Meta Ad Targeting for Tradies: Broad, Local or Retargeting?

Most tradies asking how to target a Meta ad are really choosing between three audiences: whoever Meta's algorithm thinks might respond, the suburbs you already work, or people who have already come across your business. Pick the wrong one first and the ad spend goes on people you'll never quote.

The short answer: local first, retargeting next, broad as a test

Start local. Target the suburbs you already cover, not a hobby and not the whole city. Add retargeting once people have visited your site or watched your videos. Use a broad audience only as a controlled test, with the location fence still on, and only for planned, visual jobs. A one-van operator shouldn't split a small budget three ways.

This guide is about who sees the ad. For what goes in it, see our guide to Facebook ad creative for tradies. If you're still deciding whether Meta suits your trade at all, start with Facebook and Instagram ads for tradies.

What broad, local and retargeting mean in Ads Manager

In practice the lines blur. Advantage+ audience is now the default on most campaigns, and Meta treats only a few inputs as hard limits: location, minimum age, language and custom audience exclusions. Age ranges, gender, interests, custom audiences and lookalike audiences are suggestions Meta can look past when it expects a better result.

So for a tradie, the real targeting decision comes down to two things: where you draw the fence, and who you hand the algorithm as a starting point.

Why a whole-city audience fails a mobile tradie

Radius advice online ranges from a 3 km pin to a 30 km circle, and almost everyone agrees on one point: don't target all of Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane. A metro-wide audience is huge, and Meta spends where it can find cheap results, not where your van goes. Every lead from the far side of the city is either a job you decline or a long drive that eats the margin.

The opposite mistake is a tiny pin around your home address. For most mobile tradies, 3 km leaves too few people to show the ad to. The same small group sees it again and again, and the ad set struggles to spend.

There's no universal right radius, which is why the numbers disagree. The right size is your patch.

Set the patch: suburbs, pins and the expansion setting

Start from the suburbs that already pay

Pull the suburbs from the last year of invoices, then compare them with the service areas on your Google Business Profile. Those are the places you've already proven you'll drive to. Enter them in Ads Manager as suburbs or postcodes, or drop a few small pins over the clusters. Then exclude anything inside the circle you won't service: the suburb across the river, the one past the toll road, the estate where parking takes longer than the job.

Location targeting built from real jobs beats radius targeting around your house every time.

"Living in or recently in" includes people passing through

On most ad accounts, the old dropdown that separated "living in", "recently in" and "travelling in" has gone, leaving "People living in or recently in this location" as the only option. Meta's own help centre says that setting can reach people whose home is somewhere else but who were recently in your area. A commuter who drives through your patch can see the ad.

You can't switch that off, so work around it. Keep the suburbs tight, name the suburbs in the ad copy, and ask for the suburb on your lead form so an out-of-area lead is obvious before you ring.

Check the expansion box before you publish

Age and interests: what still helps, and what to stop stacking

Age is a proxy, not a homeowner filter

A lot of tradie advice sets the age range to 30 to 65 to reach homeowners. Meta doesn't offer a reliable "homeowners only, exclude renters" switch for a plumbing ad, and age is a rough stand-in at best. A 28-year-old first-home buyer and a 60-year-old renter both exist, and an age filter gets both of them wrong.

Under Advantage+ audience, an age range is only a suggestion anyway. The hard control is a minimum age, and in most accounts it can't be set higher than 25 without switching Advantage+ audience off. If you add a range, treat it as a hint, not a wall.

Interest stacks pull the wrong crowd

Interest targeting such as "home improvement", "DIY" and "renovation" pulls in other tradies, apprentices, renters saving reels and people who simply like watching renovation shows. Stacking five of them narrows the audience size without making it any more likely to book.

If you use interests at all, add one or two as a suggestion inside Advantage+ audience and let the ad creative do the qualifying. A finished deck in a named suburb picks out a homeowner better than any interest list Meta offers.

Retargeting: pixel, video viewers and the empty-audience problem

Retargeting ads go to people who have already come across your business. They're often the cheapest results in the account, because the person has already seen your work. They're also useless until those people exist.

Install the Meta pixel before the cold campaign

The Meta pixel records visits to your website so you can build a custom audience from them. Install it before the first local campaign goes live, so every click from that campaign starts filling the audience, and mention it in your privacy policy. If your site has nowhere sensible for a pixel-tracked visitor to land, or no page for the job you're advertising, sort that out first. It's the sort of thing our web design team builds into trade sites from the start.

