Understanding Facebook Location Targeting

When delivering an ad, it's important that you target the appropriate audience. This way, you make sure that your ads are relevant to the people seeing them. Luckily for us, Facebook is a genius with all the customization settings that you can possibly imagine.

Location targeting is a powerful feature that could make or break your ad. As powerful as it may sound, some of you might be having challenges in using it. So, let us explain in detail how it works.

Location Types

To start, let’s have a quick review. Facebook has four primary location targets available:

1. (Default) Everyone in this location: an option that allows you to reach people whose home or most recent location is within the selected area. For instance, this could be used to invite everyone nearby to a large fair or high-profile sports event.
2. People who live in this location: refers to people whose home is within the selected area. You use this to maybe advertise a local retail store to people who live in a specific city.
3. People recently in this location: using this option allows you to reach people whose most recent location is within the selected area. Example, you want to advertise a time-sensitive sale to someone who recently visited a car dealership.
4. People traveling in this location: includes people traveling in the selected area as determined by the device and connection information that Facebook collects. This includes those who are more than 125 miles from their home location. This is best used in advertising rental cars and accommodation to people traveling in a specific place.

What Determines This?

So, you might be wondering how each of these categories determined. Here’s a brief explanation to it:

• Everyone in this location - People who listed a location as their current city on their Facebook profile as well as anyone determined to be in that location via a mobile device.
• People who live in this location - People whose current city on their Facebook profile is within that location. This is also validated by IP addresses and their Facebook friends’ stated locations.
• Recently in this location - People whose most recent location is the selected area as determined only via a mobile device.
• People traveling in this location - People whose most recent location is in the selected area determined via a mobile device and are greater than 125 miles from their stated home location from their Facebook profile.

To summarize, “Recently In” is defined as “People whose most recent location was in that area.” Therefore, that this category is more in regards to people who have recently arrived in a location. Which is going to differ from "live in" location based on the recency factor.

Using This Feature

As we know, Facebook location targeting is very helpful if you know how to use it properly. As a result, you'll get your ads in front of the right people and increase conversions. Above all, understand the difference of each before applying it to your ad.