Location

Are Geo-Targeting Facebook Ads Right for Your Business?

Geo-targeting is a way to restrict your ad audience to a certain geographic area. It is the best way to regionally direct your message and can be a powerful tool to maximize your ad efficacy. A few clicks on Facebook, and you’ve got ads ready to go. Sounds great, right?

There’s a catch. It can really drive up the cost of your campaign.

Facebook ads are paid for by an automated “auction.” That means that if other nearby businesses are targeting the same area as you, costs for targeted ads will be higher because of stiff bidding competition.

Before you spend your money, you need to be sure geo-targeting is right for you. 

Geo-targeting is marketing to a set of specific users based on their location. The more relevant an ad is to a user, the likelier they are to convert. By using geo-targeting, you can find customers by zip code, city, or country. If you operate out of a brick and mortar store, this can be an effective way to attract new customers.

Finding High-Value Customers with Local Awareness Ads

Every business can benefit from attracting higher value customers. Whether you’re a real estate company looking for high net worth individuals looking to buy property or a B2B SaaS company looking for a higher average revenue per user (ARPU), attracting customers who will pay you more than others is a powerful way to amplify the growth of your business.

The easiest way to target a particular geographic area is simply to set up a Facebook ad as usual. When you’re setting up the audience and you get to the map, hit “Drop Pin” and place the indicator in the middle of your intended target area. Then, use the radius slider to modify the full range of land that your targeting will cover. You can adjust this from 1 mile to up to 50 miles.

Let’s say we run a company that helps first-time home sellers better market the properties they’re trying to sell on sites like Craigslist.

After years of working with relatively inexpensive homes in rural areas, we’re looking to break into the competitive and high-flying Manhattan real estate market. Referrals and word of mouth have been powerful drivers of growth up to this point, but they won’t cut it anymore. We need to get in front of people who are trying to sell their homes in Manhattan, and we decide to run Facebook ads to do it.

Targeting Customers within a Region

Here, we’ve placed a pin in the East Village in Manhattan and set a 1 mile radius for the targeting — ensuring that everyone in this geographical region will be part of the audience for the ad that we’re going to run.

Our ad will be shown to 710,000 people: that’s a lot. Better to narrow that down a bit. To do that, we’re going to use some more targeting around the age, gender, and type of person that we’re trying to show our ad to.

Since we’re trying to help people selling their homes, we should look for indicators that the people we’re showing our ad to are actually likely to move.

Targeting Customers with a Region + Behavior & Demographic Targeting

In order to get more specific with our audience, we set up our targeting to focus on those people that Facebook says are interested in moving. We narrow our age range slightly to exclude those too young to (probably) be looking to sell their home, and also include some demographic and behavioral targeting traits. We target those who are “likely to move” and those within a range of incomes and net worths that we like:

The “likely to move” indicator is given to us based on Facebook data about people it has deemed are in the early stage of leaving their house. For net worth and income data, we’ve set up a fairly wide bracket that will at least give us some understanding of the financial situations of the customers we’re using this ad to target.

This combination of traits gives us a much more reasonable 2,800 person audience. We can show an ad to virtually every single one of these people with not that much spend.

Targeting with Geographic Exclusion

Facebook determines the locations of its users in a variety of ways: by data collected from smartphones, by manual check-ins at different locations, and by the places that users list in their profiles as their current and home cities — to name a few.That means it is not always clear which kind of “location” you’re going to be targeting with your local awareness ads:

People who actually live in a particular region

People who have recently visited a region

People who are in a region on vacation or otherwise traveling

Custom Targeting Lists

If you already have a list of places where your high-value clientele lives or work, you can upload that in text or spreadsheet form and insert it right into Facebook. That way, you can automatically begin targeting in the areas where you know your highest value customers live.

Combining geographical regions with behavioral and demographic targeting in this way can allow you to zero in on the high-value customers you want to attract to your business no matter what you’re selling or who you’re trying to find.