Solved: Targeting Tourists, Excluding Residents on Ads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I've had a look at the problem you're facing with targeting tourists and excluding residents. It's a really common issue, and tbh the way most platforms set up their location targeting makes it almost inevitable if you just use the default settings. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of a roadmap on how I'd approach this. The short answer is you need to stop thinking about *where* they are, and start thinking about *who* they are and what signals they give off before and during their trip.

You're fighting the algorithm, and you're losing...

Alright, let's get straight into it. The core of your problem is that you're trusting Meta's location targeting to do a job it's simply not designed for. The "People recently in" or "People traveling in this location" options sound perfect on paper, but in reality, they're incredibly blunt instruments. The algorithm determines this based on a whole bunch of signals from a user's device, but it can't truly understand context.

So, the signal that says a phone is 'away from home' could be triggered by:

• -> A genuine tourist staying in a hotel.
• -> A local resident who works in the city centre, miles from their house in the suburbs.
• -> A commuter who passes through the tourist zone on their way to work every day.
• -> Someone visiting family for the day from a nearby town.

The algorithm sees all these people as pretty much the same – a device that isn't at its usual 'home' location. It has no real way of knowing which one has money to spend on a tour and which one is just trying to get their lunch. When you choose an objective like "Reach" or even "Traffic", the algorithm's main goal is to get you the cheapest possible impressions or clicks. And who's cheapest to show ads to? The massive pool of local residents who are constantly in and around your target area, but who have zero interest in your tours and are therefore not being targeted by your competitors. You end up paying to show ads to people who dont tent to book these things, and it's a massive drain on your budget.

You're essentially telling Facebook to find you people in a haystack, and it's bringing you loads of hay because it's cheaper and easier to find than the needles. We need to give it a powerful magnet. Let's look at how we do that.

We'll need to look at intent, not just location...

The shift in mindset you need to make is from "Where are the tourists?" to "What do tourists *do*?". A person's journey to becoming your customer doesn't start when they land at the airport. It starts weeks, or even months, before, when they're sat at home planning their trip. This is your goldmine. By targeting their planning behaviours, you can reach them when they are actively looking for things to do and are in a buying mindset. You can get in front of them before your competitors do.

Then, for the people who are already in your location, we need to get much, much smarter about how we find them. We'll use a combination of surgical geofencing and behavioural layering to filter out as many locals as possible. It's not about finding *everyone*, it's about finding the *right ones* efficiently.

This approach splits our efforts into two main campaigns, which we'll call 'Pre-Trip Planners' and 'In-Trip Responders'. We'll also have a third, crucial campaign for retargeting. This structure allows you to have different messages, offers, and budgets for people at different stages of their journey.

I'd say you need to build a 'Pre-Trip Planners' campaign...

This is your top-of-funnel campaign. The goal here is to capture the attention of people who have a high intent of visiting your destination. You will NOT use any location targeting here, other than specifying the countries you want to attract tourists from (e.g., UK, USA, Germany, etc.). The magic is all in the interest and behaviour targeting.

Here’s the kind of audiences you should be building and testing:

1. Airline & Travel Booker Interests:

Think about how people get to your destination. Target people who have shown an interest in the major airlines that fly there. For example, if you're in Mallorca, you'd target interests like Ryanair, easyJet, TUI, Jet2.com. You can also target users interested in booking sites like Booking.com, Expedia, or Skyscanner, but layer it with an interest in your specific destination to narrow it down.

2. Hotel & Accommodation Interests:

Which major hotel chains or famous resorts are in your area? Target people interested in them. If there's a big Hilton or Marriott, add them as an interest. This is a very strong signal of someone planning a stay.

3. Competitor & Attraction Interests:

Who are your biggest competitors? What are the "must-see" attractions in your destination that aren't you? Target people interested in their Facebook pages or related keywords. If someone is researching the main cathedral or the most famous museum, they are very likley to be planning a trip and looking for other activities.

4. Behavioural Targeting:

This is a powerful one. In Meta's detailed targeting, you can often find behavioural categories like "Frequent International Travelers". Combining this with a general interest in your destination can create a potent audience. You might also find categories related to users of travel apps.

Your ad copy and creative for this campaign should be geared towards inspiration and planning. Use stunning visuals of your tour. The messaging should be about "Planning your trip to [Destination]? Don't miss out on..." or "The #1 rated activity in [Destination]. Book your spot before you fly!". You want to get them to click through to your website and consider booking, or at the very least, remember your name.

The goal is to drive traffic to your site from highly qualified future travellers. Even if they don't book right away, they now enter our retargeting pool, which is hugely valuable.

You probably should restructure your 'In-Trip Responders' campaign...

This is the campaign that directly answers your original question, but we're going to do it with precision. This is for capturing last-minute bookings from people who are physically in your location right now. For this campaign, we set the location targeting to "People currently in this location". But we DO NOT stop there.

1. Surgical Geofencing (The Scalpel, Not the Axe):

Instead of targeting the entire city or region, you're going to drop pins with a very small radius (e.g., 1-2 miles) ONLY on high-density tourist spots. Where do tourists congregate?

• -> The airport.
• -> Major train/bus stations.
• -> The top 10-20 largest hotels.
• -> Cruise ship terminals.
• -> Major tourist attractions (the ones you identified for your pre-trip campaign).

By only targeting these small zones, you dramatically reduce your overlap with residential areas. A local might pass through, but they're less likely to be dwelling in the lobby of the Hilton for an extended period.

2. Mandatory Interest Layering:

This is the step everyone misses. After setting up your tight geofencing, you MUST layer it with the travel-related interests we discussed before. So, your targeting logic becomes: "Show my ad to people who are currently within a 1-mile radius of the airport AND who are ALSO interested in Ryanair OR Booking.com OR are 'Frequent Travelers'".

This is what filters out the locals. The local barista working near the Hilton is very unlikely to also have a recent interest in booking flights to the city they already live in. The tourist who just landed and is checking into their hotel most certainly does. This double-qualification is the closest you can get to a true "tourist" filter.

3. Language Targeting:

If your destination's primary language is not English, a simple but effective layer is to set your ad's language targeting to English (or German, French, etc., depending on your key tourist markets). Most tourists will have their phone's language set to their native tongue, while most locals will not. It's another simple filter that cleans your audience.

The ad copy here needs to be about immediacy and scarcity. "In [Destination] today? We have 3 spots left on our 2pm tour!" or "Looking for something to do now? Book our sunset tour instantly from your phone." Use a map in your creative to show how close your starting point is to their likely location. The call to action should be "Book Now" and lead to a very simple, mobile-friendly booking page.

You'll need a dedicated retargeting campaign...

This is probably the most profitable campaign you will ever run. So many businesses neglect this. A tourist's planning process is messy. They might see your ad, click your website, get distracted, and forget about you. Retargeting brings them back.

You need to set up a campaign that ONLY targets people who have already interacted with your business in some way. Your audience here would be:

• -> All website visitors in the last 90 days.
• -> People who have watched 50% or more of one of your video ads.
• -> People who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page.
• -> People who initiated checkout but didn't complete the booking. (This is your hottest audience!)

The location for this campaign should be set to worldwide, or at least all the countries you target in your pre-trip campaign. It doesn't matter where they are physically. If they visited your website, they are a warm lead. You just want to stay top-of-mind as their trip approaches.

Your ads here can be more direct. "Still deciding on your [Destination] itinerary? See what you're missing!" or "Your tour of a lifetime is just one click away." You could even offer a small incentive, like "Book in the next 24 hours and get a free photo package," to create urgency. The aim is to convert the interest you've already paid to generate.

By splitting your strategy like this, you're not just throwing money at a vague location and hoping for the best. You're building a proper marketing funnel that guides a potential customer from initial awareness right through to booking. It's more work to set up, yes, but the improvement in your return on ad spend will be massive because you'll drastically cut down on the wasted spend targeting uninterested locals.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is the main advice I have for you, broken down into actionable steps. Moving from a single, flawed campaign to this multi-layered structure is the path to efficiently acquiring customers instead of just impressions.

Implementing a system like this is what separates amatuer boosting from professional paid advertising. It takes a bit more thought, but it aligns your ad spend directly with customer intent, which is the only way to get sustainable results. You stop paying for reach and start paying for potential customers.

For instance, I remember one client in the student recruitment space who was struggling with high costs. By applying a similar funnel-based approach on Meta Ads, we managed to reduce their cost per booking by 80% simply by focusing on the right audiences at the right time. It's all about precision.

Of course, this is just the strategic framework. The real devil is in the detail - picking the exact interests, writing compelling copy, designing creatives that stop the scroll, and optimising the campaigns based on the data that comes in. It's a continuous process of testing and refining.

If you'd like to go through how this could be implemented specifically for your business, we could jump on a quick, free consultation call. We could look at your current setup together and map out some of these audiences in real-time. It often helps to see it visually in Ads Manager.

Either way, I hope this has given you a much clearer, more effective way to think about reaching tourists.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh