Most businesses think about location targeting in terms of their own neighborhood. A hardware store or a dental office wants customers who live nearby, so drawing a radius around the storefront makes sense. Destination businesses work differently. An inn on the coast, a bike or kayak rental shop, or a restaurant in a lake or mountain town serves customers who live hours away and spend most of the year somewhere else. The decision to visit, and often the decisions about where to stay, eat, and rent gear, happen from a laptop or phone in a city apartment weeks before anyone loads the car.
That gap between where customers live and where they spend money changes how location settings, campaign structure, and timing should be configured in Google Ads, Meta, and other ad platforms. Default settings on most platforms are built around customers who are already nearby, so a destination business running on defaults often spends in places that produce little revenue while underinvesting in the markets that send most of its guests. This post walks through how geo-targeting works for businesses whose customers travel to them, using destinations that draw from major Northeast population centers as the running example, from beach and lake towns in the summer to mountain towns in the winter.
Start With Where Your Customers Come From
Before building any targeting, the first step is identifying feeder markets, the metro areas that send the largest share of visitors. For a destination in the Northeast, that list often includes the Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Hartford metro areas, with Montreal added for businesses within driving distance of the Canadian border. Each market behaves differently, and the right mix depends on the business.
Most businesses already have this data spread across a few systems:
Reservation and booking systems, which store guest billing addresses or zip codes
GA4 (Google Analytics 4), which reports website visitors by city and region in its demographic reports
Google Ads user location reports, which show where people were physically located when they clicked an ad
Point of sale systems and email lists, which often capture zip codes at checkout or signup
A rough tally from the last two peak seasons is enough to rank markets by volume. Comparing that ranking against revenue per guest adds a second layer. A market that sends fewer visitors but books longer stays or larger groups can justify more budget than its visitor count alone would suggest.
Presence and Interest Settings
Google Ads offers two main location options in campaign settings. "Presence or interest" reaches people who are in, regularly in, or have shown interest in the targeted location. "Presence" reaches only people who are in or regularly in that location.
For a destination business, the right choice depends on which geography the campaign targets. When a campaign targets the destination itself, such as a radius around a coastal town, "Presence or interest" is the setting that allows someone in Boston searching for lodging in that town to see the ad. Switching that campaign to "Presence" would limit it to people already physically in town, which removes most of the planning audience.
When a campaign targets feeder markets directly, such as the New York and Boston metro areas, "Presence" keeps spend focused on people who live there. Leaving that campaign on "Presence or interest" can serve ads to people anywhere in the country who have shown interest in New York, which is rarely the intent.
Many destination businesses run both structures side by side. One campaign targets the destination with interest included, capturing people actively researching the area. A second campaign targets feeder markets by presence, reaching people who fit the customer profile before they have started searching for a specific town.
Meta approaches location differently. Its location targeting is built around where people live or have recently been. Reaching travelers on Facebook and Instagram generally means targeting the feeder markets themselves and letting the creative, and any interest or audience targeting, carry the destination context.
Keywords Do Some of the Targeting
On search campaigns, the keywords themselves carry location intent. Someone in Philadelphia searching for bike rentals in a specific town has already told the search engine where they plan to be. Keywords that include the destination name, the resort name, or the region act as a second layer of geo-targeting on top of campaign settings.
This matters most when deciding how broad the location targeting should be. A campaign built on destination-specific keywords can often target a wide area, sometimes the entire Northeast, because the keywords filter out irrelevant searches. A campaign built on generic keywords, like "bike rentals" or "cabin rentals," needs tighter location targeting, since those searches come from people planning trips to every destination in the region.
Broad match keywords and automated campaign types like Performance Max loosen this connection, because the platform decides which searches are relevant. Reviewing search term reports regularly shows whether ads are appearing for searches about competing destinations, a common source of wasted spend for businesses in resort towns.
Separate Markets When Budgets and Behavior Differ
Bundling every feeder market into a single campaign is tempting because the setup is simpler and there are fewer budgets to monitor. The drawback is that the platform decides how spend is divided, and it tends to favor whichever market produces the cheapest clicks or conversions in the short term. That market is not always the one producing the most valuable guests.
Automated bidding adds another consideration. Google's Smart Bidding strategies, including Maximize Conversions and Target CPA (cost per acquisition), ignore location bid adjustments. Setting a 20 percent increase for Boston has no effect on a campaign using these strategies. When a business wants to deliberately weight one market over another, separate campaigns with their own budgets are the dependable way to do it.
For smaller budgets, a practical middle ground looks like this:
Group markets with similar drive times and booking behavior together, such as Boston and Hartford
Keep a larger or distinct market, like New York, in its own campaign
Treat Canadian markets as a separate campaign, with French-language ad copy considered for Quebec audiences and messaging that accounts for exchange rates, since price sensitivity among Canadian visitors shifts with the currency
This keeps the account manageable while still giving direct control over how much each market receives.
Drive Time Shapes Booking Windows
Distance changes more than who sees an ad. It also changes when people decide. Visitors within a three to four hour drive often book on short notice, sometimes the same week, once a clear forecast shows up or a weekend opens up. Visitors traveling from farther away, or flying in, tend to plan weeks or months ahead and are more likely to lock in holiday periods early.
That difference has direct effects on how campaigns should run:
Closer markets respond to timely messaging tied to conditions, like a sunny weekend forecast, peak fall foliage, or fresh snowfall
Farther markets respond to earlier planning messages, such as holiday availability and multi-night packages
Campaigns for drive markets can scale up quickly when weather cooperates, while campaigns for distant markets need consistent presence well ahead of peak dates
A single campaign serving both groups the same ads on the same schedule tends to reach the drive market too early and the distant market too late. Splitting campaigns by market, as described above, also makes it possible to adjust budgets and ad schedules around these different booking windows.
Handling the Local Audience
Destination businesses also have a local audience made up of year-round residents, second-home owners, and seasonal workers. Whether to include them depends on the business. A restaurant or bar may rely on locals to fill slower midweek nights and want them in most campaigns. A lodging property has little reason to pay for clicks from people who live ten minutes away.
For businesses that do not serve the local market, excluding a tight radius around town from feeder-market and interest-based campaigns prevents spend on people who will never book a room. For businesses that do, a separate local campaign with its own messaging, such as midweek specials, events, or happy hour menus, keeps residents from seeing ads about planning a getaway to the town they already live in.
Reading Location Data After Launch
Once campaigns are running, location performance should be reviewed on a regular schedule. Google Ads provides two location views worth keeping separate. The targeted locations report shows performance by the locations set in campaign settings. The user locations report shows where people were physically located when they clicked. Comparing the two often reveals useful gaps. A campaign targeting the destination area may show most of its clicks coming from a single metro, which is a signal that the metro could perform better with its own campaign and budget.
A few patterns are worth watching throughout the season:
Markets with strong click volume and weak conversion rates, which can point to a mismatch in messaging or booking window timing
Unexpected markets appearing in user location data, which can reveal new feeder markets worth testing
Differences in average cost per conversion between markets, keeping in mind that a higher cost in one market can still be the more profitable result if guests from that market spend more per visit
Pairing ad platform data with booking data completes the picture. Ad platforms report conversions, but a reservation or point of sale system shows which markets produced the longest stays, the largest groups, and the most repeat visits. Reviewing both together is what separates a market that looks efficient inside the ad platform from one that produces the most revenue for the business.
Key Takeaways
Identify feeder markets using booking records, GA4, and ad platform location reports before building campaigns
Use "Presence or interest" when targeting the destination itself and "Presence" when targeting feeder markets directly
Let destination-specific keywords do part of the targeting work, and watch search terms for competing destinations
Split markets into separate campaigns when they need different budgets, since Smart Bidding ignores location bid adjustments
Match timing and messaging to drive time, with short-notice messaging for nearby markets and earlier planning messages for distant ones
Decide deliberately whether the local audience belongs in campaigns
Review location performance alongside booking data, since the lowest average cost per conversion does not always produce the most valuable guests