Have you ever wanted to be able to send an an Ad to a specific person or company? Well now we can using Facebook’s new Geo-Targeting tool. All you have to do is a little research to find the address of the person who you would like to target (office building, marketing department of a specific company, a single employee), and you will be able to accomplish this with little time. This method is at very low cost and highly effective if you know exactly who you would like to target.
You will first need to create a new Ad Set for your Campaign and edit your Audience to select a building’s address. You’re radius can be a maximum of 50miles and a minimum radius of 1 mile around the specific address that you enter. You can then add other demographic restrictions to your audience to refine your audience down to a minimum target of 20 people (it could be as low as 1 person but Facebook will always say 20). This means that we now have the option to select specific companies, areas within a city, and even individuals.
Again, you first enter Ad Sets under Audience. In the location option you can choose to type in the address or just drop a pin (like Google Maps).
Below is a screen shot of targeting Starbuck’s Headquarters in Seattle with nothing more than the address we found on Google.
Note: You can have multiple radiuses in one Audience. Leaving your Ads targeting only the people within those radiuses.
After inputing the address. You have two more choices to make.
Choice #1 Include or Exclude the people that fall into your radius
Choice #2 Selecting a specific relation people have with this location
a. Everyone
b. People that live here.
c. People traveling here.
d. People who have recently been here.
Things get even more interesting when you add other demographics like “Employer” when going after a specific company. Below we entered “Starbucks” as an employer and came up with 1,700 people within that square mile that work for Starbucks.
Lets dig a little deeper and say we would like to get Starbuck’s advertising department’s attention so they have ZammoDigital in mind when they think of someone to contact for Facebook Ad Advice. Below we inputed “Advertising” in the Interests sections, coming up with around 500 people that work for Starbucks, near their HQ, and are interested in Advertising.
And now lets’s get into Howard Schultz’s News Feed. He does work there when he is in town and he did graduate from Northern Michigan University. Below you will see Facebook’s minimum number of people “20.” That is with in 1 square mile of Starbuck’s HQ, male, that work at Starbucks and graduated from Northern Michigan University, male, and who has “recently been at this location” results with at least 20 people. One of them most likely being the CEO of Starbucks.
As you can see, the Geo-Locator tool is a major game changer. We now have the ability to target a single person! Follow this link to read a very funny story on how one Online Marketer pranked his roommate with Facebook Ads.
What are your thoughts? Have you had any interesting results with geo-locating specific people for serving them Facebook Ads? We would love to hear them.
This is a guest post by Sam Schubert.
This sounds extremely useful. I will implement it as soon as possible.
Thank you
This is brilliant Sam, great creative application of Facebook targeting abilities, thanks for sharing this tip! Didn’t know FB allowed targeting with such precision yet.
Hi Aaron, great post! But, what if there a zero people that meet my criteria? Will Facebook show that or is it always <20?
This is awesome – wondering how I might take that a step further to target people at an address for a trade show. This would not be my event, nor my page. Any ideas or suggestions on how to do that?
I’ve targeted people at a conference by entering the address of the event venue in the location field of your ads set up. Then use the smallest possible radius around that location. Then you may want to add a broad interest to refine and make sure your only delivering ads to the people you want to hit. Also, make sure to target people who are currently in that location rather than people who live in that location. Hope this helps!
Great post dude. Remarketing campaigns based on geo-targeting serve ads to highly qualified audience resulting in high conversion rates and low cost per conversion.
Is it possible to do this by generating an event at a high foot traffic area to attract customers to a venue across the street ??
Thanks for giving this example. I’ve been doing this for years hearing about getting down to this level of detail but not finding out how to do it.
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Oh this is cool stuff! This kind of thing would be great for a local gym for example. You could make an ad that just targets people within a 5-mile radius of your gym, and maybe even give them a discount if they walk, run, or bike to the gym! The possibilities with this kind of marketing are only as endless as your imagination.
Hi Aaron, is it possible to exclude people from geotargeting? ie, not everyone who is at a specific location?
Hey Sean, Yes, you can target a geolocation and then narrow your audience based on people to also have a specific interest or to exclude people with a specific interest. Hope this helps!
What is the minimum radius now ? Is it 10 miles or 1 mile ? Thanks again
I just checked again. The minimum radius is currently 1 mile.