The most common targeting mistake is treating Meta’s audience settings as fences when many of them now work as suggestions.
Facebook ad targeting options cover location, age, gender and language; detailed targeting by demographics, interests and behaviors; custom audiences built from your own customers and visitors; lookalike audiences; and Advantage+ audience, where Meta’s AI looks for the people most likely to respond.
With Advantage+ audience on, Meta’s Help Center says locations, a minimum age, excluded custom audiences and languages stay as controls, while age ranges, gender, detailed targeting and included custom audiences become suggestions. For a local business, that makes location the setting to get exactly right.
Every option in one table
| Option | What it is built from | With Advantage+ audience on | When a local business uses it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | Where people live, have been recently or go often | Control | Always: it is your service area |
| Age | Profile age, from 13 to 65+ | Minimum age is a control; the rest is a suggestion | Set the minimum for age-restricted products |
| Gender | Profile information | Suggestion | Rarely, only when the offer is truly for one group |
| Language | Language settings | Control | Bilingual businesses running ads in a second language |
| Detailed targeting | Ads people click, Pages and posts they engage with, groups and events, device, installed apps | Suggestion | A narrow profession or hobby, before you have customer data |
| Custom audiences | Your customer list, website visitors tracked by the Meta Pixel, engagement with your Page, profile, videos or forms | Included: suggestion. Excluded: control | Reaching past visitors; leaving out current customers |
| Lookalike audiences | People similar to a custom audience you choose | Not a control | Once you have a solid list of real customers |
| Advantage+ audience | Meta’s AI, using past conversions, Pixel data and interactions with your previous ads | It is the setting itself | Most prospecting campaigns; Meta recommends testing it for almost every campaign type except retargeting |
If someone asks for the “four types of target audiences” on Facebook, these are the groups behind the question: core settings (location, age, gender, language), detailed targeting, custom audiences and lookalikes, with Advantage+ audience as the automated layer on top. Sources: Meta Business Help Center pages on reaching new audiences, Advantage+ audience and audience controls and suggestions.
Location is the setting that matters most for a local business
Location is a hard limit, so it should match the area you can actually serve. Meta’s page on location targeting sets out the rules:
- You can enter up to 25 countries, up to 250 cities, and up to 50,000 ZIP codes.
- Ads reach people who spend time in your locations, such as people who live there or were there recently.
- Cities, addresses and dropped pins come with a default radius you can adjust. A radius is not possible with ZIP codes, states, regions or countries; those cover the whole area.
- For a city, you can pick “Current city only” instead of a radius.
- When you pick a city or region, the box “Reach more people likely to respond to your ads” may be checked by default, which can extend delivery beyond your locations. Uncheck it if you cannot serve customers outside the area.
- Excluding a location works on where people are and where they live: someone who lives inside your area can still see the ad while visiting an excluded one.
A worked example: the Charleston metro
Straight-line distances from downtown Charleston to the centers of nearby towns are roughly 4 miles to Mount Pleasant, 6 miles to North Charleston, 15 miles to Goose Creek and 22 miles to Summerville (our calculation from town-center coordinates, not driving distances).
A pin downtown with a small radius covers the peninsula and parts of Mount Pleasant and North Charleston, but not Summerville. A business that serves the whole metro is better off listing the cities it serves.
One that only serves part of a city, say West Ashley and James Island, is the case for a list of ZIP codes, with no radius at all.
Detailed targeting: demographics, interests and behaviors
Detailed targeting groups people by demographics (for example, “In college”), interests (“Blues music”) and behaviors (“Frequent travelers”).
According to Meta’s page About detailed targeting, those groups come from signals such as the ads people click, the Pages and posts they engage with, groups they join, events they respond to, the device they use and the apps they install. That is also the short answer to how Facebook decides which ads to show someone.
Under Advantage+ audience, your interest picks guide delivery but do not limit it. If a narrow group really is the only market (a supplier for licensed electricians, for instance), Meta lets you turn suggestions into controls with the option to further limit the reach of your ads.
Custom audiences and lookalikes
Custom audiences are people who already know you: a customer list you upload, website visitors measured by the Meta Pixel, and people who engaged with your Facebook Page, Instagram profile, videos or lead forms. Lookalike audiences start from one of those lists and look for similar people.
For a local business, the most useful move is often the exclusion. Excluded custom audiences are one of the controls, so leaving out last month’s buyers keeps a “first visit” offer in front of new people. Lookalikes are only as good as the source list, so build them from real customers, not from everyone who ever liked a post.
Age, gender and language
Ages run from 13 to 65+, where 65+ reaches everyone older than 65, and targeting options are limited for people under 18. Set a minimum age when the product requires it, since minimum age is a control. Gender and the upper age range are suggestions under Advantage+ audience.
Language is a control. A business that serves customers in two languages can run the same offer twice, in English and in a second language, each limited to people who use that language.
Housing, jobs and financial services play by stricter rules
Ads about housing, employment, or financial products and services must be declared as a Special Ad Category. Since January 21, 2025, that has been required for financial products and services campaigns from advertisers in the United States or aimed at audiences there. Meta’s page on audiences for these categories lists what changes:
- Location by country, region, state or city, but not by ZIP code, and no location exclusions.
- Cities, addresses and pins include an expanded radius; in the United States, at least 15 miles.
- Age fixed at 18 to 65+ for housing, employment and credit ads, and all genders included.
- Some detailed targeting options removed, no detailed targeting exclusions, and no Advantage+ lookalike.
In Charleston terms, a 15-mile radius from downtown reaches about as far as Goose Creek. Real estate agents, property managers, businesses hiring staff and lenders should plan their ads for that wider circle.
A decision tree for local businesses
- Is the ad about housing, a job opening or a financial product? Yes: declare the Special Ad Category and plan around city-level targeting with the 15-mile minimum. No: go to 2.
- Do you have a customer list or Meta Pixel data on your website? Yes: build custom audiences for past visitors, and exclude current customers when the offer is for new ones. No: go to 3.
- Where do your customers come from? The whole metro: list the cities. Part of a city: list ZIP codes. Around a storefront: a pin with a radius. In every case, check whether “Reach more people likely to respond” is on.
- Is your customer a narrow group you can name? Yes: add detailed targeting, and decide whether it should be a suggestion or a limit. No: go to 5.
- Keep location, minimum age and language as controls, turn Advantage+ audience on, and make the ad itself say who it is for: the service, the neighborhood, the customer.
The words in that ad matter more when the audience is broad; the same rules as our Instagram captions for business apply to the primary text. For the rest of the setup, start with Facebook ads for small business, and set the spend as the media line of your marketing budget.
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