How should you target Meta ads for a local newsletter?

My targeting for local newsletters is one setting: where people live. That's it. Everything else stays broad.

"Basically, Meta's smarter than you, so it knows its own platform and its own customers better than we do."

The whole game used to be figuring out how to target people. With how good Meta's algorithm is now, you just don't do that anymore. Even Meta tells you: don't target, let the creative be the target. The good news for anyone starting out is that Meta is about 90% less complicated than it used to be, and targeting is the main thing that got simpler. The flip side is your creative has to be primo, because it's basically the only thing you're doing.

Why does location-only targeting work?

Because local is the easy case. Who do you target? People who live within 10 or 15 miles of here. I don't care who it is, because anyone who lives here is a good reader. That's the whole reason local newsletter subscribers are so cheap.

Then the ad does the sorting. If the ad speaks directly to locals and attracts a certain kind of person, Meta goes and finds more of that person. I spent a long time proving that building audiences was wasted effort for a free local newsletter.

Hyper-targeting costs a lot more. A friend wanted to reach grappling and martial-arts fans within 20 miles. You can do that, but you pay for it. Even narrowing a newsletter to people over 55 will raise the cost. Not a lot more, but more than targeting anybody who lives in town.

What did I try before I knew this?

Interests. My very first test audience in October 2024 was moms with young kids, for a local events newsletter. The ad specialist helping me said adding that interest dropped the estimated daily reach to about 600 people, and the narrower you go, the higher the cost per signup.

So I asked: what if we just target women 25 to 45 who live in my town? It's a family area, so a very large number of them have kids anyway. Other newsletter operators in my group kept telling me the same thing: keep it as broad as possible and let Facebook figure it out. Everybody who lives here should want this.

A guest on my podcast went through the same lesson. He hired a smart digital marketing firm that tried manual targeting, then tried letting Facebook figure it out. Facebook figuring it out was better.

What about interests, lookalikes, and retargeting?

Lookalikes make a lot of sense in theory and don't seem to work as well in practice. A paid-media specialist at a regional news company told me the same thing from their own tests: retargeting and lookalikes built from page interactions did worse than plain interest audiences.

Retargeting has real value in industries selling a $300 product. A free newsletter subscriber is worth too little. Narrowing the audience pushes your cost per signup up, so even if it worked, it wouldn't pencil. More on that in retargeting and lookalikes for newsletters.

What's the one trade-off you do manage?

Area size. A bigger area is usually cheaper because Meta has more people to work with. But go too big and you pay for people who won't care about your local content. Pick a location plan up front with that balance in mind. The setup details (pins, radius, city names, exclusions) are in how to set up location targeting.

What do you leave on default?

• Age. Meta asks two things: your ideal age, and the minimum you're willing to take. We put an ideal like 25 and up (30 to 60 on one of mine), then say yes to showing it to people outside that and set the minimum at 18. For whatever reason it keeps the price down, because Meta can show the ad to more people. You won't get many subscribers under 25 anyway.
• Detailed targeting. Blank. I use the broad Advantage+ audience.
• Interests like moms or news readers. Not added.

When does this not apply?

This assumes a free newsletter with a geographic identity. Exceptions I've run:

• Business-owner audiences. For a B2B offer, manual targeting still earns its keep: ages 30 to 60, Marketplace placement off. See Meta ads for reaching business owners.
• Two audiences, one newsletter. For my business newsletter I didn't narrow the targeting. I split the creative: one ad for employees (high-value jobs, AI training) and one for business owners (events, connecting with other owners). It skews the list toward employees, and I don't care.
• Statewide outlets. Still location only, but split into a metro campaign and a rest-of-state campaign with different creative.

If a client really thinks a filter matters, like education level for a paid membership, test it: a week with it on, a week with it off. I've never tried that one, and Meta keeps deleting things you can target anyway.

The bigger lever is the ad itself. Getting the creative amazing is the job, because location is a given.