Ads for Kyiv, Clicks from Warsaw: How to Check Where Your Ads Show

You advertise a salon, a repair shop or a clinic in Kyiv and pay for every click. But who exactly is clicking? By default, Google Ads shows your ads not only to people in your city but also to people who are “interested” in it. And there are very many Ukrainians abroad right now: they search for Kyiv services, but they will not come to you. Below: what this setting is, what Google itself says about it, what practitioners say, and what you can check in five minutes without a contractor.

We checked the facts against the Google Ads help pages on 27 October 2026. Menu item names depend on the interface version and may differ slightly.

1. What Google does by default

In your campaign settings there is a “Locations” section. That is where you choose where your ads show: a country, a city, a region or a radius around an address. There are also advanced options that decide whom Google counts as a person “from this place”. There are two:

• “Presence or interest”: your ads show to people in or regularly in your targeted locations, and to people who show interest in them.
• “Presence”: your ads show only to people in or regularly in your targeted locations.

The first option is the default, and Google’s help page says it is the default and that Google recommends using it.

What is “interest”? Google infers it from search terms, content people viewed and recent visits to a place. Google’s own example from the help pages: a user in Warsaw searches for a taxi in Odesa, and Odesa becomes a location of interest for that user. So a person in Warsaw can see your ad “for Kyiv”.

2. Why this can cost you money

You pay per click. If the person who clicked was in Warsaw or Berlin looking for a Kyiv specialist, the click is paid for and there is no customer: that person will not show up.

How many Ukrainians are abroad? According to the UNHCR update of 30 April 2026, there are about 5.76 million refugees from Ukraine worldwide, of whom about 5.21 million are in European countries (reported by Interfax-Ukraine on 18 May 2026; part of the decrease is explained by registry updates). These are refugees, not all Ukrainians abroad, and the figures do not tell you how many of them see ads from your particular campaign. But the order of magnitude shows that the audience of “Kyivans outside Kyiv” is large.

Let us be honest here: we have not seen data on how many “Warsaw” clicks a typical Kyiv campaign gets. It depends on the service. A travel agency or a flower delivery to Kyiv for relatives needs exactly such people. A nail salon does not.

3. What Google and practitioners say

Opinions differ here, and we hide neither side.

Google recommends the default. For Search ads, broad geo targeting is the recommended practice. Google also gives its own data: in global data for 21 May to 1 June 2022, advertisers in travel, real estate and education who moved from “Presence” to “Presence or interest” saw about 5% more conversions on Search campaigns. That is Google’s internal data, with no independent check, and it is not about small local businesses. Google suggests “Presence” for sensitive verticals with strict targeting limitations and when you want to reach only people physically in the right place. Google also writes that a narrower option usually reduces impressions.

Practitioners serving local businesses advise the opposite. For a salon, a repair shop or a clinic they set “Presence”: otherwise, they say, you pay for clicks from people who searched for the city from afar. One example we saw from practitioners is a cleaning company case in Lviv, Kyiv and Odesa, where turning off “interest” in Search gave more targeted traffic (the sources give no numbers). For an online store delivering across Ukraine they advise “Presence” and the whole country as the location: in one foreign case (Romania) ads “leaked” to the diaspora, but there too there are no savings figures. Other practitioners add: for hotels and resorts the default may actually be useful.

What nobody has: an independent before-and-after comparison for a small local business. We did not find one. All the stories about “wasted budget” come from agencies, and the numbers in favour of the default come from Google. So the only honest way is to look in your own account.

4. How to check it yourself in five minutes

1. Open Google Ads: “Campaigns” → “Campaigns” → “Settings” tab → your campaign → “Locations” panel.
2. Open the advanced location options (in the help pages: “Location options”).
3. See what is selected. For a business where the customer comes in, or where a specialist travels to the customer, it should say “Presence”: people in or regularly in your targeted locations.
4. See where the impressions come from. Google’s help describes the “Matched locations” view with a “Most specific location” column. Note: Google writes that this may be a customer’s physical location or a location they have shown interest in. So the report will not separate “lives in Warsaw” from “searched for Kyiv from Warsaw” by itself. We could not confirm from the help pages that the interface has a report purely on physical location, so do not rely on this one alone.
5. The second look is your leads. Check your leads and calls for people from outside your city. We wrote about spam from foreign countries in the article on spam leads from ads.

If you change the option, do it gradually: record impressions, clicks and leads for the previous 2–4 weeks, change the setting in one campaign and compare. There will be fewer impressions (that is expected, and Google warns about it); the question is whether the number of leads falls. If leads did not fall and spending on pointless clicks did, you have succeeded.

5. When the default can be the right choice

Do not switch everything blindly. The default can pay off if your customers often look for you from abroad or from another city in advance: a hotel, an airport transfer, a wedding photographer, services ordered “for relatives”. If you are not sure, run a test on one campaign and compare leads, not clicks.

From our practice

For local campaigns (a salon, a service, a clinic in one city) we set “Presence” and separately check that leads have not dropped. For stores delivering across the country we also choose “Presence” and set the whole of Ukraine as the location. This is our practice, not statistics: we have not run a separate study across clients, and we recheck it for each business. Another setting Google turns on by itself is covered in the article on five settings Google Ads turns on by itself, and what exactly your ads count as a lead is in the checklist on leads.

Summary

1. By default Google Ads also shows your ads to people who merely “take an interest” in your city, including people abroad.
2. Google recommends this option; practitioners serving local businesses set “Presence”. There is no independent comparison.
3. Check: Campaigns → Settings → campaign → “Locations” → advanced options.
4. For a business in one city, or a store delivering across the country, try “Presence” on one campaign and compare leads.
5. Do not look only at impressions and clicks: what you pay for shows in your leads.

See how we set up and evaluate advertising in the Google Ads for business section.

Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we’ll look at your account and tell you where your ads show and whether it matches the city you work in.