Targeting For Facebook Location – A Comprehensive Guide

Targeting For Facebook Location – A Comprehensive Guide: In some locations, Facebook Location Targeting options may provide practical methods to reach individual users. However, as Facebook has developed additional options, marketers might be uncertain about taking full advantage of these features.

Some may also not fully understand how Facebook decides to target audience positions.

Remember that this article mainly focuses on paid targeting. I’ve also written about limiting your audience at the page or post level using location targeting.

This post delves into what Facebook Location Targeting is and how it decides the location. When you may want to use the numerous capabilities offered, we will also cover scenarios. We’ll take a nerdy detour into segmented audience research along the way.

What Is Facebook Location Targeting?

 Location Targeting allows us to tell Facebook the relevant geographical locations where our advertising would like to be seen.

Facebook enables you to target by country, state (or area, depending on the country), place, zip/postal code, and business address at the time of this writing. In the United States, as described by Nielsen, you can also target DMA, which is a media market.

Within a single targeting group, you can also target multiple locations, but there are limitations on how many unique targeting parameters you can create. For instance, in a single category, you can include up to 25 individual countries or up to 250 individual cities.

Facebook also has very large targeting capabilities, including the targeting option “Worldwide.” You may target large areas, such as Asia, as well as the Free Trade Area. There is a list of choices available here.

There are limits on what Facebook will provide if you are using larger target groups. Later in this post, we will cover them in more detail.

How to Use Facebook Location Targeting

When you can identify locations to target, there are three phases: during the development process of the campaign, when building a saved audience, or when utilizing Audience Insights.

There are three key methods for choosing a position during each of these stages:

1) Type the location:

As we type “California” in this case, the various options populate. Make sure you pick the right geo-location!

2) Perform a “Drop Pin” on a map.

Your mouse pointer will now be marked with a checkmark, which you can drop anywhere on the map: use the +/- options to navigate the map and even move the map to where you would like to drop a location pin. Click the “Drop Pin” button once you have found your location:

The map will be filled with the GPS coordinates for the location you have selected until you click to drop the pin:

3) Bulk Upload Locations

To change as appropriate, you can now click the mileage/kilometer radius. You can type a new radius or slide the bar to the position you want:

If you need to target multiple places, this less popular approach is useful because you don’t want to have to pick them manually. This phase is protected here by Facebook.

How to Exclude Locations

You may also change the selector to the left of the place name instead of targeting a location to remove unique locations from your goal:

What Types of Locations are Eligible for Targeting?

There are some special reasons for removing areas, which are discussed later in this article. You might, for example, target individuals in a state but exclude a particular city (or cities). Here is an example that targets individuals in California, except San Diego:

For position targeting, Facebook has four options:

• Everyone in a location
• People who live in this location
• Recently in this location
• People traveling in this location

Strangely, Facebook’s support articles suggest that the default choice is anyone in a location, but I have seen the people who live in this location in my own experience appear to be the default preference when building a new audience.

You may wonder how Facebook decides whether a user lives or is just passing through a spot. Glad you inquired!

How Facebook Determines Location of a User

To evaluate (or, more realistically, to estimate) the position of a user, Facebook uses different signals. The platform may use an IP address, information about the mobile device, profile information of a user (i.e., the city mentioned in their profile), and sometimes a combination. They can also use details from the Facebook user’s friends’ locations.

Facebook, luckily, is shedding some light on this. The data source they use depends on the section of the place (i.e., Traveling In, People who Live In, etc.). Location data sources are described as follows by Facebook:

• All in this area: individuals whose current city is the location on their Facebook profile, as well as anyone decided by a mobile device to be in that location.
• People who live in this area: people whose current city is within that location from their Facebook profile. This is also validated by the IP address and the specified positions of their Facebook mates.
• In this place recently. Individuals whose most recent position is the region chosen, as determined by a mobile device only. This involves individuals who live or maybe traveling there.
• People in this place fly. People whose most recent location is the selected area, as determined by a mobile device, and from their Facebook profiles are greater than 100 miles from their reported home location.

It is important to note that to determine a user’s position, Facebook uses several signals (with the exception of Recently in this location goal, which is focused solely on mobile device signals).

You may be shocked to see that individuals living in the area, as well as those traveling, based on the concept of Facebook, may recently be included in this location category. Some might think that people living in this place recently will be exempt from this area, but that’s not the case.

Audience Location Overlap

This section is for you if you are interested in slicing, dicing, and digging deeply into comparing the various audiences for location segmentation. If this is a little too much material, feel free to skip ahead to the section “Quirks/Limitations to Consider with Location Targeting.”

Looking back to how Facebook recently identified the data source for the audience in this area, we might presume that this audience would at least automatically include everyone in the people living in this location audience.

To see if that holds up, let’s do a short experiment using the Audience Overlap tool inside the Ad tools of Facebook. We will use it here to better understand the definition of the different local audiences on Facebook and how they communicate with each other.

Audience Segmentation Analysis

Access the Audiences tool within Ads Manager:

This section is for you if you are interested in slicing, dicing, and digging deeply into comparing the various audiences for location segmentation. If this is a little too much material, feel free to skip ahead to the section “Quirks/Limitations to Consider with Location Targeting.”

Looking back to how Facebook recently identified the data source for the audience in this area, we might presume that this audience would at least automatically include everyone in the people living in this location audience.

To see if that holds up, let’s do a short experiment using the Audience Overlap tool inside the Ad tools of Facebook. We will use it here to better understand the definition of the different local audiences on Facebook and how they communicate with each other.

Interpreting Our Audience Overlap Findings

This comparison exercise indicates that it would be inaccurate to actually view the Facebook meaning of People Recently In. We should not presume that any of the people who live in AND people who move in include people recently in.

This makes sense for many reasons when we review the data sources and descriptions of the various targeting options (as discussed earlier in this article). First, the target for People Recently In is calculated as the signal using only mobile device data, while additional signals are used by the other targeting options.

Just as we can build and compare user groups in Audience Perspectives, we can also compare People Recently In with People Traveling In to test our conviction that a literal understanding of the audience meanings of Facebook will be wrong:

It is useful to be able to compare various segments of the audience and their patterns of overlap. If you like this sort of stuff, look explicitly at the use of the Audience Overlap capacity in this write-up from Jon.

Here we find that the audience of People Traveling In includes individuals who are not also within the audience of People Recently In, reinforcing our belief that the audience of Recently In does not entirely encapsulate the entire Traveling In the audience.

I’m not sure whether this is because the two are based on separate data sources or whether users are classified as Recently In by Facebook if they usually live in that area but are elsewhere at the moment.

Quirks/Limitations to Consider with Location Targeting

1) Excluded Cities When Using Broad Targeting

Some cities are often not included when you target large locations, such as Nation (or Worldwide). Most of the places subject to this restriction are islands or places where there is minimal or restricted use of Facebook, such as China.

Check out this Facebook support resource page for a full list of areas that exempt cities by using wider targeting. Located near the bottom of the article is the list.

2) Excluding Locations

Bear in mind that these just guide Facebook not to run an advertisement in this position if you exempt those places from your advertising audience. It does not prohibit the ad from being seen by people in those places.

For example, we can explain that we’re telling Facebook to target people in California but excluding people in San Diego. Facebook is not going to show our article to people in San Diego as advertising (i.e., a supported post).

There may be someone living in Los Angeles, though, who shares our message. That person in Los Angeles might have a friend in San Diego on Facebook. The San Diego friend may see our post as an organic placement because the post was shared by their friend in Los Angeles.

You have some choices if you need to fully limit people in a place from seeing the message. In a more comprehensive article about Limited Audiences on Facebook, I discussed those choices here.

3) Drop-Pin Radius Limitation

If you want to use the “drop pin” process, and the circle radius crosses into another country, your target audience does not include that country. Facebook covers other reminders, near the bottom of the list, about radius targeting here.

Scenarios When You Might Use Different Location Targeting Options

1) Everyone in this location:

If you don’t mind if the people in your goal live in the region or are only passing through it, you might use this. Coffee stores, hotels, sales online, etc.

2) People who live in a location:

This targeting category is more applicable to individuals who live their daily lives in an area and can frequently use services or goods. Think memberships in gyms, community centers, etc. It may also be beneficial for property-related facilities, such as home repair, plumbing, electrical HVAC, security services, etc.

3) Recently, in this location:

I’m going, being honest; I have trouble thinking of times when this is more helpful vs. the other choices for targeting. This section for time-sensitive sales is suggested by Facebook’s support post. An example might be inviting individuals back to a venue, maybe local visitor office ads? If you have an idea of reaching people in a place recently for great use, tell me in the comments!

4) People traveling in a location:

Naturally, this is suitable for tourism offerings. Go for this if you have a tourist attraction, event passes, hotel, rental car business, or some other service for a traveler to use.

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Not All Who Wander Are Lost

One of the first “fancy” targeting options to become accessible on Facebook was position targeting. The potential of this is often underestimated, possibly due to newer travel behavior-based targeting choices. From our dive into position targeting on Facebook, here’s what we covered:

• You may target very wide or very specific (down to a one-mile radius of a pin drop) locations (as broad as the entire globe).
  • Broad targeting does not always include all cities in a location. There are exceptions.
• Unique locations may be exempt from targeting. But this does not guarantee that users from excluded locations would certainly not see an ad.
• To evaluate estimates for the different location groups, Facebook uses various data sources. These divisions are All, People Living in, People Traveling in, and Recently In.
  • The definitions of these estimates are not aligned exactly with the realities of each segment.
• Different situations call for different targeting options.
  • You may have a business reason for choosing to target only users who live in a location and people who work in a location at other times. Options for these are provided by Facebook.