Many people who do foreign trade have a question when running Facebook ads: If ads only target countries or regions without setting interests, job titles, or industry tags, will the results be good?

The answer is: It might work, but the risk is high.

Targeting only by location is actually a very broad approach. The biggest advantage of this method is the large audience size, allowing the system to reach more people, and the algorithm is easier to learn from. At the same time, because the audience range is wide, the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is usually lower.

But the problem is, if you're selling B2B industrial products like steel or machinery equipment, your real customers are actually very concentrated. They are usually procurement managers, factory owners, engineering company executives, or wholesalers.

If you only target by location, the system will show your ads to a large number of general users, such as students, individual users, or even people completely unrelated to your industry. This leads to three issues: First, many clicks but low accuracy; second, poor inquiry quality; third, wasted ad budget.

Many foreign trade companies encounter this situation: lots of ad leads, but very few actual convertible customers.

So, running ads with only location targeting isn't unusable, but for B2B foreign trade, it's usually not the ideal approach.

In the next issue, I'll share the most effective audience targeting method for B2B foreign trade ads.