A little over a year ago, Facebook launched its Local Awareness Ads, a hyperlocal ad option that lets businesses target people who live in their area or who were just recently in the area.
Today, Facebook says it’s “making it easier for businesses with multiple locations to create local ads for each store and also giving businesses more insight into the groups of people near their stores.”
First, for businesses with multiple locations, Facebook says ads now feature dynamic ad copy that can changed based on the store’s location.
“New updates to local awareness ads allow businesses using Locations for Pages—a tool for connecting and managing business Pages with multiple store locations—to use information from each of their Pages to add dynamic ad copy, links and call-to-action buttons to their ads, so each ad is localized for its corresponding store,” says Facebook.
“For example, if a cafe with multiple locations in the Bay Area decides to run local awareness ads, they could choose to automatically populate the city name in their ad copy, depending on where the people seeing the ad are. So, people in Menlo Park would see “Join us for lunch in Menlo Park,” while people in San Francisco would see “Join us for lunch in San Francisco.” Call-to-action buttons are also dynamic, so when someone clicks on the “Call Now” or “Get Directions” button, they’re connected to the store currently closest to them. This helps advertisers spend more efficiently, since they’re only connecting with people likely to visit the store and the information they share is hyper-local and relevant.”
Facebook is also adding new insights that allow businesses to discover pertinent information about the audience they’re targeting.
“Businesses can discover the neighborhood’s busiest days of the week and times of day, so they know when people are most likely to visit their store. And they can see aggregate demographics of the people nearby, including age, gender, tourist and local residents. So, if their business serves tourists or people of a certain age group, they know when they have the best opportunity to connect with those people. Insights of this kind empower businesses to tailor their marketing to the people nearby and drive more people to their store.”
Facebook says these updates to local awareness ads are currently rolling out globally and the new page insights will hit the US first.