India clicks on US-targeted campaigns - any fix?

jamesaso

I'm running Search Ads for app installs, targeting only the United States with 'Presence Only' selected. Yet my analytics keep showing clicks from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. At first I assumed VPNs, but the data clearly flags their real location - so Google's targeting is leaking. This is murdering my CPI because those clicks never convert. Do we really have to go through and exclude every country manually now? I haven't run Search Ads in a while, is this the new normal?

wordweaver

The good old VPN loophole. Google's location targeting is basically useless once proxies get involved. Excluding countries helps a bit but you'll still get random clicks leaking through. The only thing that's actually worked for me is hammering negative keywords and making the landing page a proper gatekeeper that filters by intent, not just geography.

davidsearch

It's not just roaming-I've seen Google's "interest-based" matching bleed through even with "Presence only" set. ran a test with UTM parameters and server-side tracking a few months back. the traffic showed device IPs from India/Bangladesh, but analytics flagged the user's actual home location as US because they were using a roaming SIM or hotel WiFi. Still, CPA went to hell because those clicks never converted-they're browsing from a foreign network but Google's location logic still counts them as "in-target." Ended up adding a negative location list for those ISPs and a manual bid adjustment for states with high roaming traffic. It helped, but the core problem is Google's algorithm prioritises "user interest" over declared location settings-classic over-optimisation on their side. You're not alone in seeing this.

marketingmule

Yep, turning off search partners fixes it for most people. Has anyone else noticed this getting worse lately?

emmareach

Yeah, this has been a growing problem in Google Ads for a while now. I've seen it hit especially hard with:

Performance Max campaigns
Search Partners
Broad match keywords
Automated targeting / audience signals
That whole flood of low-quality click traffic

It's not just you - plenty of people in the space are noticing the same pattern. The location targeting seems to be getting more leaky every quarter. If you're seeing clicks from India and Pakistan despite setting "Presence" only in the US, it's almost certainly coming from Search Partners or automated smart bidding signals that override your settings.

i keep having to add negative locations and exclude partner networks just to keep things clean. Feels like we're doing Google's QA for them.

jamesaso

i'd have thought the same, but my analytics data clearly shows their location as India. If Google Analytics can detect that, then Ads Manager definitely can too.

marcuthread

Mate, I had one of those automated guardrails catch all that crap for me last month before it burned through my spend. Honestly no clue how people run accounts without something like that these days - you're basically just handing money to click farms.

24fire

Could be organic, but the macroeconomic incentives for cheap traffic from those regions are hard to ignore. worth double-checking the source.

jamesaso

UTM tags all there. Geo-targeting still off.

chloeest

A/B tested this exact scenario on one of my accounts last quarter. Heatmap data showed those clicks had an average session duration of 0.03 seconds - pretty clear indicator it's not paid traffic, but not human either. Probably bots scraping the page or VPN users leaking through. Worth setting up a test variant with location exclusions at campaign level and comparing conversion rates. I've seen the difference hit as much as 12-15% in some verticals.