Location, Schedule and Devices in South Florida

Updated: November 13, 2026 · Leer este capítulo en español

Google Ads location targeting, the ad schedule and device settings decide who sees your ads, when and on what screen. They look like small checkboxes, but in South Florida they carry a lot of weight: the region mixes residents, snowbirds and tourists, people switch between English and Spanish in the same sentence, and the calendar is shaped by heat, hurricanes and high season. This chapter shows how to set each of them so you pay only for people you can actually serve.

Google Ads location targeting: presence or interest

When you set the locations for a campaign, Google asks a question that most owners skip past. At the time of writing, it offers two main options for the places you include:

• Presence: people who are in, or regularly in, your targeted locations.
• Presence or interest: people who are in, regularly in, or have shown interest in your targeted locations.

Google's help page About advanced location options calls the broader option the default and recommended setting, and points to travel, real estate and education as areas where it tends to help. The same page also explains when plain "presence" makes more sense. Read that as what it is: a general recommendation from the company that sells the clicks, not a decision about your business.

The difference sounds technical, but it decides who you pay for. With "presence or interest," a person in Chicago who searches "AC repair Hialeah" or simply looks at Miami trip content can see your ad. For our example HVAC company in Hialeah, that click is almost always wasted money: nobody in Chicago needs a technician in Hialeah today. For that business, presence is the right choice.

Now take our example Cuban restaurant in Little Havana. A couple in Toronto planning a February trip and searching "best cuban food little havana" is exactly the kind of customer the restaurant wants. For a business that lives partly on visitors, "presence or interest" can make sense, ideally in a separate campaign with tourist-style keywords and its own budget, so you can see what travelers cost compared with locals.

South Florida also has a group in between: snowbirds, people who spend the winter here and the rest of the year up north. While they are here, they are "in" the area like any resident. Before they arrive, they may be searching from New York or Montreal for a dentist or an AC check for the condo they are about to open. Whether you want those early searches depends on your business, and that is the point: decide it on purpose instead of accepting the default.

Keep in mind that Google works out location from signals such as device location, IP address and the place names in the search. It is good, not perfect. Some clicks from outside your area will slip through. Google Ads has a report of where the people who saw or clicked your ads were located; look at it after the first weeks and adjust.

Miami-Dade, Broward or a radius: drawing your map

Google lets you target a country, a state, a county, a city, a ZIP code or a radius around an address. In South Florida, the choice between them matters more than people expect, because the map is a patchwork of separate cities.

A radius is the easiest option and often the least accurate here. Draw ten miles around Little Havana and part of the circle falls on Biscayne Bay, while some places inside it can take a long time to reach across a causeway at rush hour. Ten miles in South Florida is not a distance, it is a drive time. For service businesses, a list of ZIP codes built with the people who do the driving is usually the most honest map.

Two more tips. Google's boundaries for a city or neighborhood may not match the official ones exactly, so check the map preview before saving. And if you use manual bidding, you can bid more for the ZIP codes closest to you and less for the edges. At the time of writing, smart bidding strategies set those adjustments on their own and mostly ignore manual location adjustments, which is one more reason to get the map itself right.

Excluding areas you do not serve

Excluding places is as important as including them. Exclusions protect you from areas that sit inside your targeting but that you do not want: a far corner of the county, an island neighborhood your crews cannot reach quickly, or a city where you have no license to work.

• Exclude the far edges of a county or radius if your technicians cannot get there on time. A late arrival costs you the review, not just the job.
• Exclude other countries when you serve only local customers. Miami is searched from all over Latin America, often in Spanish, and with "presence or interest" those clicks can add up.
• Prefer "presence" for exclusions. At the time of writing, Google lets you choose how exclusions apply too; excluding people physically in a place is the usual choice.
• Pair location exclusions with negative keywords for place names. If you do not work in Homestead, add "homestead" as a negative so searches like "ac repair homestead" do not trigger your ads from inside your area. Match Types and Negative Keywords explains how.

Ad schedule: run ads when someone can answer

Every paid click that ends in a call nobody answers is money handed to a competitor, because the caller simply dials the next result. The ad schedule fixes this: it lets you choose the days and hours your ads appear.

First, a setting to get right on day one: the account time zone. It is chosen when the account is created, and your schedules and reports are read in it. For a South Florida business, it should be Eastern Time. An account created by a freelancer abroad or set up while traveling can end up hours off, every schedule built on it will be wrong, and fixing that later is far more trouble than choosing well at the start. Google's page About Ad Scheduling covers the schedule options in detail.

Then build the schedule around reality:

1. List the hours someone picks up the phone, not the hours on the door. If the front desk at the dental office closes at 6 p.m. but the last person leaves at 5:30, the schedule ends at 5:30.
2. Separate calls from forms. A form or online booking can be answered tomorrow morning; a call cannot. A common approach is to let ads run a little longer than office hours while the call button (the call asset) follows its own, shorter schedule.
3. Be honest about "24/7". The HVAC company can run ads at 2 a.m. only if a technician or answering service really picks up and can dispatch. Otherwise the late-night budget is better spent during the day.
4. Match the restaurant's moments. For the Cuban restaurant, searches happen before lunch and before dinner, and on weekend mornings for breakfast. Ads at 4 a.m. buy curiosity, not tables.
5. Review after a few weeks. Google Ads shows results by day and hour. With enough data, you may lower bids in weak hours or raise them in strong ones (directly with manual bidding; smart bidding adjusts by time on its own).

