Your Step-By-Step Guide To Creating Facebook Local Awareness Ads
Facebook is really upping the ante in October with the introduction of Facebook lead ads and the local awareness objective. If you’ve had trouble targeting prospect who live close to your business or are confused on how to accurately target your audience, then the Facebook local awareness objective is set to make things easier.
How Does The Local Awareness Objective Work?
Assuming you’ve already filled in the location of your business on your Facebook Page, Facebook now allows businesses to serve ads to users who live near their business.
Local awareness objective is easy to setup and Facebook states that you can reach your local audience cheaper than anywhere else.
Never ran this ad type before? Here’s how you set one up.
Getting Started With Facebook Local Awareness Ads
You can setup a local awareness objective through the Facebook Ads Manager. Open up your Ads Manager dashboard and you’ll see the ad objective to Reach people near your business, select the objective and the Page you’re creating the ad for:
Selecting your distance
Unlike the typical Facebook Ads, where you select your target audience using a number of parameters, local awareness objective shows an interactive map of your business and the local area:
Source: http://www.coine.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/facebook_local_business_setup_ads-e1431499157671.png
By default, Facebook sets the targeting to reach everyone within a 1 mile radius of your business which can be adjusted. On the right hand side Facebook shows you the potential reach of your ad based on the radius selected. You can further hone in on your audience by targeting prospects by street name.
Once you’ve selected your radius, you then choose the age group and gender you want your ads served to.
Note: you cannot target by behaviors or interests using the local awareness objective.
Selecting your budget
Local awareness objective uses the CPM bidding model to serve your ads and does not allow you set your own bids. You can only select your daily or lifetime budget and select a start and end date.
Facebook will estimate the potential reach of your ad based on your budget and scheduling:
Creating you local awareness ad
The creative options for local awareness ads on Facebook are almost exactly the same as other Facebook objectives… you get to write a headline, have space for some text, an image and one call-to-action.
The call-to-action is the exciting part of the ad, as you can direct prospects to:
- Like your page
- Learn more (direct them to your website)
- Call your business
- Provide directions
Last week I discussed how important phone calls can be over clicks, having a one-click call or mapped directions to your business is going to be huge if you sell offline.
The call your business CTA is only shown on mobile devices.
How Should You Be Using Local Awareness Ads?
Local awareness ads have their pros and cons. One major benefit is that businesses know their ads are being served to people in the local area. The downside is that not everybody will be their ideal customer.
Since you can only segment by age and gender, if your sell products to a laser targeted audience who have specific needs (a surf shop for example), you’ll be serving a lot of irrelevant ads and targeting the wrong people. If you have a number of customer profiles (department store or supermarket) then this ad objective will be of greater value.
This local awareness ad platform will be the perfect ad objective if your business often runs time-sensitive sales or hosts events, as the local awareness objective will be the quickest way to get people into your store.
Summary Of Facebook Local Awareness Ads
If you’re a local business and have yet to crack Facebook ads, perhaps their new local awareness objective is just what you need to turn things around. They don’t take more than a few minutes to setup and targeting and bidding has been made easy.
To make the most of local awareness ads, make sure your Facebook Page has it’s location and telephone number filled out correctly. You don’t want to pay for calls going to the wrong number or sending prospects to someone’s store!
Have You Used Facebook Local Awareness Ads Yet? Share Your Experiences Below!
Nick Bridges
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