The audiences worth building first

• Website visitors, last 30 days. People who visited your site recently and didn't call.

• Video viewers who watched at least half. Meta lets you build an audience from people who watched a set share of your video. Half or more filters out people who scrolled straight past.

• Your customer list. Past customers, uploaded with care. More on that below.

Keep the retargeting ad short: the finished job, the suburb and the phone number. A real review with the customer's permission works well here, because the person already half-knows who you are.

Why a new site's retargeting ad set won't spend

A new site with a few dozen visitors a month won't fill a retargeting audience in week one. A tiny audience either barely spends or shows the same handful of people the same ad until they're sick of it. That's normal. Don't pause the local campaign because the retargeting ad set is sitting idle. The local campaign is what fills it.

Customer lists and lookalikes, with the suburb fence left on

Upload only people you have a fair reason to contact

A customer email list or phone list from past jobs can become a custom audience, and the seed for a lookalike audience. Meta matches the list against its users and sets out how it handles the data in its Customer List Custom Audiences Terms.

Only upload people you collected the details from yourself, who would reasonably expect to hear from you. Never a scraped, bought or swapped list. The OAIC's guidance on direct marketing counts targeted social media advertising as direct marketing, and explains that personal information can generally be used for it when the person gave it to the business directly and would reasonably expect that use.

Lookalikes need a seed and a fence

A lookalike audience finds people who resemble your source audience. Meta needs a source of at least 100 people from one country, and you choose a size from 1%, the closest match, up to 10%. A tradie with 80 past customers can't build one from the customer list yet, but 30-day site visitors or video viewers can make a bigger seed.

The catch is that a lookalike is built for a whole country. A 1% Australian lookalike is spread across every state. Without your suburb fence on the ad set, it finds similar people in suburbs you'll never visit. Keep the location control on, and remember that under Advantage+ audience the lookalike is only a suggestion inside that fence.

You'll see claims online that a 1% lookalike cuts cost per lead by a big percentage. Treat any figure like that as one account's experience, not a promise for yours.

How to split a small budget

Our rule of thumb: under about $40 a day, run one campaign with one local ad set. Don't run broad, local and retargeting at the same time on a one-van budget. $20 a day split three ways is three ad sets that each get too few results to finish Meta's learning phase.

No targeting strategy will rescue weak creative. A logo slide shown to the perfect suburb is still a logo slide. And judge every stage on cost per booked job against what the job is worth, which our Google Ads vs Meta Ads guide walks through with a worked example.

How to check where your ads went after week one

1. Open the geography breakdown. In Ads Manager, use the Breakdown menu and look at results by region. In Australia that shows states, so spend in a state you don't work usually points to a lookalike without a fence or the expansion box left on.

2. Check the suburbs on your leads. Ads Manager won't break results down by suburb, so the suburb question on your lead form is your real location report. Tally where the leads came from.

3. Exclude what you won't service. If leads keep arriving from the same out-of-area suburbs, exclude them, tighten the pins and recheck the expansion box.

4. Watch audience size and frequency. If the same small group is seeing the ad several times in the first week, the patch is too tight. Add the next ring of suburbs you'd happily drive to.

Meta ad targeting checklist for tradies

• Locations built from the suburbs on your invoices and Google Business Profile, not the whole city.

• Suburbs you won't service excluded.

• "Reach more people likely to respond to your ads" unticked under Locations.

• Age range treated as a hint, with no homeowner filter assumed.

• No more than one or two interests, added as suggestions, not stacked.

• Meta pixel installed before the first campaign, and mentioned in your privacy policy.

• Retargeting audiences built: site visitors last 30 days, video viewers 50% or more, customer list.

• Retargeting ad set set to limit reach, not use the audience as a suggestion.

• Customer list made only from people you have a fair reason to contact.

• Lookalikes run inside the same suburb fence.

• One local ad set under about $40 a day. Retargeting added when the audience can spend.

• Region breakdown and lead suburbs checked after week one.

Meta ad targeting for a trade business isn't a radius argument. It's a fence around the suburbs that already pay, a pixel that starts filling a warm audience from day one, and the patience to add retargeting and broad tests only when there's something to run them on. If you'd like a second set of eyes on your current setup, send it through. Our Meta Ads team will check your locations, the expansion setting and your custom audiences, and tell you what's leaking budget before you spend another week on it.