Wellllll…. Shit.
Meta continues to push its “father-knows-best” approach to your ad campaigns — removing yet another lever you had to narrow down to your specific audience. And this one will most definitely have an impact on small and local businesses.
Until this week, when you set up a Meta ad campaign and got to the Location Targeting part of your ad set, you had the option to target only people who lived there, or only people who had recently been there but weren't residents, or both.
This was an important control for businesses that had local markets — plumbers, dentists, HVAC repair companies — the kind of business that really only wanted to spend its money on people who lived there, not people visiting family, or passing through, or just being a tourist.
🎯 Your Targeting Just Got More Limited
Now, Meta has removed this ability and replaced it with a single, catch-all, called “People living in or recently in this location.” A pop-up box explains:
Won't have to? Who was saying this was a chore? Many businesses wanted to select a type — needed to, to make sure their ad dollars weren't wasted on people who will never buy from them. But now, won't be able to.
😠 How Does This Help Small Businesses, Exactly?
It's hard to not see the hypocrisy here. Almost every news release Meta puts out about its ad platform contains some language about how much they care about small and local businesses — with headlines like “How Meta is helping small businesses thrive this holiday season.”
The ability to target only local consumers might have been the single most important targeting lever small and neighbourhood businesses had. How is removing that helping them?
We reached out to Meta for comment and did not hear back by deadline.
🤖 AI Will Never Be As Good As Checking a Box
Here's what they probably would say: They'd tell you that machine learning is making audience targeting an obsolete endeavour — that their AI models are so good, they have high confidence in the inferred data of who is a resident and who is a tourist.
But you don't have to have a PhD in marketing science to know that inferred data will never be as good as clicking a button that says “Target residents only.”
No matter how good the AI is.
Tomorrow, our Meta ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell will be here with more on this — that will be exclusively on the Premium Podcast, which you can sign up for by tapping Go Premium in the show notes.