Facebook Ads Manager is one of the powerful advertising platforms in the world, with 3.14 billion daily active users across its portfolio of apps and services (that’s 60% of the connected world). Facebook presents marketers with a unique opportunity to engage audiences across the world regardless of nationality and language.
But just because you can advertise to everyone in the world doesn’t mean you should. For most brands, advertising to such a large audience is unnecessary and prohibitively expensive. That’s where Facebook location targeting comes in.
This article will walk through three powerful ways you can use Facebook location targeting to optimize campaign efficiency and increase return on ad spend.
Facebook location targeting is a feature in Facebook Ads Manager that allows you to target campaigns based on user location. Location targeting currently supports targeting based on a variety of location types including country, county, city, and postcode. Facebook also provides the option to drop a location pin and set a targeting radius around the pin.
Facebook currently considers a user to be in a specified location if they are living in or were recently located in that location, and states that they use “a variety of signals” to determine that information.
Facebook location targeting is available for all campaign objectives, with the exception of awareness objective campaigns. To increase awareness of physical locations such as bank branches, stores, and restaurants, Facebook recommends marketers leverage the store traffic objective.
To add location targeting to your campaigns, simply open your campaign audience and navigate to “Locations.” As you think about how to leverage location targeting in your Facebook campaigns, consider these three powerful use cases to get started with.
Consumers can vary widely across locations. Different countries have contrasting cultures, but even at the local level different cities within the same country can enjoy distinct lifestyles and speak different languages.
The offers that might resonate in one location, therefore, may differ from those that resonate in another. By creating campaign variants per distinct location with Facebook location targeting, you can scale your campaigns across geographies while still delivering relevant experiences to each audience.
An international sports apparel retailer may, for example, launch a promotion offer on athletic shorts across the United States and Mexico, but serve creative in different languages for each region. While United States consumers are shown creative with English language text, Mexican consumers are shown creative with Spanish.
To personalize campaigns based on location, simply duplicate your original campaign, update Location within audience targeting to your desired target location for the campaign, and make any other campaign updates necessary to localize for the target audience.
Who you decide not to target with your Facebook Ad campaigns can be just as important as who you do target. Mis-targeted ads waste campaign budget, lowering ROAS and reducing the number of ads that can be shown to your ideal customers. Setting up audience exclusions allow you to prevent certain users from being included in your campaign, increasing campaign efficiency.
In this regard, location-based targeting is helpful for defining who shouldn’t be targeted by your campaigns. Within Facebook Ads Manager, you can create audience exclusions based on interests, location, and demographics. For example, if you currently sell your products in the United States of America but aren’t currently able to ship to Canada, you can exclude advertisements from being shown to users in Canada. This will ensure that your entire campaign budget is dedicated to consumers that are eligible to purchase.
Some campaigns will only be relevant to consumers in certain regions. In these cases, you can deliver campaigns directly to your target location and personalize it to the nuances of that region instead of taking a one-size-fits all approach.
A nationwide pizza restaurant running a Chicago deep dish pizza campaign can, for example, deliver their campaign exclusively to consumers in Chicago and surrounding cities, without having to worry that New York pizza enthusiasts on the east coast might get offended.
Location-specific campaigns allow brands to design more thoughtful campaigns for each location, captivating consumers in their target regions.
John Joe Smith, founder and CEO of WasteNot, is hosted by Tom Triscari, founder of Quo Vadis, for a Q&A conversation on the future of audience suppression.
Many advertisers waste up to 40% of their ad budgets due to inefficient targeting, and they aren't even aware of it. In this article, we'll walk through how brands can use modern audience suppression strategies to improve advertising efficiency and performance.
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WasteNot is the only platform focused on allowing marketers to activate and optimize real time ad exclusions across all biddable media.