Are you wondering why your Facebook ads campaign is failing despite having top-notch ad creatives? Facebook geofencing can be the missing piece.
Successful ad campaigns aren’t just the fruit of quality products and good ad banners or videos. Rather, who you target your ads to plays a huge role in the success of the ads.
Research shows that businesses globally lost $54.63 billion in ad spend in 2022 due to invalid traffic. This number might increase up to $72 billion in 2024.
This figure alone shows the importance of targeted marketing efforts, and there’s no better way to do it than geofencing.
This article is all about Facebook geofencing. You’ll learn how to geofence on Facebook and explore its benefits and use cases.
But before we start, here’s a quick overview of geofencing!
Note: Although Facebook’s name is Meta now, we’ll still refer to it as Facebook since most people are familiar with it.
Table of Contents
Geofencing in a Nutshell
Geofencing is a marketing technique that creates a virtual boundary around areas such as retail locations or targeted user locations. This helps businesses display ads to individuals living in these locations or visiting them.
Users within these areas get contextually relevant ads to their interests and geographical location.
Businesses often conduct previous research to identify areas with high concentrations of their target audience. This research might include analyzing demographics, consumer behavior, and past sales data.
By focusing ads in high-interest locations, businesses attract potential customers.
Businesses commonly use social media platforms for geofencing due to their massive user location database and ready-to-use geofencing workflows.
Let’s explore whether you can geofence on Facebook.
Can You Geofence on Facebook?
Yes, Facebook allows geofencing for targeting ads. Facebook calls this feature Location Targeting.
Using geofencing in Facebook, you can create a custom audience based on precise locations. You can target users who are in, recently visited, or live in a specific area.
To set this up, you drop a pin on the map and set an optimal radius, which can be as small as one mile. This radius ensures that your ads reach people within the most relevant distance from your retail locations.
Moreover, Facebook allows for the exclusion of certain areas within the geofence to narrow down marketing efforts. For example, if the optimal radius for your ad is one mile, you can exclude low profitability areas in between.
Here’s how to geofence on Facebook to reach your target audience.
How To Geofence on Facebook
Facebook geofencing is a simple process. Here is a step-by-step guide for implementing geofencing on Facebook.
Step 1: Create an Ad Campaign and Choose Campaign Goals
In your Facebook business account visit Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite and create a new Ad campaign. Next, you’ll have to choose an Ad Objective. There are six ad objectives, and each one represents a different business goal.
These ad objectives include:
- Awareness: to spread awareness about the brand or a new product.
- Traffic: to attract traffic to your website or other online channels.
- Sales: to target people likely to buy from you.
- Engagement: to increase social media engagement such as page likes and post views.
- Leads: to gather leads to target.
- App promotion: to persuade people to install your app.
Tackle this step carefully, as your campaign depends upon the ad objective. You can find detailed information about each ad objective in Meta’s official guide.
Step 2: Create a New Audience and Define the Location
After choosing your Ad objective, you should select a campaign name for your ad set and click Next.
Then, the ad manager will prompt you to your new ad set. There, you will see multiple options, such as Ad set name, Budget and Schedule, etc.
Now, scroll down to the Audience controls section to create a new audience. Within the Audience controls section, there will be a sub-section called Location.
In the Location settings, enter the names of countries, cities, or regions you want to target. Facebook geofencing allows you to search for one location at a time or upload multiple locations in bulk. You can target up to 25 countries, 250 cities, or 50,000 postcodes.
If you aren’t sure about the location, you can use the browse feature. The browse feature suggests countries and regions or allows you to use a saved location. You can also enter a country’s name and get suggestions for cities with a high population.
To specify a precise location on the map, use the Drop Pin feature.
After selecting a location, set a specific radius around them. You can select the radius around it using the slider or manually adjust the area by zooming on the map. The minimum radius you can set is one mile.
Note that radius targeting is not available for states, regions, or countries. The radius also doesn’t extend into other countries, even if the visual map does.
Step 3: Refine Target Audience Using Location Exclusions
To optimize your geofencing on Facebook, you should use Location exclusions. This feature lets you refine your target audience by excluding specific areas within your chosen location.
To exclude areas, click the Exclude button next to the Locations field.
You can set up exclusion zones using the Drop Pin feature and set a radius for each zone.
Location exclusions are especially useful for creating an optimal radius. For instance, you can exclude areas to target a radius smaller than one mile, which is the minimum radius limit.
Image: Demographic settings in Meta ads.png
Step 4: Adjust Demographics
After selecting the optimal radius, you’ll have to adjust a few demographic settings in the Advantage + audience section. These include the age, gender, and language of your target audience.
For age, you have to set a lower and higher limit. For gender, you have three choices: men, women, and all. The language settings let you target ads to speakers of specific languages.
After these basic settings, you have the option for detailed targeting. Detailed targeting lets you define your audience more specifically. For example, you can include or exclude people based on certain interests and behaviors from your audience set.
Step 5: Launch and Monitor the Campaign
When you have correctly set your demographics, click Next. Here you will need to set up your ad. This means you will have to upload your ad creative, write the ad copy, select destinations, etc.
Now, launch your campaign. Use Facebook Ads Manager to track performance and make adjustments based on performance, engagement, and conversion metrics.
You can view your campaign results by selecting Campaigns, Ad sets, or Ads in Ads Manager. There, you’ll see the list of all your ad campaigns. You can select a date range and choose the ad you want to view results for.
Benefits of Facebook Geofencing
Many successful businesses have used geofencing in Facebook to achieve their business goals and skyrocket their sales.
Here’s why businesses should use Facebook’s location targeting.
- Precise targeting: Facebook Geofencing allows businesses to target users in a specific geographical location.
- Cost efficiency: By focusing on a localized target audience, businesses can reduce ad spend and maximize their marketing efforts.
- Increased engagement: Localized ads resonate better with users, which leads to higher engagement and interaction rates.
- Improved conversion rates: Geofencing on Facebook increases the likelihood of conversions by targeting users near your business or event.
Reasons Why Businesses Use Facebook Geofencing
Businesses of all sizes all over the globe use Facebook geofencing for different business objectives. Here are some reasons why businesses use Facebook geofencing:
- Local store promotions: Businesses use Facebook geofencing to promote sales or events to people near their stores to boost foot traffic.
- Event marketing: Marketers target users within a geographical location surrounding an event venue to drive higher attendance.
- Competitor targeting: Companies reach customers near competitors’ locations to entice them with special offers and deals.
- Real estate: Agents use geofencing on Facebook to advertise open houses to nearby residents and potential buyers.
Facebook Geofencing Considerations
When using Facebook Geofencing, note that Meta technologies use various signals to show ads within your chosen geographical location. This can result in occasional ad impressions or leads from outside your target area due to signal variability.
Organic engagement, such as likes and comments, may also come from outside the target audience. Preview ads may also appear to people connected to your business, but Facebook doesn’t charge for these impressions.
Lastly, when using tools like Google Analytics, be aware that they might show different results due to different geotargeting methods.
Geofence Profitable Locations With geoPlugin!
Facebook geofencing is a great way to target audiences based on their geographical location. But what about using geofencing outside the Facebook platform?
This is where geolocation services like geoPlugin become useful. geoPlugin allows business owners to gather information about potential customers, such as country, city, zip code, and long/lat coordinates.
Unlike geofencing on Facebook, which uses its API, geoPlugin provides full ownership of your database. This means you can use the same database for other purposes, such as geopricing and geoblocking.
So, sign up for geoPlugin today and grow your business using geofencing and other location-based advertising techniques!
