Set the radius from the street, not from the platform default
Salmiya and Hawally are dense and walkable, so a tight circle works. Drop the pin on your door and set 1.5 to 2.5 km. That covers Salem Al Mubarak Street, Block 10, Tunis Street and Ibn Khaldoun without paying for people in Fahaheel who will never drive past you. The mistake I see most often is leaving the platform default, which is usually 10 km or the whole country. In a Salmiya block that default wastes roughly half to two thirds of the budget, and the report still looks fine, because reach is cheap and useless.
Jahra, Sabah Al Salem, Al Qurain, Messila, Mangaf and Fintas are the opposite. Everyone drives, plots are spread out, and 2 km around your shop may contain three hundred households. Open the radius to 5 to 8 km there, and in Jahra it is often fair to take the whole governorate. Distance is not the real cost in these areas. The real cost is that nobody crosses a ring road for average coffee, so if you go wide the offer in the ad has to be worth the drive: a signature drink, a drive-through, a real reason to stop.
Kuwait City behaves like a different country. Sharq, Mirqab and Qibla are an office catchment that fills from 7am to 2pm Sunday to Thursday and empties at night and across Friday and Saturday. Run that radius on a weekday daytime schedule only and you cut wasted spend by about a third. Malls are different again. Nobody at the Avenues or 360 lives within 2 km of it, so a circle around the building is meaningless. Target mall visitors as a place or point of interest instead, and run it in the evenings and on the weekend.
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Where you actually draw the circle on Meta, Snapchat and Google
On Meta, open the location field inside the ad set, search your address, then switch to the drop pin option and drag the radius. The smallest circle Meta allows is 1 km. The setting that matters more than the radius is the dropdown above it: choose people recently in this location, not people living in this location. A coffee shop sells to whoever is passing at 5pm, not to registered residents. Build one ad set per area instead of one ad set holding three pins, otherwise Meta quietly spends everything on the cheapest area and you never see it in the numbers.
Snapchat is where most of the Kuwaiti audience actually is, and its geo tools are the best of the three. In Ads Manager you can drop a radius pin, but you can also draw a custom shape on the map, which is the right tool when you want one street or one mall. Draw the polygon around Salem Al Mubarak Street, or around the Avenues footprint, and nothing outside the line gets served. Snap also lets you layer a time schedule on top, so a Kuwait City lunch shop can run 10am to 3pm Sunday to Thursday and go dark the rest of the week.
Google Ads uses a radius around an address, minimum 1 km, set under Locations in the campaign. Then open location options and force presence, meaning people in or regularly in your targeted locations. If you leave the default that also includes interest, you pay for someone in Riyadh searching about Kuwait cafes. On search campaigns the radius matters less than the words, because "coffee near me" is already local. The radius earns its keep in Performance Max and Demand Gen, and in bid adjustments: add 20 to 30 percent on the two kilometres nearest your door.
Let the map tell you which blocks deserve the money
You cannot read area performance out of one blended ad set. Meta reports regions at governorate level, which is far too coarse to be useful in Kuwait, so the only reliable method is structural: one ad set per radius, 20 to 30 KD a week each, running three to four weeks before you judge anything. Under that, a week is noise. After a month you will usually find one area at half the cost per result of the others, and two areas that look identical. Kill the worst, move its budget to the best, and leave the middle alone.
Walk-ins are invisible unless you make them visible, so give each area its own signal: a different promo code, a separate WhatsApp click-to-chat number, or a QR on the cup that changes per campaign. Then look at what the far areas actually do. Customers 6 km out rarely become daily regulars for one cup, but they will order beans, boxes and gift sets, and that demand belongs on your own store with KNET checkout rather than on a delivery app taking 25 to 30 percent. The near radius sells the seat; the store sells the bag.