In 2023, Meta made a big change to location targeting that had significant negative impact on some industries. An update may help, at least when creating advertising to reach travelers.
Originally, advertisers had several options when targeting people by location.
If you wanted to isolate only the people living in or traveling in a location, you could. But with the change a year ago, the only option was to reach people “living in or recently in” a location.
If you only wanted to reach locals, you couldn’t. If you wanted to avoid locals and only focus on people traveling, you couldn’t. Unless the algorithm is incredibly smart, wasted ad spend is inevitable.
While there isn’t a fix for targeting locals, the latest update could be a big improvement for those in the tourism industry.
The Change
When you select a city (city of New York) or region (state of New York), you may see a checkbox (not every ad account has it as I write this). This is a critical element. If you do not select a city or region (for example, you only select countries), you will not see this option.
As far as I can tell, this option is available regardless of the objective and performance goal. It also doesn’t seem to matter whether you use Advantage+ Audience or original audiences. The only slight variation is that the objective appears to influence whether the box is checked by default (you can uncheck it).
Here’s what it says:
To improve performance, we’ll show ads to people interested in your selected cities and regions, for example people showing intent to travel to these locations or make purchases there. This only includes people in the same country as each location you select.
When you check that box, Meta will expand your audience based on the following:
- Recently visiting or living in that city or region
- Searching for terms and Marketplace listings related to that city or region
- Interacting with ads or Pages related to that city or region
- Having friends living in that city or region
- Living in towns or cities close to that city or region
Meta ran an experiment that suggests turning this on can lead to a 6.7% lower cost per result. Here are details of that experiment:
This result is based on an experiment run between March 11, 2024 and March 18, 2024. The experiment found that using location targeting to reach people most likely to respond led to a median cost per optimized event that was 6.7% lower than only reaching people living in or recently in a city or region.
I would love to see experiments for advertising that would benefit most from this. For example, what was the impact on results for businesses within the tourism and hospitality industries? Instead, I assume these are generic results that combine verticals.
An Example
Let’s assume that you run ads for a hotel in New York City. You could select only the city of New York and 25 miles around it, but that will only include people living or recently there. If they’re traveling, they likely already have their hotel booked. You could target the entire United States, but that’s surely to lead to waste.
Instead, you can select New York City and turn this option on. Pulling from the list above, you can then also reach people who…
- Searched for terms and Marketplace listings related to New York City
- Interacted with ads or Pages related to New York City
- Have friends living in New York City
The first two are most likely to be helpful in this case. It’s not clear how much recency matters when it comes to searching for terms or interacting with ads. But, it would be logical to assume that Meta will put more value on the most recent interactions.
The friend connection could also use clarification. The likelihood that someone has friends in or near a big city is high. A logical assumption is that Meta will place greater value on friendships where there is more interaction. For example, if you have a Facebook friend in the promoted city, but you haven’t interacted with them for 10 years, there’s no reason to show that person ads.
Other Benefits
Meta lists the following verticals that may benefit most from location expansion:
- Travel: Reach people who may be looking for accommodation or activities
- Entertainment: Reach people who are searching for shows, concerts and activities
- Retail: Reach people who are looking to travel to a location that is close to physical stores
- Professional services: Reach people looking to travel to your location who may be interested in your products or services
- Restaurants: Reach people looking to travel who may want to book meals and restaurant reservations
A key point to remember here is that the location will only be expanded to include people within the country you’ve selected. While people may technically search to travel outside of their country, this expansion will not pick up those people.
Should You Use This?
If you are in any of the verticals listed above, the answer is rather obvious: Yes, you should probably turn this on and take advantage of it.
Knowing advertisers well, my guess is that most others will either turn it off or be upset if they unknowingly leave it on. But, I have doubts that leaving this on will hurt your results.
This feature is all about taking advantage of opportunities if they’re there. It doesn’t mean that a huge chunk of your budget will shift to people outside of the area you targeted. It could be a handful of people or no one at all. This simply gives Meta the ability to reach those people if it will help you.
Meta specifically mentions that you may want to turn this off when promoting businesses “in sensitive verticals (eg, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, biotech),” but this will likely be the exception.
Again, this won’t even come up for advertisers who target by country since you’ll need to select a city or region for targeting. If this does apply to you, my recommendation is to test it extensively. Do not assume that it’s bad. Allow performance to guide you.
It Remains Imperfect
It’s easy to focus on the limitations on this update, so let’s address those…
1. You still can’t isolate only travelers. There’s no way to avoid spending money on people who live in the same city or region as your business.
2. No solution for international travel. While this is great for larger countries like the US where travel within the country is common, it doesn’t help small destination countries. In those cases, tourism is predominantly from outside of the country.
3. You still can’t isolate locals. I know that this update has nothing to do with it, but there is a clear need to bring back the ability to restrict targeting to local residents. Think schools, politics, daycare, and certain services (lawn care, plumbing, roofing) that would only be useful to locals.
It would be nice. Meta surely knows about these pain points. Advertisers have been screaming about them for over a year now.
Your Turn
Will this update help you?
Let me know in the comments below!
