A common complaint among meta-advertisers is that their ads cover people outside of their target locations. Is this possible? Is this a legal question?
In almost all cases, there is a reasonable explanation. Confusion is mainly based on misunderstandings about the way they are positioned.
Let’s investigate and discuss what you can do about this…
1. Lived or nearest
This is the most common confusion point. Meta made a major change in positioning about two years ago. Initially, there were four different ways to define how you contact people in a certain area.
While the “live or nearest” location is your default location, you have other options:
- People living in this place
- People in this position recently
- People travel in this place
In other words, advertisers have more control over location. They can only focus on people living in a certain location or traveling.
But after the change, there is only one: “living or nearest” one location.
Meta seems to have removed specific documents related to determining locations, but back in 2018, Luke wrote about how Meta defined “life” and “recently” at the time.
- People who live in this place: The current city from its Facebook profile is all in the location. This is also confirmed by the IP address and the location stated by Facebook friends.
- Recently in this location: The latest location is the person in the selected area and is determined only by mobile devices. This includes people who live there or who may travel there.
While we can’t say this clearly, it’s a good starting point to understand how to determine the location.
It should be noted that if META still uses the location shared in the user profile, it may not be updated within ten years. This person may not live there anymore.
The key points here are: When you target the location, it not only includes the people who live there. It will also include people entering and leaving the area. This may be a big reason advertisers come into contact with people they think they shouldn’t.
2. Position radius
This is especially a problem when targeting specific cities to promote local businesses. Suppose you want to reach everyone in Denver. You’ll do this…
As you can see from the screenshot above, the default location radius is +25 miles. By Denver’s example, this will also include people in Boulder, a very different city, easily one hour or more away from other locations within the radius of Denver.
If you observe enough to lower the radius, you will notice that it can only lower it to +10 miles.
This will capture cities like Thornton. Again, that doesn’t mean these people live in Denver (or Boulders or Thornton). They may have been only in any of these cities lately.
3. Location expansion
Meta launched a new feature last year that gives advertisers the option to attract more people outside of designated target areas.
If you choose a city or region, you will see the option to “attract more people who may respond to your ads.” In fact, it may be selected by default (you can uncheck the box to turn it off).
After checking, Meta will expand your goals to show your ads “people who are interested in your chosen city and region, such as those who intend to go to these locations or make purchases there.”
This expansion will remain within the target country (for example, it won’t expand to attract people who are considering traveling to Denver). However, when checking, you will attract anyone who neither lives or is recently in the location of your choice.
4. Organic distribution
This is another big one. Advertisers will view comments or likes on their ads and do some research on where these people come from. This method has flaws, and its main reasons are:
1. A person’s location in his profile may be different from the location closest to their phone indication.
2. If within the same country, you may have checked the box to attract people studying the location.
3. They may have seen your ads organically.
Someone may see your ads organically. It can be as simple as surfaced in their feed, because the connection to it (you are indeed targeting). But one can find strange things and ads (one example is through ad transparency).
The most important thing is: You cannot automatically assume that you pay to reach all the people associated with your ads, as you may not have paid to reach some people who are exposed to it.
Passed failure verification
If you suspect you are paying to reach out to people who neither reside in your target location (and should not be because the checkbox for extended location positioning is already off), I encourage you to use the breakdown feature.
Using the Failure Drop-down menu in ADS Manager, go to Geography and select Countryside or Region.
You can then view how your ad spend and results are distributed by location.
In most cases, it is unlikely that you will find anything different.
VPN comments
We cannot ignore the possibility that the real possibility you are going to give to attract people who are not actually their claim to be the country. While I don’t consider myself an expert on VPNs, I think this might be an explanation.
People will use VPNs to conceal who they are or where they are from. In theory, this could mean making them look like they live in the United States, even if they don’t.
This goes far beyond my expertise, so I won’t claim whether this is a meta that can or should be controlled. But if you are sure you are going to reach someone you shouldn’t be, the explanation has nothing to do with Meta.
Other exceptions
Of course, it’s very likely that your budget will be spent on people who go beyond any of these explanations. Yuan does admit this.
The key part is:
Since these signals vary, full accuracy cannot be guaranteed. You may sometimes see a small amount of ad impressions from outside your location settings, and even receive messages or clues.
I don’t think this is a “ahha” moment that explains all your suspicions. This is why a few impressions appear outside the target area when using geographic crashes.
But I don’t think this will have any impact.
Can it be controlled?
I would love to share a detailed explanation here about how to make sure your ads can only attract the people you want to attract. Unfortunately, we are not a place where we have particularly strong advertiser controls.
If you are a local business, can you limit your advertising to people who live somewhere? No.
If you are in travel or tourism, can you limit your advertising to people traveling somewhere? No.
I’ve seen some advertisers come up with a complex geofencing strategy where you exclude everyone from a certain radius.
While this seems to make sense in theory, because everyone lives outside of the target location, it will backfire because it will also exclude those who live in your target location but travel in the excluded area.
If you have a big problem, it’s worth trying, but it’s certainly not a magical solution.
Your main focus should be on the areas you actually control:
- Advertising creative mentions target area
- Advertising copy summons people from the target area
- Table areas emphasize people who match positions
Your ad copy, creativity and form can attract the right audience or exclude the wrong audience. Since the algorithm will also learn from the people who perform the actions you want, it is possible that you use copying and creativity to help alleviate position wandering.
now you
What strategies do you use to isolate your preferred location?
Let me know in the comments below!
