Solved: Should I exclude countries when targeting one country?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! That's a really good question, and honestly, it's one of those things that seems simple on the surface but actually gets to the very heart of running efficient and profitable ad campaigns. A lot of people get this wrong and end up wasting a suprising amount of their budget without even realising it.

The short answer is yes, you absolutely should bother excluding everywhere else if you're only targeting the UK. But the 'why' is where it gets interesting and reveals a lot about how these ad platforms really work. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and walk you through not just the 'how', but the strategic reasons behind it that can save you a lot of money and headaches down the line.

We'll need to look at why 'Targeting the UK' isn't enough...

You'd think that when you tell a platform like Meta or Google, "I want to target people in the United Kingdom," that's exactly what it would do. You set your location, job done. But unfortunately, it's not quite that straightforward. The fundamental thing to understand is the core motivation of the ad platform's algorithm. Its primary job isn't to find you the perfect customer; its job is to spend your daily budget while achieving your chosen objective (e.g., clicks, impressions, conversions) at the lowest possible cost to the platform.

This means the algorithm is constantly hunting for bargains. It's looking for the cheapest eyeballs, the cheapest clicks, the cheapest conversions. And where are those typically found? In countries with lower advertising competition and lower economic value, which is almost certainly outside of the UK. So, if you leave the door open by not explicitly excluding other countries, you're essentially inviting the algorithm to find these 'bargain' users. It will see an opportunity to show your ad to someone in a completely different country for a fraction of a penny, and it will take it. This is what we call 'budget leakage'.

Think of it like this: you've set up a market stall in a specific, affluent part of London. You know the customers there are willing to pay for your quality products. If you just put up a sign that says "Open for business," you'll get some local custom. But if you don't put up any barriers, you'll also get people wandering in from miles away who were just looking for the cheapest possible option and have no real intention of buying your premium goods. You're spending time and energy on people who were never going to be your customers. By actively excluding other countries, you're putting up the velvet rope. You're telling the bouncer (the algorithm) exactly who is and isn't on the list, forcing it to focus its attention only on the high-value crowd you actually want to talk to.

Another critical detail that trips people up is the default setting on platforms like Meta: "People living in or recently in this location". This sounds harmless, but it can be a real campaign killer. This setting means your ads could be shown to someone who lives in New York but was on holiday in London last week. Or someone who just passed through Heathrow on a layover. These people are not your UK-based customers. For almost every business, from a local plumber to a national ecommerce store, you need to change this setting to "People living in this location". It's a small click, but it makes a massive difference in ensuring you're reaching actual residents, not transient visitors who can't buy from you anyway.

I'd say you need to understand the financial drain of poor targeting...

Okay, so we've established that budget leakage is a real thing. But what's the actual financial impact? It's often much bigger than people think. Let's say just 10% of your budget leaks outside the UK. If you're spending £2,000 a month, that's £200 straight down the drain. Over a year, that's £2,400. That's a significant amount of money that could have been spent acquiring actual, paying customers in the UK.

The problem is compounded by the vast difference in costs between countries. A click in the UK might cost you £1.50, while a click from another country might cost £0.10. The algorithm sees this and loves it. But that £0.10 click is worthless to you. The lead you might get from that click is worthless. The data point it adds to your pixel is worse than worthless—it's actively harmful, as we'll see later.

We've worked on campaigns where, before we took over, a client was wondering why their Cost Per Lead (CPL) was so low but their sales were terrible. When we looked into their analytics, we saw that 40% of their "leads" were coming from countries they couldn't even service. The platform was reporting a fantastic CPL, and the dashboard looked great, but the business was suffering because none of it was real. They were paying for vanity metrics, not results. This is a classic trap.

To really bring this home, I've put together a little interactive calculator. Play around with the sliders to see how even a small percentage of wasted budget can drastically inflate your true cost of acquiring a customer and reduce the number of real customers you could have reached.

This simple calculation shows that the issue isn't just about wasting a few quid; it's about the opportunity cost. Every pound spent outside the UK is a pound not spent on finding a real customer. It's the difference between hitting your targets and wondering why your ad spend isn't translating into tangible growth. This is why we always stress quality over quantity. It's far better to get 10 high-quality leads from the UK than 100 low-quality leads from all over the world. The latter just creates noise, wastes your sales team's time, and ultimately, costs you money.

You probably should think beyond just excluding...

Now that we're clear on the importance of exclusion, let's take it a step further. Proper geographic targeting isn't just a defensive move to prevent waste; it's a powerful offensive tool for optimisation. Just targeting "the UK" as a single block is often a missed opportunity.

The UK isn't a monolith. Consumer behaviour, competition, and therefore advertising costs, can vary wildly between London, Manchester, rural Wales, and the Scottish Highlands. Lumping them all together in one campaign means you're averaging everything out. You're hiding valuable insights. For example, the high Cost Per Click (CPC) in London might be dragging down the overall performance of your campaign, but it's being masked by a much lower CPC in less competitive areas. You wouldn't know that your return on investment is actually 3x higher in the North of England because all the data is blended together.

A more sophisticated approach is to segment your campaigns geographically. You don't have to go crazy and create a campaign for every single county, but you can be strategic. For an e-commerce client, we might set up seperate campaigns or ad sets targeting:

• -> Tier 1: London (highest competition, highest spend, requires specific messaging)
• -> Tier 2: Other Major Cities (Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, etc.)
• -> Tier 3: Rest of UK

This structure immediately gives you clarity. You can allocate budget based on performance, not just population. If you discover that Tier 2 cities are converting at half the cost of London, you can shift more of your budget there to maximise your returns. You can also tailor your ad creative. An ad that resonates with a Londoner might be very different from one that works in a smaller town. This level of granularity is where you move from just 'running ads' to 'running a smart, data-driven advertising strategy'.

The right structure really depends on your business model. I've built a little flowchart to help visualise how you might approach this. It's a simplified model, but it illustrates the thought process.

You'll need to consider how this affects your data...

This is probably the most overlooked consequence of sloppy location targeting. It doesn't just waste your ad spend in the short term; it poisons your data, which has long-term, expensive repercussions for your entire marketing funnel.

First, think about your website analytics. If 20% of your website traffic is coming from countries you don't serve, all your key metrics are skewed. Your bounce rate will look higher than it really is for your target audience. Your average session duration will look lower. Your conversion rate will be artifically depressed. This makes it incredibly difficult to make good decisions. You might think your landing page isn't working and spend thousands on a redesign, when the real problem was that you were just sending a load of irrelevant international traffic to it.

Second, and perhaps more critically, it messes up your ad platform's pixel data. The pixel is the brain of your advertising operation. It learns from every single visitor. When you feed it junk data from irrelevant countries, you're essentially making it dumber. The algorithm learns that "people who visit my site" includes a large chunk of users from outside the UK.

What happens next?

• Retargeting becomes inefficient: You'll spend money showing your ads again to people in countries who can't buy from you. Your "Added to Cart - last 30 days" audience is contaminated.
• Lookalike audiences become weaker: When you ask Meta to create a lookalike audience of your website visitors or purchasers, it's going to base its model on a flawed dataset. It will look for patterns among your UK customers AND your irrelevant international visitors. The resulting audience will be a diluted, less accurate version of what it should be, leading to higher acquisition costs when you try to prospect for new customers.

I've run audits for so many accounts where the client complains their lookalike audiences "don't work". The first thing we check is the geographic source of their pixel data. More often than not, it's a mess of worldwide traffic. Cleaning this up by implementing strict location targeting is the first step to building powerful, effective audiences that actually drive growth.

Here's a visual representation of how this data pollution affects your audience quality.

Here's how you actually set it up...

Talking about the theory is all well and good, but let's get down to the practical steps. Here's how you would correctly set this up on the two biggest platforms.

On Meta (Facebook/Instagram):

1. Go to your Ad Set level in Ads Manager.
2. Find the "Audience" section and scroll down to "Locations".
3. In the "Include" box, type "United Kingdom" and select it as a country.
4. This is the crucial step: Directly below the "Include" box, click on the "Exclude" link.
5. In the "Exclude" box, you have a couple of options. The easiest is to type "Worldwide" and select the global region. Meta will be smart enough to keep the UK targeted because your "Include" rule overrides the "Exclude" rule for that specific country. Alternatively, you could exclude by continent (e.g., exclude Asia, Africa, North America, etc.) if you prefer.
6. Finally, click on the dropdown menu that defaults to "People living in or recently in this location" and change it to "People living in this location".

On Google Ads:

1. Navigate to the Campaign you want to edit.
2. In the left-hand menu, click on "Locations".
3. You should see "United Kingdom" listed under "Targeted locations". If not, click the blue pencil icon to edit, and add it.
4. Now, click on the "EXCLUDED" tab at the top of the locations panel.
5. Click the blue pencil icon again. In the box, start adding the countries or continents you want to exclude. Again, adding whole continents is usually faster than individual countries. You cannot just exclude "Worldwide" here like on Meta; you have to be more specific.
6. Another important setting is under "Campaign Settings" -> "Locations" -> "Location options". Make sure you have "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations" selected. The default "Presence or interest" option is far too broad and will show your ads to people outside the UK who have simply shown an interest in the UK, which is definately not what you want.

It takes an extra 60 seconds to set this up properly, but those 60 seconds will save you hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds and dramatically improve the quality of your campaign data over the long run.

So, to pull this all together for you...

As you can see, a seemingly simple question about location targeting opens up a whole world of strategic considerations. Getting it right is fundamental to any successful paid advertising effort. It's not a minor detail; it's the foundation upon which everything else is built. If your foundation is cracked because you're leaking budget and polluting your data, it doesn't matter how great your ads are—your results will always be compromised.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a simple table to summarise the key action points.

Navigating these details is precisely where expert help can make a significant difference. It’s not just about knowing which buttons to click; it's about understanding the deep-seated logic of the platforms and building a strategy that forces them to work for your business goals, not just their own. These small, foundational tweaks are often what separate campaigns that break even from those that are wildly profitable.

I hope this detailed breakdown has been genuinely helpful. If you'd like to chat further and have a look at your specific campaigns, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can review your account and give you some more tailored advice.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh