Geotargeting with Facebook Ads

How to Avoid the Biggest Mistakes and Pay Too Much for Ads?

Facebook Ads is an excellent platform to expand to lucrative markets in your home country, or in nearby or even far away countries.

However, to take full advantage of location targeting with Facebook Ads, you have to know the rules, opportunities, and a few (totally legal) tricks. Without these location targeting may become an expensive experience.

In a brand new eBook, we provide a concise but still comprehensive summary of location targeting options on the Facebook Ads platform. Its title is: Ultimate Guide to Location Targeting with Facebook Ads – With Special Attention to International Geotargeting.

Although the examples usually correspond to international targeting, most of the tips and conclusions apply to location targeting in our home country and targeting at all (even interest-based targeting).

Often we don’t speak the language of the targeted country, but it is always an option to target the English-speaking portion of the Facebook audience. An that is roughly one thousand million people worldwide!

Imagine that just a few hours after deciding to go international, your ad will be seen by people in San Diego or Bora Bora.

Advertising internationally is easy. Getting through your message to the exact people you want or to sell is not.

Most of the possible problems are related to two subjects: advertisement costs (and consequently profitability) and reaching the right audiences. Even if your goal is not making a profit, costs do matter.

Knowing the rules and a few tricks helps to avoid the most common mistakes advertisers regularly make:

• Paying too much for small or too specific audiences.
• Putting the wrong mix of countries, territories, or regions (states, counties – depending on your country) into the same ad set.
• Missing important countries and territories.

Did you know that there are more than 240 non-overlapping countries and territories you can target on Facebook? Unfortunately, some of those are hard to find and add on the platform (Facebook Ads Manager). For example, if you just target the United Kingdom you will miss several of nearby islands, not to speak about several overseas territories.

When starting advertising a new service or product, most often we start with a well-defined set of interests, behaviors, and demographics to get some traction and feed Facebook Ads with relevant data. After that, we can let Facebook’s powerful algorithm find prospects for us in a broader audience.

The situation is very similar when our goal is not profit-making, but we want our message delivered to the right people.

Using our best interests in the initial phase or niching down for any reason will soon lead to quite small audiences, even in large countries. Another problem with countries is that the portion of people on Facebook is sometimes surprisingly small (see for example China, or Japan). Another one is the portion of those who speak English.

Too small audiences = Too high CPM (Cost per 1000 impressions) and high cost per conversion.

The premium we pay may easily be 100%, 200%, or more. That will instantly kill profitability.

That can be avoided by stacking audiences, in our case countries or regions in the same ad set.

Done. Problem solved! Or not?

Unfortunately not. The Facebook algorithm can sometimes do miracles in finding good prospects for us, but with top of the funnel (ToFu) or middle of the funnel (MoFu) goals will always go for the cheapest audience. Perhaps you put a dozen countries into the same ad set. And surprise! 90% of the impressions went to the two counties with the lowest purchasing power.

All these can be avoided. We did the groundwork. We compiled a database with expected costs and a lot of other data covering the World, containing thousands of manually entered data points and calculated results. Although the database can be used on its own (it also contains a help worksheet in the Excel file), the corresponding eBook gives lots of useful tips to make the most out of it.

Check out a sample database (MS Excel file, no opt-in, i.e. email address is needed).

In the beginning, we started to compile the database of countries with expected CPM, Reach, Landing Page View Rate, and Cost per Landing Page View (CPLPV) data for ourselves. Later this was also planned to be a bonus material attached to a premium product. That is still likely to happen. However, we thought many people may take advantage of such a database, not just the customers of that particular product.

If you consider advertising internationally you may need the full list of countries with numbers calculated similarly to the 25 rows in the sample Excel file. With Facebook, you can individually target more than 240 non-overlapping countries and territories to get full coverage. Some are hidden for some reason and a lot of investigation is needed to find those, not to speak about the work associated with copying the numbers and doing the calculations.

Now, until the offer is not withdrawn, you can save yourself a lot of work. Don’t miss any countries, don’t overpay for ads. Get the full database for a symbolic price.

Before making a purchase, make sure you have downloaded the Excel file with the sample data above to know exactly what you can expect.

The file also contains the result of lots of virtual experiments we have run and another six figures based on the data in the Excel file.

Although the eBook and database are available separately, now it may make more sense to buy it as a bundle (save more than 67%).

The content of the bundle:

• Ultimate Guide to Location Targeting with Facebook Ads – With Special Attention to International Geotargeting eBook (20 value packed-pages). Everything you always wanted to know about doing location targeting right and as cheap as possible.
• A database of 243 countries and inhabited territories independently targetable by Facebook Ads.
  • Reach, Landing Page Views, Cost per Landing Page View, and CPM predictions (>1000 people in the audience) for 225 countries (Facebook doesn’t supply relevant data for some of the smallest territories).
  • Alpha-2 country codes (you will need those to evaluate data downloaded from Facebook Ads Reporting!).
  • GDP (PPP) per capita data for 220 countries
  • Google Ads CPC data (not recent) for 98 countries
• Bonus 1: The results of 40 virtual experiments with 6 informative charts (see above).
• Bonus 2: In a similar format to the countries table, it contains data for all states in the United States. You will be surprised by the big differences in terms of advertisement costs and the purchasing power of citizens among the various states.
• Extra bonus: all regions in the Philippines with data referring to the English-speaking audience. That can be more valuable than many may think. You can save a ton of money, if you experiment with your creatives, copies, interest-based targets, and so on in an inexpensive country before advertising in expensive markets where CPM hits the roof.

Grab your copy until available!

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