Facebook made several subtle tweaks to location targeting recently that could make a big difference for advertisers.
If you haven’t read the public post that explains these updates, make sure to do so.
Here’s an overview of ways that brands might benefit.
Target By Address
You’re probably familiar with Facebook’s local awareness campaign objective that is currently only available within the ad create tool. It was never rolled out to Power Editor, but it now appears it’s not at all necessary.
A local awareness campaign was the awareness equivalent of the boost button for engagement. Facebook simplified the process as much as possible so you didn’t have to think too much about targeting.
When creating a local awareness campaign, you simply told Facebook what radius around your location you’d like to promote and select a very general audience to target (age and gender). That was about it.
Until now, you couldn’t truly recreate this in Power Editor. You could target a radius around a city or zip code, but not around a physical address.
But now that’s possible. And you can get more fine with your targeting as well, drilling down into interests, behaviors or custom audiences.
So now you can create a campaign targeting people within a certain proximity of your business, but focus only on your customers. Or maybe focus on those with particular interests.
Everyone In This Location
The best thing about the addition of this option is that it clarifies how Facebook has been — more than likely — targeting by location until now. Frankly, it’s never been particularly clear.
Were you targeting people based on the home address indicated in users’ Facebook profiles? Were you targeting people who were simply in the area, but may be from somewhere else?
Well, you were doing both (unless that has now changed). At least going forward, this will be the default.
So if you don’t care whether someone lives close to a location (but may or may not be there at this moment) or if they are simply in the neighborhood, just use this default setting going forward and it will catch everyone.
People Who Live In This Location
There may be times when you want to target only people who live in a certain area — regardless of whether they are currently close by.
Thoughts that come to mind here are promotions for schools or political candidates. In either case, the subject matter may appeal to the person because they are a local resident. But whether they are currently in the city or traveling won’t impact the relevance.
Services like construction, HVAC, plumbing and others that would be relevant to those who live in the area might also consider targeting this group of people.
I’d personally stay away from restaurants and retail in this case unless the goal is awareness. If you want action, it’s going to be important that the target audience is currently in the neighborhood, and this option won’t guarantee that for you.
People Recently In This Location
Note that using this option will target all people currently in a certain proximity — whether they live there or not.
As a result, this is ideal for restaurants and retail. It doesn’t matter much whether you are a local or not — only that you are close by. Share a sale and entice those who are close by to come in!
People Traveling In This Location
Again, there are going to be certain businesses that are best promoted to different audiences within a proximity.
For example, you’d have very little reason to promote hotels or tourist destinations to locals. But you’d absolutely want to target people close by who don’t live in the area.
This one has already generated some buzz in the PHC!
Your Turn
What other ways would you use these new location targeting options?
Let me know in the comments below!
Category: PHC Blog Uncategorized