Google Ads Without Location Targeting: The 2024 Guide

Most of the advice you hear about Google Ads is to "go local" and "get specific" with your geography. Tbh, for a business that sells nationally or even globally, that's probably the worst advice you could follow. It’s a surefire way to limit your growth and compete in crowded, expensive digital postcodes for no good reason. You're struggling because you're trying to apply a local shop's strategy to a borderless business. It's time to change your thinking entirely.

The secret to scaling Google Ads without geographic limits isn't to find the perfect country setting; it's to stop targeting places altogether. You need to start targeting problems. When you focus on the specific, urgent pain your customer is experiencing, their physical location becomes almost irrelevant. This is how you find high-value customers anywhere in the world without just throwing money at a map and hoping for the best.

Why is targeting 'the whole country' burning my cash?

When most people set up a "nationwide" campaign, what they really do is take their old local campaign, remove the city-level targeting, and set it to "United Kingdom". They use the same generic keywords, the same generic ads, and wonder why their cost-per-click skyrockets and conversions dry up. You're not just reaching more people; you're reaching more of the wrong people.

The issue is that "nationwide" isn't a targeting strategy. It's a lack of one. You're telling Google you want to reach everyone, so the algorithm shows your ad to the cheapest, broadest audience it can find that loosely matches your keywords. This often means people doing vague research, not people ready to buy. A keyword like "accounting software" could be a student writing an essay, a small business owner in Cornwall, or a CFO in London. Their intent is completely different, but a simple location-based campaign treats them all the same.

You have to get to grips with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), but not in the way most marketers think. Forget "companies with 50-200 employees". That's useless. You need to define your customer by their nightmare. What is the career-threatening, budget-draining, urgent problem that keeps them up at night? For a B2B SaaS client we worked with, we stopped targeting "UK businesses" and started focusing on the specific nightmare of "my sales team is wasting hours on manual data entry". Suddenly, the ad wasn't for everyone; it was for a very specific person with a very specific pain. That's when you cut through the noise. When you do this, you'll naturally start to see how you can stop wasting money on Google Ads because every click you pay for has a much higher chance of being relevant.

So, how do I target people without targeting a place?

You switch your entire focus from demographics to psychographics—specifically, user intent as revealed by their search queries. You target the problem, not the person's location. This means digging deep into long-tail keywords that signal someone is past the research phase and is actively looking for a solution.

Think about it. Someone searching for "marketing" is just browsing. Someone searching for "how to get more leads" is getting warmer. But someone searching for "best software for b2b lead generation" is holding their credit card. Their location doesn't matter; their intent is crystal clear. They have a problem and are actively looking for a tool to solve it.

I remember one campaign we worked on for a recruitment software company. They were burning cash targeting "recruitment agencies in London". We switched the strategy completely. We started targeting keywords like "how to reduce time to hire" and "best medical job matching software". We went from a £100 cost per acquisition down to just £7. Why? Because we were reaching people with a bleeding neck problem, not just people in a specific building. This whole approach is about a fundamental shift in mindset. You need to learn how to target problems, not just locations, as that's where true scale is unlocked.

How much should I be paying for a click or a lead, then?

This is the million-dollar question, and the answer isn't a simple number. It depends entirely on what a customer is worth to you over their lifetime. Stop obsessing over a low Cost Per Lead (CPL) and start focusing on a high Lifetime Value (LTV). If you know a customer is worth £10,000 to your business, does paying £300 for a qualified lead that has a 1-in-10 chance of closing still seem expensive?

This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent scaling. Without knowing your LTV, you're just guessing. You'll pause campaigns that seem "too expensive" even if they're delivering your most profitable customers, and you'll let "cheap" campaigns run that deliver nothing but tyre-kickers. Let's break it down.

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much does a typical customer pay you each month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after costs of service?
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Once you have your LTV, a healthy business model aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to a third of your LTV to acquire a new customer. This number gives you your true budget and frees you from the tyranny of cheap clicks.

How should my campaigns be structured if not by city or country?

If you're not structuring by geography, you need a different logic. The best way is to structure your account around the customer journey or user intent. This allows you to create highly specific ad copy and landing pages that speak directly to where the user is in their decision-making process. It’s a far more powerful way to organise things than just lumping everyone in "England" into one ad group.

A simple but effective structure we often use looks something like this:

• Campaign 1: Problem-Aware (Top of Funnel). This campaign targets users who know they have a problem but don't yet know about your solution. Keywords here are broader and question-based, like "how to improve team productivity" or "why is my cloud bill so high". Your ads and landing pages here should be educational, offering guides, checklists, or webinars.


• Campaign 2: Solution-Aware (Middle of Funnel). This group is actively looking for solutions like yours. They're using keywords like "best project management software" or "aws cost optimisation tools". Your ads should be more direct, highlighting your features and benefits versus the competition. This is where you push for free trials or demos.


• Campaign 3: Competitor & Brand (Bottom of Funnel). This targets users searching for your brand name or your direct competitors (e.g., "Asana alternative"). These are the highest-intent searches you can find. Your ads should be aggressive, with clear calls to action, special offers, and social proof to seal the deal.

This structure gives you immense control. You can allocate budget based on which part of the funnel is performing best and get incredibly clear data on what messaging works at each stage. It's a bit more work to set up, but the results are almost always worth it. If you're new to this kind of thinking, our guide on structuring Google Ads for a broad audience provides some concrete examples with real data behind them.

But won't going broad just attract junk traffic?

This is the single biggest fear people have, and it's a valid one if you do it wrong. Simply removing location targeting and using broad keywords with a "Maximise Clicks" bid strategy is absolutely a recipe for disaster. You're telling the algorithm to find you the cheapest possible traffic, and it will happily oblige by finding people who click on anything but never buy.

The myth is that "broad" is the problem. The real problem is a lack of clear signals. You have to tell Google's machine learning what a successful outcome looks like for you. The non-negotiable requirement for scaling without location targeting is rock-solid conversion tracking.

You need to be tracking not just the final sale or lead, but every meaningful step along the way. Free trial sign-ups, demo requests, key page views, newsletter subscriptions—these are all valuable signals. When you set your campaign objective to "Maximise Conversions" or use "Target CPA" bidding, and you feed the algorithm this rich conversion data, you're giving it a crystal-clear picture of your ideal customer. It then uses its immense power to go and find more people who look and behave just like them, regardless of where they are located.

Think of it like this: without conversion data, you're asking a delivery driver to find a person in London. With conversion data, you're giving them a full name, address, and postcode. One is a guess; the other is a precise instruction. It's a common mistake, but with the right setup you can actually make broad audience ads work without wasting your budget, you just have to guide the algorithm properly.

What if I want to go global, not just national?

The same principles apply, but with a few extra layers of complexity. My strong advice is to prove your model in a single, large market first (like your home country) before you try to conquer the world. Once you have a profitable system, you can start to expand methodically.

The biggest mistake I see is companies running a single "Worldwide" campaign. This is a terrible idea. User behaviour, language, purchasing power, and competition vary massively between countries. A £50 product might be an impulse buy in Switzerland but a major investment in Poland. You'll get skewed data and poor results.

Instead, group countries into logical campaign tiers. A common approach is:

• Tier 1: Core English-Speaking Markets. Usually UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. These are often high-value but also highly competitive.
• Tier 2: Developed Non-English Markets. Western Europe, parts of Asia like Japan and South Korea. You'll need translated ads and landing pages here, it's non-negotiable.
• Tier 3: Developing Markets. The rest of the world. CPCs here can be incredibly cheap, but the lead quality and conversion rates are often much lower. You might also find a higher prevelance of bot traffic.

Start with Tier 1. Once that's profitable, expand to the others. Deciding exactly how to group them is a common challenge, and the right approach depends on your specific product and data. We wrote a detailed article on whether to separate or group countries in your campaign structure which can help guide that decision. And for UK founders looking across the pond, the US is a massive but tricky market. It's not as simple as just changing the currency; we've actually created a specific founder's guide to launching and scaling paid ads in the US to cover the specific cultural and competitive nuances.

This all goes to say that there is a way to scale beyond your local borders, and it has very little to do with your location targeting settings. It's about a fundamental shift in strategy towards understanding your customer's intent and having the data infrastructure to guide Google's algorithm effectively.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Here’s a summary of the actionable steps you should take to move from a wasteful, location-based approach to a profitable, scalable one.

When you might need some help

As you can probably tell, this is a lot more involved than just picking a few keywords and setting a budget. It's a proper strategic shift. Getting the keyword research right, calculating the financial models, implementing flawless conversion tracking, and restructuring an entire account takes time and expertise. Making a mistake in any of these areas, especially when you're trying to increase your ad spend, can get very expensive, very quickly.

It's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's about understanding your audience, optimising your targeting, creating compelling ads, and fine-tuning your landing page.

That's where a professional consultancy can make a huge difference. With years of experience and a deep understanding of the advertising landscape, we can help you identify the best strategies to make scaling profitable. We can provide insights that you might not have thought of and take over implementation of the entire optimisation process for you, ensuring that every pound you spend is working to grow your business, not just your click count. If you'd like to get a second pair of eyes on your strategy, we offer a completely free, no-obligation consultation to review your current campaigns and identify your biggest opportunities for growth.

Hope that helps!