What pros do: they call the business from a mobile phone during the scheduled hours, a few times, on different days, just as a customer would. If the call goes to voicemail, rings forever or reaches someone who cannot help, they fix that before touching anything in Google Ads. The cheapest improvement in most local accounts is answering the phone.

Mobile and call-heavy searches

For many local services, a large part of the searches come from phones, often from people who want to call right now. Do not take that on faith for your own business: Google Ads shows your results by device, so after a few weeks you will know your real split. But plan for mobile from the start.

• A call button changes the game. With call assets (see Writing Ads That Get the Click), someone can call straight from the ad without visiting your site. For urgent services this is often where most leads come from. At the time of writing, Google also offers ad formats built around the call itself, called call ads.
• The page must work on a phone. Fast loading, the phone number visible without scrolling, a short form. A page that looks fine on your office computer can be painful on a phone with weak signal in a parking lot.
• Different devices, different intent. Someone researching dental implants may compare options on a computer at night; someone with a broken AC calls from the phone at noon. The dental office may see more forms from computers and more calls from phones.
• Device adjustments. With manual bidding you can raise or lower bids by device. At the time of writing, a -100% adjustment excludes a device, and that one works with smart bidding too. Excluding phones is rarely wise for a local business; excluding tablets because of a few expensive clicks usually is not worth the effort.

Calls also need to be counted, not just received. How to track them, and how to tell a real lead from a two-second hang-up, is covered in Measuring Calls, Leads and Sales.

Language targeting for bilingual Miami

For years, Google Ads had a campaign-level language setting, and it seemed obvious to choose Spanish for a Spanish campaign. In Miami that often backfired, because many bilingual people have phones and Google accounts set in English while they search in Spanish. Google has since changed the rules: starting in September 2026, the campaign language setting no longer applies to ads on the Search Network. Google now matches ads to the language of the search itself, preferring ads written in the same language as the query. At the time of writing, older articles (and some accounts mid-transition) still show the setting, so it helps to understand both.

Imagine a customer in Hialeah whose phone is in English searching "reparación de aire acondicionado hialeah." Under the old setting, a campaign restricted to Spanish speakers might not have reached him. Under the new rules, what decides is whether you have an ad written in Spanish for that Spanish search. The practical approach in bilingual markets is the same either way:

• Write ads in both languages. With the new rules, the language of your ad is what matches it to the language of the search. If your account still shows the old setting, include both English and Spanish instead of trying to sort people by it.
• Let keywords do the sorting. Spanish keywords in their own ad group or campaign, with ads written in Spanish. English keywords with English ads. Keywords Miami Customers Really Type covers how people actually search in Spanish and Spanglish.
• Send Spanish searches to a Spanish page, and make sure whoever answers the phone can switch languages. An ad in Spanish that leads to a page and a voice in English loses the customer at the last step.

The South Florida calendar: hurricanes, tourists and holidays

A campaign that runs the same way twelve months a year ignores how this region lives. The table shows the main moments. Dates are approximate, and how much each one matters depends on your business.

A little context on three of those dates. The National Hurricane Center dates the Atlantic season from June 1 to November 30 and marks September 10 as its statistical peak, though storms can form before and after the official dates. Art Basel Miami Beach has been held since 2002, in early December at the Miami Beach Convention Center, and anchors what is now called Miami Art Week. And the Calle Ocho Festival, started by Cuban exiles in 1978, takes over SW 8th Street in Little Havana every March. For our example Cuban restaurant, that weekend is not a normal Saturday: the schedule, the budget and the kitchen all need to be ready for it.

A storm plan for your ads

When a hurricane approaches, offices close, crews prepare their own homes and phones go unanswered, but campaigns keep spending unless someone stops them. After the storm, demand can jump for repairs, water damage and AC service once power returns. Write the plan before the season:

• Who pauses or lowers the campaigns when a storm alert is issued, and from which device if the office is closed.
• Which ads and services go live after the storm, already written and approved, with honest, practical wording.
• How you will handle more calls than you can serve, so you do not pay for leads you cannot attend.

Keep the tone helpful. Google's ad policies on sensitive events list natural disasters among the events during which Google may restrict ads, with the stated aim of cutting insensitive or exploitative content. Customers also remember who tried to profit from a bad week. Plain information ("We are open, here is how to reach us, here is what we can fix") works better and keeps you within the rules.

For the budget side of seasonality, such as when to raise spending and how fast, see Budgets and Bidding. If you would rather have a team keep the map, the schedule and the storm plan up to date, see how our PPC management in Miami works. The next chapter moves to the map itself: Local Services Ads and Google Maps.