How to check your Facebook Ad Location Targeting

Getting poor results from your Facebook Ads? It could be because they're showing up in the wrong places.

Location targeting is a key benefit of advertising through Facebook, however by default Facebook will target everyone in New Zealand 18+.

Facebook Ads remains one of the most effective ways to reach people via quite specific location targeting at scale and combined with age, gender and interest based targeting can help you reach your target audience to grow your business.

For any posts Boosted from a Facebook page, you can view ad data from the “See insights and ads” text that appears below the post on your Facebook feed, as shown below.

Here you can view People (age and gender), Placements and Location data from your advertising.

If your ads are showing nationwide (intentionally or not), you'll likely find they're showing most often in Auckland due the larger population there.

​If Auckland is outside of your service area then there's immediate room for improvement and an obvious explanation of where your money is being wasted.

If your service area is Auckland you will also want to select Auckland rather than New Zealand as I've seen Auckland-based businesses have 50% of their ad budget spent in other regions. You can also get quite specific in which suburbs you target as well to reach those closest you.

​Below this you can view the Audience details selected at the time as well as a button to ‘Edit audience’ if you wish to do so.

Also note that Facebook location is not always 100% accurate, they say so themselves. And sometimes your web browser may place you in a different location which feeds Facebook incorrect information about your location as well.

Tips and tricks

Instead of needing to set your location for every new post boost or ad campaign, you can create a Saved Audience within Facebook Ads Manager, input your target audience one and select this when you go to run an ad.

Learn more about reaching the right people with your ads