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Two shops, one Google Ads account: stop letting the account decide which truck gets the call

Two shops on one website don't bid against each other in the auction. Put them in one campaign, though, and they share one budget, one season, one schedule and one phone number, and Ad Rank settles the towns between them.

By Lonta AIPublished Updated 14 min readHow we write

TL;DR

  • For Google Ads across multiple locations, run one account with a campaign per shop: its own zip codes, budget, ad schedule, phone number and address. Google sets budget, locations and schedule per campaign, so a campaign covering both shops has one of each for both.
  • Shops on one website don't bid against each other. Google says keywords in one account that target the same site and match the same search "don't compete with each other in the auction". Local Services Ads show only your highest-ranking location for an area.
  • A shared campaign costs you control instead. Where both shops could serve a household, Google picks by keyword, relevance and Ad Rank, and a campaign short of budget can sit out. Drive time isn't on that list, so give every shared zip code to one shop.
  • With a linked Business Profile, every shop address is eligible on every ad, and an ad showing an address can send the call to that shop's number. A location group on each campaign keeps each shop on its own ads.
  • Keep the shop campaigns off a shared budget. It exists to move unspent money between campaigns.

Do multiple locations in one Google Ads account bid against each other?

The common version says two locations in one account enter the same auction twice and raise their own price. Google's page on how it chooses between keywords inside one account says otherwise:

"If multiple keywords, targeting the same domain, are eligible to match the same search term, they don't compete with each other in the auction."

Only one of them can trigger an ad, or as the keyword matching page puts it, "you'll have only one bid in the ad auction". The prioritization page limits that rule to keywords "targeting the same domain". If each shop has its own website, these pages don't cover it, but Google's unfair advantage policy doesn't allow "Trying to show more than one ad for your business, app, or site in a single ad location". In Local Services Ads, when several of your locations serve the same area, Google's ad rankings page says it "will show only the highest ranking ad in response to a user's query".

So a second shop isn't a way to put two ads on one search. It costs you control over four things: which shop gets the towns in between, which phone rings, whose season sets the budget, and which hours the ads run. All four live on the campaign. Google's account structure page says campaigns "have their own budget and settings that determine where your ads appear".

Who gets the call from the towns between your shops?

Draw each shop's campaign as a radius and the zip codes between the shops usually land in both. There, Google's order of priority decides. When more than one of your keywords can serve a search, the prioritization page picks one in this order:

  1. An exact match keyword identical to the search term.
  2. A phrase or broad match keyword identical to the search term.
  3. Relevance, judged from "the meaning and context of the search term, all the keywords in an ad group, and landing pages within the ad group".
  4. If that still ties, the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

Two shop campaigns copied from one template have the same keywords and often the same landing page, so in our reading a search like "ac repair near me" ties through step 3 and goes to Ad Rank. The page also lists exceptions: a campaign whose location targeting doesn't cover the searcher can't serve, and a keyword in a campaign limited by budget "won't always be able to trigger an ad even if it otherwise could".

Our reading of what that does to a two-shop company: the household halfway between your shops goes to whichever campaign wins Ad Rank, or to whichever still has budget that afternoon. If the smaller shop's campaign runs dry by two o'clock, the bigger shop serves the middle for the rest of the day, and the call lands at the shop with the longer drive. In the report it looks like any other lead.

Settle it with the map, not the auction. Give each campaign a list of zip codes, with no zip code on both lists. Google's exclusions page says "there's no need to exclude areas that you haven't already targeted", with one exception: a campaign that targets places people "searched for or showed interest in". That is the default setting, "Presence or Interest", and Google counts being "recently in a location" as interest (About advanced location options). Our reading: under the default, a zip code list keeps the shops apart for people located in each map, not for everyone searching. A Prescott household just back from Phoenix can still match the Phoenix campaign. Switch each shop campaign to "Presence" if the split has to hold.

If a campaign has to stay a radius or a city, exclude the other shop's zip codes from it, since "exclusion takes priority". The same page says the number of locations you exclude "shouldn't exceed the number of locations you're targeting per campaign". Our reading: a radius or a city is one targeted location, so past one excluded zip code, switch to a zip code list.

When the middle belongs to neither shop. 1st Choice Plumbing, Air & Insulation has two Arizona shops, Phoenix and Prescott, about a hundred miles apart. Their combined targeting covered a good deal of the I-17 between them, nearly an hour from either shop. Ground like that comes out of both maps.

Searches that name the other town. Our reading: a homeowner in Phoenix searching "furnace repair prescott" for her mother's house is inside the Phoenix campaign's map, so the Phoenix campaign can take the search, and the call reaches the shop a hundred miles from the job. Add each shop's town names as negative keywords in the other shop's campaign. Under the default "Presence or Interest", which counts terms used in searches as interest in a place, the Prescott campaign can then take that search. Under "Presence", the setting that holds the split above, that search goes to neither campaign, which is the trade-off.

No border is exact: location targeting "doesn't determine geographic borders" (Target ads to geographic locations) and may reach "nearby, closely related areas" (About targeting geographic locations). Drawing it by drive time is covered in our article on location targeting for service areas.

Which phone rings?

Three settings decide which number a searcher sees.

Call assets. A number can sit at the account, campaign or ad group level, and the call assets page says "the most specific will be used". One campaign for two shops usually means one number for both.

Location assets. Once your Business Profile is linked, "the locations you add are eligible to show with any Search, Display, or Video ad in your account" (About location assets). The call assets page adds that ads featuring a specific business location "may direct calls to the phone numbers that are associated with those locations, rather than the phone numbers set with your call assets". An ad from the Phoenix campaign can carry the Prescott address and the Prescott number.

Location groups. The location groups page lets you assign specific locations to the account, a campaign or an ad group, and says "The most common use case is to apply location groups at the campaign level." A group holding one shop goes on that shop's campaign. Check that it isn't empty: Google says an empty group works like "No location assets".

So each shop campaign gets that shop's number (or tracking number) as a campaign-level call asset (how call assets compare with call-only ads), and a location group with that shop in it. One catch from the call assets page: to avoid a disapproval for "Unverified Phone Number", the number has to be in E.164 format (Google's example is +12345678900), and that exact number has to be "explicitly visible in your website's source code" unless your domain is verified in Google Search Console. Put the exact number from that campaign's call asset, tracking number included, in that +1 format in the source of that shop's page; a tel:+1… link does it.

Whose season sets the budget?

At 1st Choice, Phoenix sits at around 1,100 feet and Prescott at around 5,400. Prescott gets snow most winters and has a heating season Phoenix doesn't have. One set of campaigns covered both.

In January, Phoenix searches for very little, so the account throttled down for winter. That was right for Phoenix, and it cut Prescott's heating season in the months Prescott needed the money most. In July it ran the other way: Phoenix at capacity pulled the budget, and Prescott, where July is an ordinary working month, got what was left.

Under Smart Bidding (Target CPA or Maximize conversions), one campaign has no setting to spend more in Prescott in January. The bid adjustments page says "If you make a manual bid adjustment to your automated Smart Bidding strategy, it won't be supported", and its table leaves location adjustments out of both. A campaign per shop gets its own average daily budget, set from that shop's calendar (planning ad spend from crew capacity by month).

1st Choice Plumbing, Air & Insulation · Phoenix, AZRead the case
1.9×
Prescott winter bookings
Window
Two quarters against the two before
Source
Client CRM

1st Choice Plumbing, Air & Insulation, Phoenix and Prescott. With the map and the seasonal calendar split by shop, and Prescott on campaigns built for Prescott rather than a smaller copy of Phoenix's: Prescott winter bookings: 1.9×. Window: Two quarters against the two before. Source: Client CRM.

Limit: Prescott is the smaller of the two markets by some distance, so its percentages move on a small base.

1st Choice Plumbing, Air & Insulation · Phoenix, AZRead the case
+31 points
Heating share of Prescott spend
Window
November to February
Source
Google Ads

1st Choice, Prescott only. Heating share of Prescott spend: +31 points. Window: November to February. Source: Google Ads.

Limit: A mild Prescott winter and a hard one are very different years, and the two winters in this comparison were not equivalent. Some of the improvement is weather.

A shared budget undoes the split. Google's shared budgets page describes the feature as "allowing underutilized budgets to automatically reallocate to budget-capped campaigns". For two shops on different calendars, that moves Prescott's quiet-month money to Phoenix without anyone deciding it. To take a campaign off one, open its Settings, click Budget and select "Individual campaign budget", first thing in the morning: Google says a switch mid-day starts serving "as though the campaigns have spent $0 up until that point" (Manage a shared budget). The same trap with two trades instead of two shops is in HVAC and plumbing in one ad budget.

Can each shop run its own hours?

