Here’s great news for businesses with brick-and-mortar locations: Facebook has introduced updates and improvements to its local ad targeting offerings for a much more valuable and insightful advertising strategy!
Smart Ads with a Local Focus
The new updates to local ad targeting on Facebook are so significant that they’ve been given their own Page Insights tab. If you’ve been advertising on Facebook, get ready to receive a lot more value at the same cost. If you have a business with local physical locations and you’ve never advertised on the platform before, now is a great time to consider a Facebook advertising strategy. Local ad targeting on Facebook focuses on Facebook users living a predetermined distance away from a business as well as Facebook users who have recently visited an area. The local ad targeting has evolved to smart ads featuring ad copy that changes based on the location of a business – an especially important feature for companies will multiple locations.
Let’s examine a fictional company named Boutique Y. Boutique Y has seven shops scattered in metropolitan areas in the U.S. A Facebook user living two hours from Dallas will see the Boutique Y ad for the Dallas location whereas a Facebook user who checked in to a restaurant in Las Vegas two days ago will see the ad for Boutique Y’s Las Vegas store. The same Las Vegas ad would appear for Facebook users living in the Las Vegas area.
If the ad for Boutique Y features a call-to-action, it may also be customized. So, for example, a Facebook user may click the ad to check in-store availability or to get directions and the information he will receive on the webpage he is directed to will depend on the nearest Boutique Y.
Area Insights
Business owners will also be privy to detailed information regarding the surrounding neighborhoods of their business locations. Area information includes but is not limited to demographics, peak times for local foot traffic, data on how many local individuals have seen an advertisement, data on whether the Facebook users seeing the ads live near the business or are currently visiting (or have recently visited) the area. In fact, the area insights will get so detailed that business owners and page administrators will be able to access data on how many Facebook users are in a specified amount of feet from the business at any given moment (all individual Facebook users included in the data will be anonymous)!
