Local businesses present a special kind of challenge for Meta advertising. Your potential audience is limited, and you’re often focused on foot traffic instead of conversions. More often than not, budgets are also lower.
While it’s a challenge, don’t overthink it.
Performance Goal
If you’re able to optimize for a purchase or lead, you’re at an advantage over many local businesses. Do that.
While it’s not easy, by any means, you are at least better able to get Meta to prioritize the action you care about.
If you can’t optimize for a conversion, you will probably need to optimize for a top-of-funnel action like reach, ad recall lift, ThruPlay views, or interactions.
None of these are preferred, but our main goal is simply to show our ads and build some local brand awareness.
Demographic Targeting
Because we’re using this type of interaction as our performance goal, we have to be careful with demographic targeting. Since the delivery algorithm is literal, the biggest issues with waste happen because it’s not hard to find people to reach or get a basic reaction from.
So if your ads go to an irrelevant demographic at a high rate (confirm this first with breakdowns), consider value rules to correct it by lowering bids.
Always prioritize value rules over removing demographics entirely, unless you can’t legally serve a group.
Location Targeting
Then target people within a reasonable radius of your location.
Though it’s a common strategy, resist the urge to remove people who live outside of that radius with exclusions. Since you can only target and exclude people who live or recently in a location, excluding people outside of a radius will also exclude people who live in your targeted area but travel outside of it.
Because you’re targeting a local area, Meta will also automatically check a box to reach people who show interest in your area.
Unless your business is a destination for outside tourists, you’ll want to uncheck it.
Placements
Whether you remove placements or use value rules here is up to you. Just make sure there’s a specific problem related to placement delivery that you need to solve.
There’s a balance between quality of placements and costs. The more placements you remove, the more expensive it will get.
It’s the Ads
Now, none of these are magical settings that will guarantee results for local businesses. Focus on the ads.
Attract your ideal customer by leaning into their pain points and offer your product as a solution. Your ads and your offer are the keys to everything. Local businesses aren’t unique in that way.
