Solved: Meta Ad Targeting Without Location (Actionable Fix)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on this. The struggle with audience targeting, especially without a geographical focus, is something I see a lot. The good news is that you're probably focusing on the wrong thing. For most businesses, especially digital ones, geography is one of the least important targeting parameters. The real breakthroughs come from shifting your focus from 'where' people are to 'who' they are and, more importantly, what specific, urgent problem they have.

It's not about finding a magic country or city; it's about finding a 'problem state' and targeting that directly. We'll walk through how to do that. It’s a bit of a mindset shift but it's what seperates the campaigns that burn cash from the ones that scale profitably.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get this out of the way first. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire probably made. Something like "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutely nothing of value. It's a recipe for creating generic, boring ads that speak to no one and get ignored by everyone. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain.

You need to become an absolute expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. That's your true target audience. Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title on LinkedIn; she's a leader terrified that her best developers are about to quit out of sheer frustration with a broken workflow. For a legal tech SaaS I can think of, the nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's 'a partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the entire firm to a malpractice suit.' You see the difference? Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's an anxiety that keeps them awake at night.

When you target the problem, geography becomes almost irrelevant. An engineer in London feeling that pain is the same as an engineer in Sydney or San Francisco. The problem is universal, and so is your potential market. This is the first and most important step. Before you spend another pound on Meta, you need to be able to articulate this nightmare scenario in a single, powerful sentence.

We'll need to look at where this 'Nightmare' lives online...

Once you've isolated that nightmare, the next step is to figure out where people experiencing it congregate online. This is where your targeting data comes from, and it's far more powerful than just layering on random interests. You need to build a map of their digital world.

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy on Meta. You're not guessing anymore. You're showing up in the exact places your ideal customer already trusts and pays attention to. We've used this exact approach for B2B SaaS clients and it works because it's rooted in real-world behaviour, not abstract demographics. Do this work first, or you really have no business spending a single pound on ads.

Here’s how you can think about mapping this out:

I'd say you need to build your audiences from the inside out...

Okay, so you know who your customer is (by their pain) and you have a list of potential interests to target. Now, how do you actually structure this in Meta? A lot of people get this wrong. They just throw a bunch of interests into a campaign and hope for the best. The right way to do it is to prioritise your audiences based on their 'temperature'. You always start with the hottest audiences first—the people who already know you—and work your way outwards to colder traffic.

This is what we call building from the inside out. It's more efficient, gives you faster feedback, and makes your ad spend work much harder. For pretty much every account we work on, from eCommerce to B2B SaaS, the structure is broadly the same.

Here’s the order of priority I'd recommend:

BoFu (Bottom of Funnel) - Your Hottest Audiences

These are the people on the verge of converting. They've shown strong intent. Your first priority is to get back in front of them and close the deal. This is your lowest-hanging fruit and should always be your first ad set.

• -> Previous Customers: The best audience for repeat purchases or up-sells. You can create custom audiences from your customer lists.
• -> Added to Cart / Initiated Checkout: People who almost bought. A simple reminder ad can be incredibly effective here.
• -> Viewed Cart / Added Payment Info: Similar to the above, very high intent.

MoFu (Middle of Funnel) - Your Warm Audiences

These people are aware of you and have shown some interest, but they're not quite ready to buy. Your goal here is to nurture them, build trust, and move them down the funnel.

• -> All Website Visitors: A broad but useful audience. You'll want to exclude recent converters (BoFu audiences).
• -> Video Viewers: People who have watched a significant portion of your video ads (e.g., 50% or more). They are engaged with your content.
• -> Social Engagers: People who have liked, commented on, or shared your posts on Facebook or Instagram.

ToFu (Top of Funnel) - Your Cold Audiences

This is where you find new customers and scale your campaigns. It's the riskiest and most expensive part of the funnel, which is why you only tackle it after you've got your BoFu and MoFu campaigns running smoothly. This is where your ICP research becomes absolutely critical.

• -> Lookalike Audiences: This should be your first port of call for cold traffic. You ask Meta to find new people who are similar to your best existing customers. You should test lookalikes based on your BoFu audiences, in order of value. A lookalike of 'Purchasers' is far more valuable than a lookalike of 'All Website Visitors'. You need at least 100 people in a source audience, but really you want 1,000+ for it to work well.
• -> Interest/Behaviour Targeting: This is where you use the list of podcasts, tools, and influencers you identified earlier. Group them into themed ad sets. For instance, if you're targeting eCommerce store owners, you wouldn't target a broad interest like "Amazon". That's full of consumers. Instead, you'd target interests like "Shopify", "WooCommerce", and pages of well-known eCommerce agencies. This is about precision.
• -> Broad Targeting: This means targeting with minimal restrictions (e.g., just age and gender, if relevant). You should only attempt this once your Meta Pixel has thousands of conversion events and is 'seasoned'. The algorithm can then work its magic, but it needs a lot of data to do so. Don't start here.

