dataset into non-identifying categories. Track serviceable, unsupported and unknown outcomes using the same definitions.
4. Compute spend per compatible serviceable outcome where the linkage is reliable. Where it is not, show separate advertising and enquiry tables rather than inventing joins.
5. Test alternative explanations: misleading page coverage, unavailable stock or uneven staff follow-up. Geography is only one candidate mechanism.
6. Draft the narrowest justified next step and its review criterion. After any separately authorised change, check total qualified demand and the previously useful cross-region enquiries.

Location is evidence, not an identity

Sources and further reading

• Google Ads: advanced location options and signal limits