The Question I Received:

Is there a way to target people on Facebook that you’ve been around, meaning that if my phone is within a certain distance of people, will Facebook push my ads to them?

My Answer

No, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think that Facebook can.

How to Target People Who’ve Been to Specific Locations

But here’s something that you can do: you can drop a pin on a certain location, for example, you can include anyone that’s been to my office. With your Facebook ads, you can select people who were recently in this location and then you can choose people within one mile of that location.

A One-Mile Radius Includes Too Many People

So if your location is in the middle here, let’s say this is your address here, then Facebook is going to basically say okay your office is here. And we’re going to give a one-mile radius, so we’re going to one mile this way, one mile this way, one mile this way, one mile this way.

So, this is actually a really big radius. The problem is that if you want someone who’s been right there, you’re getting people that have been right here and right here and right here and right here, so there’s never a really great way to fix this.

How To Narrow Down The Area And Make It More Precise

But I actually just saw a genius way that people fix this and I’m testing it and it’s working okay. I haven’t really tested it too much yet but basically what you do is you drop pins. You drop a pin right here and then you drop a pin in all of these locations here and set it to a one-mile radius but you exclude those radiuses.

You’ll see it once I draw it. What happens is that all these circles here are now excluded locations, so the only thing included is this location right here.

Now, when you actually do it, you can make it so that it’s very precise. So, we’re doing this with a hospital in Miami right now and we were able to get it close enough that everything except for the hospital campus itself is excluded. So, that’s one way that you can do that for Facebook targeting.

More Possibilities with Google Beacon

I don’t think you can target people that have been near you though I believe that you can do that type of thing with Google beacon. I haven’t really played around with it a lot yet. It’s a little big brother-ish and people might find it really creepy, but I believe that that’s something you can do with Google beacon.