Only as separate campaigns. Ad schedules are set per campaign, "a maximum of 6 ad schedules per day for each campaign" (Set up an ad schedule), and without one a campaign shows ads "All day" (About Ad Scheduling). If Phoenix runs a night crew in July and Prescott's phones go to voicemail at five, one campaign can't do both. The bid adjustments page says Smart Bidding ignores manual schedule adjustments but does "respect your Ad Schedule settings". Call assets have their own hours: "You can set numbers to appear only when your business can accept calls."

A shop whose ads are off on some days of the week, weekends included, can spend more a month since June 1, 2026, unless its daily budget comes down. Google's pacing for a campaign switched off on certain days "will now attempt to spend up to" 30.4 times the daily budget a month, never more than twice the daily budget in a day (Changes to budget pacing for Ad Scheduling). Schedules that switch off hours within a day aren't affected. As an illustration, not a client's numbers: a $60-a-day shop campaign running about 22 weekdays used to pace toward about $1,320 a month, and now paces toward $1,824 ($60 × 30.4). If $1,320 is right for that shop, set the daily budget to $1,320 ÷ 30.4, about $43.

What splitting did in two accounts

In the Arizona account, the case puts most of the drop in cost per booked visit down to money no longer spent on the hundred miles between the shops.

1st Choice Plumbing, Air & Insulation · Phoenix, AZRead the case
−22 to −28%
Cost per booked visit
Window
Two quarters against the two before
Source
Call tracking

1st Choice, both shops. With every contested area assigned to one shop by drive time and each shop on its own calendar: Cost per booked visit: −22 to −28%. Window: Two quarters against the two before. Source: Call tracking.

Limit: Cutting the corridor between the shops improved the cost per booked visit and also removed customers. We have not shown that the corridor is unprofitable at every budget, only that it was the worst use of this one.

The second account, Cody & Sons Plumbing, Heating & Air, has shops in Dallas and Plano twenty-five miles apart. Its map was split in the same quarter it started advertising a maintenance plan, and the case says the two effects can't be separated, so we quote no number from it.

What this doesn't cover

  • Performance Max, and Local Services Ads beyond the one-location rule. This is written for Search campaigns.
  • Repair and replacement inside each shop. A campaign per shop can still put a repair call and a system replacement on one budget and one bid target. Keeping those apart is a second split, by the type of work: how an HVAC account keeps repair and replacement apart.
  • Whether the towns in between are worth buying at all. In the Arizona account they were the worst use of that budget. A company with more trucks could get a different answer.
  • Shops that are separate companies. Who holds which account is a separate question: who owns your Google Ads account.

Do this in your account

  1. List the towns in between. Every zip code either shop could serve, with the drive time from each shop at the hour you dispatch. Give each to the shorter drive, mark the ones neither should serve, and write it down.
  2. One campaign per shop, targeted by zip code, with no zip code in both, set to "Presence" if the split has to hold. If a campaign has to stay a radius or a city, exclude the other shop's zip codes only while there are no more exclusions than targeted locations (Google's limit); past that, switch the campaign to a zip code list.
  3. Add the other shop's town names as negative keywords in each campaign.
  4. Set the phone and address per campaign: a campaign-level call asset with that shop's number, and under Assets → Location, a location group with only that shop. Put the exact number from that campaign's call asset, tracking number included, in +1 format in the source of that shop's page (a tel:+1… link), unless your domain is verified in Search Console.
  5. Give each campaign its own budget from that shop's month: monthly amount ÷ 30.4. Under the Tools icon → Budgets and bidding → Shared budgets, check that neither shop campaign is on one.
  6. Match each schedule to that shop's phones, including the hours on the call asset.
  7. After 30 days, open Matched locations for each campaign (Campaigns → Insights & reports → When and where your ads showed, per Google). Each row is a location that matched your ads, either where people were or a place they showed interest in. Our reading: a few rows just past the border are normal, since no border is exact, but a steady flow from the other shop's zip codes means the split has a gap.

FAQ

Should each location have its own Google Ads account? Usually not. A campaign per shop gives each shop its own money, map and hours under one login and one bill. Separate accounts don't get you two ads on one search either: the unfair advantage policy doesn't allow it.

Can I split the shops by ad group instead of by campaign? Not the budget, the hours or location bid adjustments: Google sets all three on the campaign. AI Max for Search has an ad group setting for "locations of interest", but Google says users matched that way "must still meet campaign-level geo-targeting criteria".

Does this apply to Local Services Ads? The overlap rule does. When several of your locations serve the same area, Local Services shows only the highest-ranking ad. How that ranking works is in Google Local Services Ads ranking factors.

Sources

All read in full on September 24, 2026. Every quotation above is from these pages.

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