If your business relies on local clients, placing Facebook advertisements in your neighbourhood is an excellent method to boost foot traffic. In this session, we’ll show you how to create a geo-targeted Facebook ad from scratch.
What Is Geo-Targeting and How Is It Different Than Geo-Fencing?
Geo-Targeting & Geo-Fencing both target a specific location with paid media however, they are very different when it comes to deliverability.
Simply described, geo-fencing is a “digital fence” around a certain location that triggers adverts to be delivered whenever someone enters that zone. This method can be as big or as tiny as you desire; you can geo-fence an entire city or just a single street or structure.
Example: If you had a surfing lessons business it would be beneficial to run a geo-fenced ad for anyone visiting the beaches where you provide your lessons.
Geo-targeted advertising will appear to users in a certain place, such as a country, city, state, street, or zipcode; however, these ads also incorporate other targeting options such as age, interest, behaviour, gender, and so on…
Example: If you are a technology provider, it would be beneficial to run ads in your downtown area. Taking it a step further would be to include your average customer’s age, what industry they are in, buying behaviors, interest, job title, etc…
How To Setup Geo-Targeted Facebook Ads
Facebook does an excellent job of attempting to persuade company owners to invest in advertising. The blue button that says “sponsor post” will be everywhere on Facebook; this is not how we want to set up our advertising efforts.
You always want to be using the Facebook Business Manager for any ad campaigns due to the level of control you will have. It can be accessed by clicking this link: https://business.facebook.com/
Once you have your Facebook business manager set up, go to the top left of the page and click the menu button that is under the home icon and click “ads manager”, it’s going to bring you to a page with a green button that says +Create towards the top left.
This is going to bring up a window where you will get to choose your audience type, depending on what your advertising goals are is going to determine what you will pick. Here at LoungeLizard.com we typically are running Conversion campaigns due to it providing us a reduced cost per click (CPC) because of how we have our conversion tracking setup.
Choosing Which Facebook Ad Campaign Type to Use
On the next screen, name your campaign after selecting the desired campaign aim. If your business is in the credit, employment, housing, or social issues/elections/politics field, you’ll need to go to the special ad categories list and select the appropriate category.
Naming Your Facebook Ad Campaign
It will give you the option for campaign budget optimization near the bottom; we do not recommend turning this on for new advertisements until your campaign has received at least 50 conversions. This optional mechanism automatically distributes your campaign budget to the best-performing campaigns.
Once you have either 50 conversions or 10-30k impressions that’s when you should come back and turn this on. Every industry is different for maximizing performance, do a lot of testing to see if this tool has any improvement for your return on ad spend (ROAS).
The Facebook Ad Set Section Is Where The Geo-Targeting Magic Happens
Naming Your Ad Set
Just like the other Facebook ads sections, you’re going to have some boxes that are self-explanatory. First, name your ad set & then choose where you want to be sending traffic to (Website, App, Messenger or WhatsApp).
If you want to create conversations with potential customers choose Messenger or WhatsApp, this is a great way to communicate with customers quickly.
If you have a lead magnet (sign up form, free consultation, case study, etc…) choose the website.
Once that is completed, you will have the option to choose if you want to create Dynamic Creatives or an Offer. This would be something for you to test out to see if they bring any benefit to your organizations’ campaign efforts. Here at Finsbury Media, we do most of this work manually to have more control of what is being shown.
Campaign Budget
Under Budget & Schedule is where you will get to choose if you want to use a daily budget or a lifetime budget. For most of the Facebook ads agency, we run we utilize a daily budget. The reason for this is because audit each account daily and the campaigns are constantly running with no end date until we decide to choose a better performing campaign.
If you are a complete beginner with no experience of auditing your accounts or get super busy we suggest choosing a lifetime budget that way you don’t end up with an unexpected bill.
How Much Should You Spend On Facebook Ads?
There really is no perfect number for this, every organization is going to have different capital restraints when it comes to advertising. $10 a day is usually a great beginner starting point for most local businesses. As you get more comfortable with the Facebook ads platform with our tutorials, you can increase your budget to increase traffic volume.
Ad Scheduling To Show Ads During Normal Business Hours
Facebook offers the option of scheduling your advertising to run only while your business is open. After you’ve chosen your budget, click the box that reads “run advertisements on a schedule,” and a new selection will appear with days and hours to choose from.
Pro-Tip: For local businesses, this would be a perfect phase of the campaign to do A/B split testing to determine if the time of the ads presented can boost your conversion rate.
The goal of this test would be to see if customers are calling or coming to visit after seeing your ad the same day or if running ads 24/7 will be just as beneficial due to the fact most people work throughout the week and can only come after work or when they are free.
Developing An Audience For Your Geo-Targeted Facebook Ad
Now it’s time to start narrowing down who your ideal audience is, there are many different options to choose from and we suggest completing all of them for the most precise targeting.
For this section, we are going to pretend that we own a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
On the first section of the Audience tab, there will be a box that says Custom Audiences, this will not have anything for you to choose if you have a new ads account.
If you plan on running multiple different ad designs but to the same audience of people, at the end of this section you can click “Save This Audience” and that will allow you to improve efficiency when you create your next campaign by just selecting the one you previously built.
Location-Based Targeting
Our imaginary burger restaurant is in Fort Lauderdale, FL so, we need to be choosing areas to show our ads within a reasonable distance of 5-10 miles of where our location is. To do this hover over the locations section and hit edit on the top right of the box.
By default, it will have whatever country you are in already filled out. Delete that option (unless you want to show it to all of your country) and start typing in the city, state, or zip code for where you want your ad to be shown.
This can be as large of an area or as small as you want, just remember if you are a local business, we need to take control of the area and dominate within a 5–10-mile radius first.
We suggest starting with zip codes or cities first.
We went ahead and typed in Fort Lauderdale as the city we want our ads to be shown in as well as adjusted the mile radius by clicking the number with the + sign next to the location. This will allow you to adjust how far from your location you want the ad to be displayed.
Another option we chose is “people living in this location” this is going to allow us to only show ads to customers who live in our area. Fort Lauderdale is a tourist destination and many of them go out to eat while on vacation so, we could have also chosen “people living in or recently in this location”. This is where you need to get your creative juices flowing and think about who your ideal customer is.
Targeting Specific Ages & Gender
This section is straightforward. What age range is your customer usually and what gender are they? If you sell women’s swimsuits you would not want to be showing those to males. If you don’t have this data yet, do a simple Google search “Average age for XYZ” and then use that as your starting point.
Detailed Targeting: Demographics, Interests & Behaviors
We can’t target specific keywords with Facebook Ads like we can on Google Ads agency however, we can target based on what the customer is interested in, their purchasing behaviors & demographics.
This is where it’s extremely important for you to take some time to think of every single possible interest your potential customer could be into that involves your niche.
We chose a few to give us a solid audience size of 510,000 people. Facebook does a great job at understanding who we want our ideal customers to be. Facebook will continuously find new users who could be interested in our burgers once the campaign has gone through the initial learning stages.
Choosing Your Language Targeting
Click edit on the languages section and choose who you want your ad to be shown to based on the language they speak. Make sure your ad copy is in the language you are targeting as well.
Placements Of Where Your Geo-Targeted Facebook Ad Will Be Seen
This section is crucial in your campaign setup due to the fact, not every placement has the highest engagement. Click “manual placements” and then select from the platform drop-down menu where you want your ad to be seen. We mainly just use Facebook & Instagram.
Now depending on what your advertising creative is will determine the best placements for it however, we see the best results from just running our ads on:
- Facebook News Feed
- Instagram Feed
- Instagram Explore
- Facebook Group Feeds
Optimization & Delivery Objectives
The final portion of the ad set section is crucial to your budget optimization. There are a few different options you can explore and see which gets the best results. We give you a solid foundation and it is up to you to find what performs best for your organization.
For the sake of this example, we chose link clicks which is a solid starting point for you if you have a decent website or landing page to send visitors to.
Next, you can choose cost control for how much you are willing to pay for that objective to be hit each time. Too little and your ad will never be shown, too much and you will blow through your ad budget. If you are a beginner, you can leave this blank.
Once you start seeing data come in and average CPC, then you can come back in here and set a number to start testing results with.
Finally, we may choose when we are charged. For most people who don’t have fantastically engaging ad creatives, getting charged on link clicks is the best option. If you have fantastic ad creatives, you may be able to earn a lower CPC because you are only charged for every 1,000 impressions rather than per click.
This is also something you’ll have to test on your own to figure out.
Creating Geo-Targeted Facebook Ad Creative
First, name your ad and choose which Facebook & Instagram account you want your ads to be coming from. Second, choose the format of what your ad creative will be. We usually just use a single image or video, however; this is something for you to test to see if adding more options to the ad works for your business.
Now that all of the hard stuff is done, it’s time for you to fill out your ad creative. Once you choose if you are using a picture or a video, just fill in the blanks after that. You can see where we put our text on the left and where it will show up on the ad on the right.
We hope you enjoyed our guide on how to use Facebook geo-targeted advertisements and how they may help you generate buzz in your local neighbourhood.
This campaign was designed to provide you a brief overview to get you off and running; if you’d like a more in-depth analysis of your company, please contact us for a discovery call. We’ll create a very deep advertising funnel for you and handle all of the auditing, performance, and reporting.
Finsbury Media is there to assist you. Get in touch with us right away to get started! We have the knowledge and experience to assist you boost the amount of business leads you now receive.