By structuring your account this way, you create a full-funnel system. Your ToFu campaigns bring in new people, your MoFu campaigns warm them up, and your BoFu campaigns close the sale. Each part has a clear job to do.

You probably should stop worrying about location and start worrying about cost...

This brings us to a really important point. The real question you should be asking isn't "Where are my customers?" but "How high a Cost Per Lead can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" If you can't answer that question, you're flying blind. The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Calculating your LTV is probably the single most powerful thing you can do for your paid advertising. It changes your entire perspective. Suddenly, you're not trying to find the cheapest possible clicks or leads. You're trying to find the most profitable customers, and you know exactly what you can afford to pay for them. It's the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth.

Here’s the basic formula:

LTV = (Average Revenue Per Account * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's run through an example. Say you're a SaaS business:

• -> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): £500/month
• -> Gross Margin %: 80% (after accounting for cost of goods sold, etc.)
• -> Monthly Churn Rate: 4% (the percentage of customers you lose each month)

The calculation would be: LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04 = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000.

In this example, each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. Now, a healthy rule of thumb is a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead.

Suddenly, that £250 lead from a CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is how you escape the trap of optimising for vanity metrics and start optimising for profit. Use the calculator below to get a feel for your own numbers.

We'll need to look at your offer...

Even with the best targeting in the world, your campaigns will fall flat if your offer is weak. The number one reason I see campaigns fail is a mismatch between the audience, the message, and the offer. Your ad needs to speak directly to the 'nightmare scenario' we talked about earlier.

For a high-touch service business, you should deploy a Problem-Agitate-Solve framework. You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad would say something like, "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round? Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth." It hits the pain point, twists the knife a little, then presents the solution.

For a B2B SaaS product, you can use the Before-After-Bridge framework. You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief. Your ad could say, "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out. Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated. Our platform is the bridge that gets you there."

Then we come to the most common failure point of all: the call to action. You absolutely must delete the "Request a Demo" button. It's probably the most arrogant Call to Action ever invented. It assumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than book a 45-minute meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and positions you as a commodity.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. For SaaS, this is a free trial or freemium plan (no credit card). Let them use the actual product and feel the transformation. If you're a service business, you must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset. A free, automated SEO audit. A free 'Data Health Check'. For us, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. You have to solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

You'll need a testing framework...

So, you’ve defined your ICP’s pain, mapped their digital hangouts, structured your funnel, calculated your LTV, and crafted a killer offer. The final piece is a disciplined testing process. You can't just set and forget.

I’d suggest having different, long-term campaigns for each stage of the funnel (ToFu, MoFu, BoFu). Inside your ToFu campaign, you can then have different ad sets, each targeting a specific audience (e.g., one for a lookalike of purchasers, one for 'Shopify' interest, one for 'Acquired podcast' interest). Let them run with a modest budget for a few days to a week.

The key is to know when to kill an ad set that isn't working. A good rule of thumb is to turn off any ad set that has spent 2-3x your target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) without getting a single conversion. If your target CPA is £50 and an ad set has spent £150 with no results, it's time to cut it and reallocate that budget to the winners. You have to be ruthless. Constantly test, learn, and iterate. The goal is to systematically find pockets of profitable audiences and scale them up.

This whole process takes time and effort, but it's how you build a predictable, scalable customer acquisition machine instead of just gambling with your ad spend.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This might all seem like a lot to take in, so I've put the key action points into a table to give you a clear roadmap. This is the main advice I have for you and the process we follow to build successful, geographically-agnostic campaigns.

As you can see, getting this right involves a lot more than just picking a few interests in Ads Manager. It's a strategic process that combines deep customer insight with disciplined execution. It's not easy, and it takes time to get right, which is why many businesses struggle to make paid ads work for them.

Working with an expert can help you bypass a lot of the expensive trial-and-error. I remember one campaign we worked on for a B2B SaaS client where we generated leads from decision-makers for just $22 on LinkedIn by focusing on their specific problems. For another eCommerce brand, this strategic approach helped us achieve a 1000% return on ad spend. We can help you implement this entire process, from defining your ICP to scaling your winning campaigns.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can take a look at your business and give you some tailored advice. It might be a good next step to turn these ideas into a concrete action plan.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh