# How to FIX Facebook Ads Location Targeting

Channel: Ben Heath
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iroQ_Zino3g
Duration: 16 min
Language: English
Words: 3870
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/iroQ_Zino3g

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[0:00] a lot of Facebook advertisers have been struggling with location targeting since meta changed the location targeting settings last year I've seen firsthand in our client ad accounts that sometimes your Facebook ads can be put in front of people in the complete wrong location which is a big waste of money fortunately we've worked out how to fix this problem and prevent your Facebook ads being shown to the wrong people and in this video I'm going to show you exactly how we did it okay so to demonstrate what's going on here and the fix to the problem I'm in an example Facebook ad account I'm in ads manager

[0:27] I'm going to create a quick example campaign to demonstrate this right so I'm going to click on this green plus create button I'm going to go with a leads campaign but what I talk about here applies to other campaign types as too and I'm going to go with manual campaign as well as I'd recommend most people do particularly if they want to take more control over certain aspects like this right so I'm going to jump to the adset level I'm not going to worry about all the other settings the campaign ad set or ad level I've got lots of videos that cover things like instant forms we're not going to worry

[0:52] about any of that today what we're going to focus on is this location targeting stuff with this problem and how to fix it so I'm going to go ahead and use the default targeting settings here which is Advantage Plus audience you can see that section down here but if you still use original audiences so let's you click on this and you go to original audiences or perhaps your ad account hasn't updated to the new Advantage Plus audience being the default option and you are using original audiences it doesn't matter either way I just want to quickly state that now because we're going to be focusing on location targeting settings

[1:20] and location targeting settings are in the audience control section in the new setup they're just part of the targeting setup and the old setup but either way because it's in audience controls the location targeting setting things are hard boundaries they aren't suggestions there are other targeting options you can see here down in Advantage Plus audience that are suggestions so if you add in an interest for example in Advantage Plus audience you're saying to meta I would like to advertise these people but you've got flexibility to advertise to others it shouldn't be that way with location targeting because it's up in audience controls just wanted to clarify that point cuz I know some

[1:48] people might find that confusing basically no matter what your setup is you'll be able to follow along on what we do here will apply so let's go ahead and click edit into locations now underneath this location sections we've got reach people living in or recently in this location now I mentioned right at the beginning about these changes that Metro made to location targeting settings before they made those changes we had more options here so the default was this Reach people were living in or recently in this location but we could get more specific and specifically Target people only living in this location and there are some other

[2:19] options as well like people are traveling in and out and stuff like that well last year when meta changed this they made this option mandatory everyone had to use this Reach people living in or recently in this location now I'm sure you can imagine I'm sure some people watching this video have had this problem that that can cause issues because there are lots of businesses that only want to reach people that actually live in a specific location they are not interested in people that are traveling in and out because they might not be able to serve those people I mean think plumber for example if you operate as a plumber you

[2:52] need people's properties to be within the area in which you're advertising because if they're miles away you're not going to be willing to travel I probably going to work with a local Plum or anyway it's a big waste of money to put your ad in front of them particularly if they've traveled somewhere and actually in another country by the time they see your ad because of that recently in part of this location targeting setting you've also got other businesses that are location based think of gyms or cafes or restaurants if they're advertising to local area they're only advertising to people that are actually in the local area I mean maybe

[3:22] restaurants people traveling out but gyms would be a good example of if someone doesn't live nearby they're not going to use that gym not for more than one session maybe whil they there it's a waste of money they only want to reach people that actually live there so why did meta go about and introduce this because it has caused issues for a lot of advertisers well they're a bit worried about the privacy concerns and the the perspective and and the pressure they might get from media and and other sources around hang on are you tracking where people live versus where they're just traveling like we understand you

[3:51] know where people are when you're putting ads in front of them but people worried it comes across as a little bit creepy in terms of working out differentiating between people actually live somewhere and people who are traveling somewhere have been somewhere so that's why they removed it but as I said it causes all sorts of problems because there are lots of businesses where you just want to advertise to people living in this location and this problem is exacerbated if you operate your business in an area where you need to reach people that actually live there but there's loads of travel in and out you think of places

[4:21] like London or New York where there's people traveling in and out all the time and you could end up putting ads in front of someone that was in New York last week but they the other side of the country on a different country or maybe even just in a different part of the state but you still can't serve them that's still a waste of money and actually one of the most extreme versions of this would be Paris so before I record this video I quickly looked up how many visitors Paris gets each year and it's about 50 million people but Paris only has a population of just over 2 million people so if

[4:48] you're a business that operates in Paris and you only want to put your ads in front of people that actually live there cuz they're the only ones that going to become your customer you could end up wasting an enormous amount of money advertising to people that are coming in and out and traveling and and doing that sort of thing now what we need to do here is set this up in a way where more of your ads are put in front of people that actually live in that location the people that you want to reach and less are put in front of people that have recently been in and one of the best

[5:10] ways to tackle that is with something called Geo fencing I'm going to show you exactly how that works now so let's delete out the United Kingdom that's just put in there as default because that's where I'm based and let's put in a town in the UK called Oxford which may well actually be a city I'm not sure but either way that's what we're going to go with it's a city there we go so we got Oxford and let's say we want to advertise to people within 15 mile radius of Oxford a local based business and that's what we think is realistic either us traveling to them or them

[5:38] traveling to us now what we can do is we can set exclusion target areas around our area to help prevent ads being shown to people in those other areas that might travel to Oxford or might have recently traveled to Oxford but aren't our target market so this is a little bit fiddly and it takes a little bit of time I'm not going to do the whole thing but I'm just going to demonstrate sort of how this would work so we've got Swindon here right and it's 25 miles let's change that radius to I reckon about 12 miles yeah there slight overlap there but that's fine and

[6:09] then with Swindon what we want to do is we want to click this little down arrow and then we want to click exclude location okay and now if I zoom out slightly you can see that you know we've got our little radius that we do want to Target in blue that's what's included and then we've got this area now excluded and then what we need to do is add in more exclusion zones so we can add in new now and just go around a little bit new land okay and then again what we want to do is get the radius right on that cuz you see that overlaps massively now we

[6:37] want 10 miles something on this yeah perfect just a tiny little overlap in there and then we want to exclude location let's quickly do the same with reading no I want the city not the unitary Authority these are sort of things you got to watch out for when you're adding a location targeting and always look at the map to verify that you've actually got it right cuz you can get you can get caught out quite easily so if we do 10 miles around yeah just tiny little bit of overlap I'm not worried about that and then exclude location okay I'm not going to do the whole thing because that will take too

[7:05] long but you get it right so you can see what we're doing here we're targeting this area Oxford plus 15 miles around that's where we want to advertise and then we're building an exclusion Zone around the outside Geo fening by adding in these exclusion zones what we're basically saying to matter is I don't want you to put ads in front of people that are living in or recently in these other locations the ones within the red exclusion Zone circles so for example if someone lives in this red area around reading but they've just traveled to Oxford recently they're not going to have ads put in front of them because

[7:40] they meet the criteria of the exclusion and you don't want to advertise to that person in this scenario anyway because they're not going to become a customer of yours if you can only serve those in and around Oxford and you can do this at larger scale smaller scales you know I've done this on a relatively small scale here but you could do it with us States for example we've done that before you could get even more specific you get smaller so you can scale this up and down but the principle remains of this is how you help improve that problem if you are seeing that I only

[8:05] want to Target people who live in this area my ads are being put in front of people that are in different locations that's a waste of money how do I fix it this is one of the best ways to go about doing it now what some of you will already have worked out is that geofencing isn't a perfect solution if we just zoom in slightly I'll explain now of course we want to Target people that are living within this blue area Okay some people living within this Blue Area will have recently traveled to the excluded areas you know down here and just again to further clarify we would

[8:33] now build red areas all the way around the outside of this I'm just not going to do that cuz it would take too long so that means we are potentially going to miss out on some good prospects which is Annoying It's not what we'd like to do in Ideal World we we wouldn't have that and you can see how the audience size changes to to emphasize this so for example we've got these three exclusion zones in here we've got an audience size of 258,000 to 304,000 if I go ahead and delete reading for example we will see that that jumps up 26 2,000 to 309 not

[9:00] by much just a little bit but that shows that you know there was almost no overlap so it's not coming from that tiny bit of overlap what's happening there is there are some people that live in this area and are recently traveling into this area and they would now be excluded so we can see that not a huge amount but we can see that that does happen and you're going to miss out on a few potential leads there but I think if you are running into this as a problem so you are seeing that more than say 5% of your leads are coming from the wrong

[9:25] location or or 5% of your ad impressions are coming from the wrong location this is something that I would look to implement because what's more important for you as a meta Advertiser is that your budget is spent efficiently you want to make sure that you're not wasting money putting ads in front of the wrong people in the wrong location if you miss out on a few leads in your area that's probably absolutely fine because there's probably way more leads within your area than you could actually service and deal with and and and actually work with anyway way more potential customers there's plenty of people to reach it's much more important

[9:56] that you exclude the wasted budget than it is that you maximize every single little bit out of the people that exist in the area and you can see that as we Chang that we remove one of those the audience SI didn't change much if I go ahead and remove the swinden one how about the same thing happens right we get a slight increase yeah a slight increase you know an extra 8,000 people or so out of an audience of that size this is not a big deal so you're missing out on a few leads yes and I know there'll be comments people saying oh this not perfect because of that but I

[10:22] think that if you are seeing this as a problem you are seeing that your ads are being put in front of the wrong people you're getting leads from the location you're thinking what's point in that I can't work with them this is a much better setup than not doing it because as I said it prevents you from wasting budget now there is an alternative technique that you can use to help fix this location targeting issue before I get into that just want to quickly let you know about Facebook ads Mastery which is my brand new course with community so it's brand new course material never before seen

[10:52] not stuff that's on YouTube or anywhere else it's our very best stuff it's the stuff that we use to train our own internal people to produce the best possible for clients so it's in terms of learning how to get great results for Facebook and Instagram is the best stuff around and it comes with a full School community so there's more than 600 members in there already it's a fantastic Community full of people just like you asking questions answering them helping each other out there's lots of interaction from me and my team answering questions and getting involved and helping everyone level up their Facebook ads game we do live calls live

[11:21] trainings inside there as well lots of stuff going on keeping you up to date the very latest helping you get the best possible results if that sounds something you be interested in the price start from just £97 per month there is a link in the description you can click on that go ahead and find out more details and I very much hope to see you on the inside okay so this alternative technique that I mentioned a second ago is called the call out method and it's actually not something that we do at the adset level with our targeting here it's something that we do at the ad level so

[11:46] I'm going to very quickly demonstrate what that looks like I'm drop over to the ad and again I'm going to ignore all the other stuff all the warnings and things this is just an example ad what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump to the primary text and let's say we're running an ad in New York and we only want to reach people in New York we might write something like New Yorkers did you know about our new event about our about whatever it is right now this is the call out method because we've got New Yorkers right there this will speak to people that are New Yorkers that live

[12:17] in New York that that associate themselves with that label and what that means is that when we run an ad with this with the call out method only people that live in New York that identify as New Yorkers are going to engage Eng with this people who are traveling in and out just almost subconsciously they're just going to scroll past and ignore it where people actually there go oh yeah that's for me okay I'm going to pay it more attention now meta will see those engagement signals and that will train the algorithm for the delivery of this ad to put your ads in front of people that

[12:47] engage with the ad because that's what meta's always doing to all ads all the time but if those people that engage happen to people that actually live in that location which is what we want in this case to help fix this location targeting problem then that's then self-reinforce so you start by putting the ad out and it should improve over time and meta should learn who to put in front of of course if you start an ad as well with New Yorkers d d d or it could be Texans or it could be you know West londoners or it could be anything like that location based those are the only

[13:16] people that are actually likely to go ahead and convert as well whereas if you don't have that in and let's say you're advertising a Landscaping service well you'd be surprised how many how many people will become leads from locations that are mild miles away from your business and you could never actually work with them that happens all the time because they don't look at all the fine details of check out where you are location wise and things along those lines whereas if you put something like this at the call out method in ad copy New Yorkers only people that live in New York let's say we're going to advertise

[13:42] some landscaping services for the rest of this ad only people that live in New York for the most part are going to fill that out and then provided you're using a leads campaign objective or a sales campaign objective then that's also going to train meta in terms of putting your ads in front of the right people cuz they're like ah okay they've got the call out method that means the only people that actually identify as a New Yorker that live in this location to becoming leads and then it's like a reinforcing cycle from then on right we're trying to get this advertis in more leads these people are coming leads

[14:06] has put ads in front of people that are more like them and round and round it goes and your campaigns improve over time so that's how the call out method works very simple very easy and something that we do all the time and that is sort of an alternative fix to this location targeting settings problem to Geo fencing now some advertisers have real problems with this and if you do you could always use both you could use the Geo fencing that I mentioned and you could add in the P out method there's limited downsides to doing so you could also test using one or testing the other

[14:34] like a lot of things meta ads related I'm a big fan of testing to see which works best for your particular business your products your services your location there's always variation in that sort of stuff so you could test GE fencing versus the call out method and see sometimes the call out method lends itself very naturally to an ad sometimes it's a little bit forced to get it in there in cases where it's forc we'd normally lean more towards the Geo fencing in cases where it's not call out method can work just fine so so I just wanted to give you those two options to let you know that you can use one either

[15:02] both all is absolutely fine but have a play around to see if you can fix this issue and obviously keep a close eye on where your leads where your interactions are coming from because if they're in the wrong location and you implement this and it fixes it great you can then move on and focus on other areas of your campaign and help improve those to get better results now we've talked quite a lot about location targeting in this video that's the whole topic is what I wanted to help you out with but there are obviously lots of other targeting settings and things you need to get

[15:28] right Within Facebook ad campaign if you want the best possible results and in this video here I give you a full Facebook ads targeting tutorial and I walk through all the things that you might want to use targeting wise so we talk about custom audiences lookalike audiences Advantage Plus all the stuff that you need to get right it is well worth a quick watch if you want to get the best possible results out of your Facebook ads cuz targeting and putting your ads in front of the right people is obviously really important go ahead and check it out

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