Facebook is well-known amongst marketers as the world’s leading platform for creating highly targeted advertising campaigns. Of course, the success of the targeting depends upon how well the advertiser has understood its customers.
Marketing advice often refers to the “customer journey”, encouraging brands to map out all the steps a customer takes from the first time they become aware of the brand, through to purchase and retention. The concept of mapping customer journeys can be literal as well as figurative when you bring location intelligence into the picture.
Location intelligence tools such as Periscope® enable brands to visualise their customers’ journeys both online and in real life on their own secure, corporate version of Google Maps. This allows users to generate insights such as most profitable customer groups, and best-performing products by location.
These insights offer a golden opportunity to marketers who want to leverage location intelligence for Facebook ads.
How Facebook uses location intelligence
Facebook’s own investment in location intelligence enables it to serve relevant local ads, and drive user engagement. Location tracking is enabled by default for all Facebook users, unless they choose to disable it. This enables the social network to:
- Build a pattern of where users are located when they’re using Facebook
- Offer location “tagging”, so users can publish where they are to the News Feed and find friends locally by tapping “Nearby” from the Facebook menu
Facebook uses this information to serve your ads to the right people in the right places, but there’s a lot you can do with your own location intelligence insights to supercharge the targeting of your Facebook ads.
Using location intelligence for Facebook Ads
Given Facebook’s ability to precisely target its users based on location, it’s easy for advertisers to create ads and present them to customers in the right areas. In order to get the most out of your campaigns, however, think about how to utilise other insights gained from your own location analysis.
Simply creating versions of your ad that are identical apart from the name of the area is a missed opportunity when Facebook’s ad targeting allows you to segment by:
- Age
- Gender
- Occupation
- Life events (e.g. having children)
- Interests
- Buying habits
- … and more
In fact, once you start layering ad parameters on top of each other (e.g. women aged under 30 based in Leeds who had a baby within the last 12 months and are fans of beauty pages), there are literally thousands of potential ad groups. To choose the best ones for your brand, refer back to the insights from your own location intelligence: are you serving ads to the people most likely to buy?
Building custom audiences on Facebook
Facebook also offers an option to upload custom audiences to receive your ads, such as your current and previous customers, or subscribers to your email list. This is where data analysed by Periscope® can really come into its own. Let’s say your analysis shows that the highest profits come from men aged 18-25 who live within 10 miles of a major city. You can build a spreadsheet featuring just these customers and upload it to Facebook, where you can create highly personalised ads featuring the products you know they like to buy. You can even create a Lookalike Audience where Facebook finds other users with the same attributes as your specified custom audience and shows your ad to them too.
Custom audiences can also be created from your website visitors as well as people who have downloaded your app. You can use Periscope to analyse the location of these individuals, along with other attributes such as their purchase history, before uploading as segmented custom audiences to receive targeted ads.
Ad targeting possibilities on Facebook are endless, and your own location intelligence is the key to success. Request a 10-minute demo of Periscope® to discover what this powerful software can do for you.