Setting up Meta ads is a fiddly little process, and I get why sooo many trade and rural businesses outsource to an agency to do it – but my goal with Marketing WAGs is to save you the cost of an agency, teach you how to do the Meta ads yourself, and put the money you’re saving back into your ad spend so your (and your partner/husband’s) business can grow!!!
The basic process of Meta ads is:
- You make your creative
- You plan out your caption
- You dive into the
horrible,scary,frustratingMeta Business Suite - You set your budget
- Hit live and wait for the leads to roll on in
While I could write a whole bloody book on tips, tricks, fails, and learnings I have had over the years using Meta Business Suite, I really want to stress about one niche little part of setting up Meta Ads that I feel like soooo many brilliant marketing podcasts and Instagram accounts skip over diving into – and that is Location Targeting.
Why Location Is Everything for Trade Businesses
Here’s the reality for service-based businesses — tradies, builders, landscapers, sparkies, mechanics, plumbers, you name it: you can only work where you are.
Your man is not selling a digital product that ships to Brisbane from the couch. He is jumping in a van, skedaddiling to a job, and doing physical work within a geographic radius that probably has a hard limit (aka he ain’t driving to bloody Timbuktu).
The thing with Meta, and for a lot of the marketing podcasts I listen to, is that they are so tuned in to product-based businesses that it seems to be their only focus.
So when you jump into Meta and let its Advantage+ do a lot of the heavy lifting, it’s not uncommon that it serves your ad to someone in Melbourne when you’re based in Toowoomba. Annnd that’s your money, gone. When it reaches someone in Tauranga and your business is in Christchurch? Wasted. Every single impression, every click from someone outside your service area is money that could have gone toward reaching an actual potential customer.
This is why I put location targeting above everything else when setting up Meta ads. Get this wrong and you’re pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
The Problem: Meta Does Not Want You to Restrict Location
Here’s where it gets a bit frustrating — Meta’s whole thing right now is pushing you toward their AI targeting system called Advantage+. And look, Advantage+ has its place. If I had an e-commerce brand selling nationwide, then sure thang, let the algorithm rip because it’s actually pretty good for that.
But for local service businesses? It’s a nightmare!!
Advantage+ treats most of your targeting settings as suggestions. You say “women aged 45–65 interested in home renovation” and Meta goes “cool, noted, we might try a few other people too.” It basically reserves the right to ignore you.
(I do have a few pointers for that, but they can come in a future post.)
Location, however, is one of the only hard constraints that actually sticks. Meta will honour your location setting even inside Advantage+. Which means it’s the one lever you genuinely control — and the one you absolutely need to get right before you touch anything else.
How to Actually Set Location Targeting in Meta Ads Manager
Here’s how to make sure your ads are actually reaching people in your service area and not just… hitting rando’s feeds.
Step #1: Go into Ads Manager and open your Ad Set. Location targeting lives at the Ad Set level (not the campaign level, not the ad level — the middle one).
Step #2: Find the Audience Controls section. If you’re using Advantage+ Audience (which is now Meta’s default), look for “Audience” — this is where your hard limits live. Click “Show more options” if you can’t see it. Location will be in there. If you’ve switched to Original Audience Options (manual targeting), the location field will be more obvious — it’s right at the top of the audience section.
Step #3: Add your locations properly. Choose your locations, and set the radius where applicable.
I also regularly use the excluding location too. So for a real life example, my partner’s business is in Christchurch, and we service a pretty decent area around it, but if I don’t have exclusions in place, then it’s not uncommon for dirty old Meta to send the ad further south to Timaru or even Dunedin, which is wayyy to far away. Or I mean, he probably would do work there, but I doubt the clients would want to pay his diesel km’s and put him and the boys up in some accommodation while they build a 70m2 granny flat on their back lawn, y’know?
Step 4: Check your radius isn’t too tight. A wee tip around location targeting and your budget is if your budget is small (under $20/day), a very tight radius can actually choke your ad delivery because the potential audience becomes too small for Meta’s system to work with. If you’re finding your ads aren’t doing the thing, try widening the radius slightly before you touch the budget.
A Quick Note on Budget vs. Location
I know some people would argue budget is the most important setting. And it is kinda true — more money means more reach, right?
But here’s my thing: a bigger budget means you waste money faster if your location is wrong. You can have a $5/day ad reaching the right people and get leads. You can have a $50/day ad reaching the wrong people and get absolutely nothing.
Get the location right first. Then worry about creative. Then budget. Then all the other stuff.
Meta is getting better at a lot of things. But its default settings are built for scale — for brands that want to reach as many people as possible, as broadly as possible. That’s not us. We’re local businesses. We need local leads.
So before you agonise over your headline, your CTA, your image, or whether $15 a day is enough — go into your ad set and make sure your location is locked down.
It is, without question, the most important setting in your Meta ad!!!
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*Talia writes the Marketing WAGs newsletter every Tuesday — practical marketing tips for the partners of tradies who are figuring it out as they go. Subscribe below.*
