Geo-targeting is a way to restrict your ad audience to a certain geographic area. It is the best way to regionally direct your message and can be a powerful tool to maximize your ad efficacy. A few clicks on Facebook and you’ve got ads ready to go. Sounds great, right? Facebook ads are paid for by an automated “auction.” That means that if other nearby businesses are targeting the same area as you, costs for targeted ads will be higher because of stiff bidding competition.
Before you spend your money, you need to be sure geo-targeting is right for you. How do you know? The short answer is it depends. The long answer is we can help you figure it out, right now.
What Is Geo-Targeting?
Geo-targeting is marketing to a set of specific users based on their location. The more relevant an ad is to a user, the likelier they are to convert. By using geo-targeting, you can find customers by zip code, city, or country. If you operate out of a brick and mortar store, this can be an effective way to attract new customers.

For retail stores with a physical location, using geo-targeting to find nearby customers is also called local awareness advertising.

Local awareness ads are an incredibly powerful tool, and not just for bringing new customers to your store. You can use Facebook’s local awareness ads to do the work of geofencing firms that charge thousands for their geographically targeted outbound sales.
It doesn’t have to cost that much money to target your customers where they live.
If you already use local awareness ads and want to discover new and refined strategies to get high-value customers, keep reading. If you need a refresher on the basics about geofencing and want to know if it is the right choice for your business, click here.
Finding High-Value Customers with Local Awareness Ads
Every business can benefit from attracting higher value customers. Whether you’re a real estate company looking for high net worth individuals looking to buy property or a B2B SaaS company looking for a higher average revenue per user (ARPU), attracting customers who will pay you more than others is a powerful way to amplify the growth of your business.
The easiest way to target a particular geographic area is simply to set up a Facebook ad as usual. When you’re setting up the audience and you get to the map, hit “Drop Pin” and place the indicator in the middle of your intended target area. Then, use the radius slider to modify the full range of land that your targeting will cover. You can adjust this from 1 mile to up to 50 miles. Let’s say we run a company that helps first-time home sellers better market the properties they’re trying to sell on sites like Craigslist.
After years of working with relatively inexpensive homes in rural areas, we’re looking to break into the competitive and high-flying Manhattan real estate market. Referrals and word of mouth have been powerful drivers of growth up to this point, but they won’t cut it anymore. We need to get in front of people who are trying to sell their homes in Manhattan, and we decide to run Facebook ads to do it.

Targeting Customers within a Region
Here, we’ve placed a pin in the East Village in Manhattan and set a 1-mile radius for the targeting — ensuring that everyone in this geographical region will be part of the audience for the ad that we’re going to run.
Our ad will be shown to 710,000 people: that’s a lot. Better to narrow that down a bit. To do that, we’re going to use some more targeting around the age, gender, and type of person that we’re trying to show our ad to.

Since we’re trying to help people selling their homes, we should look for indicators that the people we’re showing our ad to are actually likely to move.
Targeting Customers with a Region + Behavior & Demographic Targeting
In order to get more specific with our audience, we set up our targeting to focus on those people that Facebook says are interested in moving. We narrow our age range slightly to exclude those too young to (probably) be looking to sell their home, and also include some demographic and behavioural targeting traits. We target those who are “likely to move” and those within a range of incomes and net worths that we like: