Google Ads Location Not Specified: The Complete Fix Guide

It’s one of the most frustrating things to see in a Google Ads report. You spend hours crafting the perfect campaign, refining your radius targeting to specific postcodes in London or Manchester, and then you check your location reports.

There it is. A huge chunk of your budget, sometimes 20% or 30%, attributed to "Location Not Specified" or "United Kingdom (Country)" with no city detail.

It feels like you're burning money in a black hole. Without geographic data, how can you know if you're reaching your actual service area or just paying for clicks from someone using a VPN in a basement somewhere irrelevant? It breaks the fundamental promise of digital advertising: data transparency.

I’ve audited dozens of accounts this year alone where business owners were ready to turn off their ads entirely because of this specific metric. They assume it’s fraud, bots, or Google just being lazy with reporting.

But here is the contrarian view I usually take: "Location Not Specified" might actually be your best performing segment.

Before you panic and exclude everything that doesn't have a postcode attached to it, we need to dive into why this happens, why it’s getting worse (thanks to privacy laws), and how you can actually verify if these clicks are making you money or stealing it.

Why Google Hides Location Data (It's Not Just to Annoy You)

First off, let’s clear up a misconception. Google isn't usually hiding this data because they don't know where the user is (though that happens). They are often hiding it because they aren't allowed to tell you, or the user has taken steps to hide it.

We are living in the age of GDPR and hyper-privacy. In the UK and Europe especially, the granular tracking we got used to in 2015 is gone.

Here are the main culprits for that grey "Location Not Specified" bar in your charts:

• IP Masking & VPNs: A massive chunk of B2B traffic uses corporate VPNs. If I'm a CTO at a software company in Shoreditch, my internet traffic might be routed through a data centre in Ireland or just anonymised completely. If you block "unknown" locations, you effectively block me—the exact person you want to sell to.
• Mobile Carrier Data: Mobile towers don't always pass precise location data to ad exchanges, especially if the user has disabled location services on their browser but is still using Google Search.
• Privacy Settings: Users are opting out of tracking. Apple's iOS updates have made it incredibly easy for users to say "No" to sharing location data.
• Low Search Volume Areas: Sometimes, if a user is in a tiny village with very few people, Google purposefully obfuscates the specific location to prevent "fingerprinting" that user, simply rolling them up into a broader "Country" level report.

If you react emotionally and exclude this traffic, you aren't just cutting out noise. You are cutting out privacy-conscious, tech-savvy users. In my experience running B2B SaaS campaigns, these are often the users with the highest purchasing power.

The "Search Intent" Safety Net

So, if you can't rely on the location report, what do you rely on?

Intent.

This is where keyword strategy becomes your primary filter. If someone searches for "Emergency Electrician in Bristol," frankly, I don't care if Google thinks their IP address is in a data centre in Slough or if the location is "Unknown." The user has explicitly stated their intent and their location requirement in the search query.

We see this constantly with service businesses. If your keywords are broad, like "electrician" or "plumber," and your location targeting is loose, "Location Not Specified" is dangerous. You might be paying for clicks from anywhere. But if your keywords are tight, or if you are using phrase match with location qualifiers, the risk drops significantly.

However, you need to be careful. If you are a purely local business, seeing clicks from outside your area or unknown areas can be stressful. We see this often with local campaigns where irrelevant clicks can drain the budget. You can read more about how we handled irrelevant Google Ads clicks for local businesses here, but the gist is that "Unknown" wasn't the enemy—broad keywords were.

The Trap of "Presence vs. Interest"

One of the most common reasons "Location Not Specified" traffic turns out to be junk is not the lack of data, but a setting deep in your campaign options that most people miss.

Google defaults your location targeting to: "Presence or interest: People in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in your targeted locations."

Read that carefully. "Shown interest in."

This means if someone in Paris is researching a holiday in London, or just reading news about London, they have "shown interest." If you target London with this setting, Google might show your ad to that person in Paris. When you look at your report, their location might show up as "Unknown" (because they aren't actually in your radius) or "France".

The Fix: Always switch this setting to "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations."

This forces Google to only bid on users who are physically detected in your area (or regularly there). It tightens up the "Location Not Specified" bucket significantly because it removes the "Interested in" ambiguity. If you're struggling with high spend and poor targeting accuracy, check out our guide on solving poor geo-targeting accuracy.

Calculating the Risk: Should You Exclude It?

Okay, so you've tightened your settings, but the "Unknown" bucket is still there. Should you exclude it?

The only way to know is to run the math. You need to compare the CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) of your unknown traffic against your known traffic.

If "Location Not Specified" has spent £500 and generated 0 conversions, while London has spent £500 and generated 10, then yes, get rid of it. But often, you'll find the CPA is actually comparable.

Use the calculator below to simulate the impact of excluding this traffic. Often, business owners think they are "saving money" by excluding it, but they are actually capping their revenue.

Scaling Beyond Geography

When you focus too much on location data, you miss the bigger picture: Scalability.

One of the biggest issues we see with accounts that plateau is that they have over-constrained their targeting. They have layered so many location exclusions, radius restrictions, and audience filters that Google's algorithm has no room to breathe.

If you're trying to scale, "Location Not Specified" is often where your incremental growth lives. As mentioned in our guide on scaling beyond location targeting, expanding your view to trust algorithmic targeting (Smart Bidding) often yields better results than micromanaging every postcode.

Smart Bidding strategies like "Maximise Conversions" or "Target CPA" look at thousands of signals—time of day, browser history, device type, previous search behaviour—to determine if a user is likely to convert. Location is just one of those signals. If the other 99 signals scream "BUYER," but the location is unknown, Smart Bidding will still bid. And it should. If you block it, you are manually overriding a system that is smarter than you are.

Advanced Tactic: Validating "Unknown" Traffic with Server-Side Data

If you really can't sleep at night worrying about these clicks, there is a technical way to verify them.

When a user converts (fills out a form) on your site, you can capture their IP address on your server backend. Tools like HubSpot or simple WordPress plugins can do this. You can then run those IPs through a geolocation database.

For example, in B2B SaaS campaigns, we often find that "Unknown" leads come from IPs owned by major corporations or financial institutions—your exact target market. These companies just have strict firewalls that block standard location passing. If you exclude that traffic, you might cut off your biggest clients.

When You ABSOLUTELY Should Exclude It

I've defended the "Unknown" category a lot here, but there are times when you should kill it.

• Local Service Businesses with Strict Radii: If you are a pizza delivery place or a tow truck that literally cannot service someone outside a 10-mile radius, "Unknown" is too risky. You can't tow a car in Birmingham if you are in London. In this case, strict radius targeting and excluding "Location Not Specified" (if the platform allows effectively, or by using strict "Presence" settings) is safer.
• Legal/Compliance Constraints: If you are selling insurance or financial products that are legally only allowed to be sold to residents of a specific jurisdiction, you might need to be conservative.
• Obvious Spam Patterns: If you analyze your "Unknown" traffic and see a 99% bounce rate and 00:01 average session duration, while your known traffic has 2 minutes, then it’s probably bot traffic. Kill it.

If you suspect your location settings are actually draining your budget without returning value, you might want to read our article on stopping wasted money with better location targeting.

Visualizing the Data Flow

To help you understand why this data gets lost, I've put together a simple flowchart. It helps to visualise that "Unknown" isn't a single bucket of bad traffic, but a mix of various filtered users.

Action Plan: How to Optimise Your Campaign Now

So, you're looking at your account right now. What should you actually do? Here is the step-by-step logic I use when auditing a client account with this issue.

There is a lot of nuance here. If you're running Google Ads without location targeting being set up perfectly, you can spiral into high costs quickly. I’d recommend reading our guide on Google Ads without location targeting to understand the broader implications.

Final Thoughts

It's easy to look at "Location Not Specified" and see a failure of the system. But in reality, it's just the new normal of internet privacy. As advertisers, we have to move away from the obsession with perfect tracking and move towards an obsession with perfect intent.

If the user wants what you sell, and they have the money to pay for it, does it really matter if Google can't tell you which mobile tower they pinged off?

That said, getting this balance right is tricky. Leave it too open, and you waste budget. Lock it down too tight, and you miss your best customers.

If you're unsure whether your "Unknown" traffic is a goldmine or a money pit, it might be worth getting a second pair of eyes on it.

We offer a free initial consultation where we can dive into your location reports, audit your settings, and see exactly where your budget is going. We can't promise to fix Google's privacy protocols, but we can definitely help you stop wasting money on the wrong clicks.

Hope this helps!