Dealing with changes to Facebook ads location targeting

So you’ve been running Facebook Ads for years, you are all over it, you’re a local business and you know how to target your local area to drive people in-store, or you only want people living in your city to subscribe you your services.

Sorry, earlier this year Facebook dropped a bomb by changing its targeting options, and you might only be realising this now as you go to set up new sets of ads.

While there’s no official statement from the team at Meta explaining the change, for now, continuing to run existing campaigns using the old method is not impacted. however if you duplicate or create a new ad set, the new location targeting method will be reflected in these.

We believe that running campaigns using the old method will eventually have a shelf life (although we don’t know what this is), after which they’ll likely stop if not updated to the new option.

So what’s changed?

Well, when it comes to choosing location targeting you no longer have all of the options you used to. Before the change you could choose:

• People living in or recently in this location
• People living in this location
• People recently in this location
• People traveling in this location

And now?

Any new ads only let you target:

• People living in or recently in this location

So why is this a problem? 

Many advertisers may be unaffected by this change, however it can have a detrimental affect to local businesses such as homeowner services, businesses with limited shipping locations, tourism, and local retail outlets..

For example if you are a local business based in Christchurch and you only want to target people who live here, you can no longer do that. It will also capture people who live in other cities that have recently been here. That’s not helpful because they can’t come in and visit your shop when they have jumped on a plane to go home hundreds of kilometres away.

What do we advise?

We’re exploring other targeting options for our clients such as geo targeting. We will keep you updated.