Location targeting is the most consequential Google Ads setting that B2B SaaS accounts leave on default. Every campaign has a location option, and Google sets it to "Presence or interest" automatically — a setting that quietly serves your ads to people outside your buying market who merely searched for or read about your target region. For a lead-gen account, that out-of-market traffic can eat 20-35% of budget on clicks that have no chance of becoming pipeline. The fix takes thirty seconds per campaign, but it only helps if you know the setting exists and check it every time you build a campaign, because Google resets it to the default.
Beyond that one setting, location is a structural lever that most B2B SaaS accounts underuse. Which countries you target, how you group them, whether you split high-value and low-value markets, and how you exclude regions that never convert — these decisions shape cost per SQL as much as keyword or bid choices do. This guide covers the presence-versus-interest distinction that wastes the most budget, how to structure campaigns across markets with different value, why manual location bid adjustments no longer work under Smart Bidding, and how to audit where your spend actually lands. For the audience side of targeting — who rather than where — see our guide to Google Ads audience targeting for B2B SaaS.
Presence vs presence-or-interest: the default that leaks budget
The location option lives under Settings → Locations → Location options, and it has two meaningful values. "Presence" serves your ads to people physically in — or who regularly frequent — your targeted locations. "Presence or interest," the default, adds everyone who has shown interest in those locations, which in practice means anyone who searched for the location name or consumed content about it from anywhere in the world. For a B2C business advertising a destination, interest targeting can be useful. For B2B SaaS selling into defined markets, it is almost always wrong: a buyer in your market is physically in your market, and interest-based reach only adds people who cannot buy.
The cost of leaving this on default is not hypothetical. Because the interest signal captures anyone globally who searched your target country or city name, campaigns targeting, say, "United States" will serve to people in other countries researching the US market, comparing vendors for a US subsidiary, or simply reading US-centric content. According to a 2026 analysis of geo-targeting for B2B SaaS, presence-or-interest routinely spends 20-35% of a lead-gen budget on out-of-market clicks, and "Presence" is the correct setting for roughly 99% of lead-gen accounts. Switch it on every campaign, and re-check it whenever you build a new one — Google does not carry your preference forward.
Structuring campaigns across markets that convert differently
When you sell into multiple countries with meaningfully different deal sizes, CPCs, or sales cycles, stacking them in one campaign forces a single budget and a single bid target across markets that behave nothing alike. The result is that your highest-value market subsidizes your lowest, and Smart Bidding cannot calibrate to either — it optimizes to a blended average that fits no individual geography. A US enterprise deal worth $50,000 in ACV and a smaller-market deal worth $5,000 cannot share a target CPA sensibly. Separating them lets you set a budget and a bid target appropriate to each market’s economics.
The practical structure for a B2B SaaS account selling globally is to split by market or by value tier. For a small number of markets, run one campaign per country. For a broad global rollout, group into tiers: Tier 1 might be the US, UK, and Canada; Tier 2 Western Europe and Australia; Tier 3 the rest of the world — each tier a separate campaign with its own budget, target CPA calibrated to local LTV, and language- or currency-appropriate ad copy and landing pages. This structure also lets you scale winners and cut losers independently rather than in one undifferentiated bucket. It complements funnel-based structure rather than replacing it — for how geography layers onto intent tiers, see our guide to B2B SaaS campaign structure by funnel intent tier.
Location bid adjustments are dead under Smart Bidding
If you are running Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Maximize Conversions — as most B2B SaaS accounts now are — manual location bid adjustments do nothing. Smart Bidding sets bids at auction time using hundreds of signals, and location is already one of them; a manual +20% or -40% location modifier is simply ignored. This trips up teams migrating from Manual CPC, where location bid adjustments were a primary lever. Under automated bidding, the modifiers still appear in the interface for the geographic report, but they no longer steer spend. Trying to manage geographic performance by nudging location bid modifiers is wasted effort that gives a false sense of control.
Under Smart Bidding, you influence geographic performance through three real levers instead. First, targeting and exclusions: remove locations that generate spend without pipeline so the algorithm never bids there. Second, structure: split high-value and low-value geographies into separate campaigns so each gets its own target and the algorithm optimizes each market on its own terms. Third, conversion-value data: feed accurate, differentiated values back to Google — ideally revenue or pipeline value, not a flat lead count — so Smart Bidding learns which locations actually produce customers and bids up accordingly. Value-based bidding is what lets the algorithm favor a market that converts less often but at far higher deal size. For the mechanics of feeding value back, see our guide to the SaaS conversion value ladder and value-based bidding.
Excluding the geographies that never convert
Location exclusions are the counterpart to targeting, and they are underused. Even with "Presence" set correctly and campaigns split by market, some regions inside your targeted geographies consistently generate clicks and spend without producing qualified pipeline — often because they draw a different, non-buying audience for your category. The geographic report shows this clearly: pull the Locations view, sort by cost, and look for regions with meaningful spend and zero or near-zero conversions over a statistically useful window. Excluded locations override targeted ones, so adding a region to the exclusion list stops spend there immediately without disturbing the rest of the campaign.
Be deliberate about the window and the threshold. A region with no conversions over two weeks of low spend has not proven anything; a region with substantial spend and no conversions over a quarter has. Exclude on evidence, not impatience, or you will cut markets that simply have longer sales cycles — a real risk in B2B SaaS, where the gap between click and closed deal can run weeks. Where volume is thin, look at leading indicators (demo requests, qualified form fills) rather than closed-won before deciding. Excessive exclusions can also starve Smart Bidding of the data it needs to learn, which compounds a broader problem for accounts with limited volume — see our guide to running Google Ads on thin data and low conversion volume.
Radius targeting, regions, and the right granularity
Google Ads lets you target at several levels of granularity: countries, regions or states, metropolitan areas, cities, postal codes, and a radius around a point. For most B2B SaaS, country- or region-level targeting is the right default, because software buyers are not constrained by physical proximity the way a local service business’s customers are — a SaaS deal can close with a buyer anywhere in a country. Radius targeting, which is essential for local businesses, is rarely useful for B2B SaaS except in specific cases: a field-sales motion concentrated in certain cities, an event or roadshow campaign, or an account-based push around a cluster of target headquarters.
Over-granular geography usually hurts more than it helps in B2B SaaS. Slicing a national campaign into dozens of city-level campaigns fragments conversion data so thin that Smart Bidding never gets enough signal in any one to optimize, and the management overhead rarely pays back. The better instinct is to target broadly enough that each campaign accumulates the conversion volume Smart Bidding needs, then use exclusions and value data to shape performance within that geography — rather than pre-carving the map into pieces too small to learn from. Match the granularity to how your product actually sells: national or regional for most SaaS, tighter only when a concrete go-to-market reason justifies it. Getting location right is also one of the fastest ways to fix a campaign that is spending its budget without producing results — a frequent culprit behind budget and delivery problems in B2B SaaS accounts.