How radius targeting works
You drop a pin — a shop, a landmark, an address — and set a distance around it. The platform then shows your ads only to people whose location signals put them inside that circle. Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads both offer it, alongside targeting by city, district or country.
The detail that decides whether it works is which people the circle catches. Both platforms separate people who live in the area, people who were recently in it, and people merely interested in it who are searching about the place from somewhere else. The default is not always the narrowest option, which is how a restaurant in Kathmandu ends up paying for clicks from people planning a holiday from another continent.
Why radius targeting matters
For a business whose customers have to physically arrive, spend outside the catchment is waste that looks like performance. Impressions and clicks still arrive; the enquiries do not, or they come from people who will never travel. A tight, honest radius often lowers cost per enquiry simply by removing that noise, before anyone touches the creative.
Size matters more in a small market than a large one. Nepal’s ad auctions are thinner than those in bigger countries, so a circle drawn too small can starve delivery and leave the budget unspent, while one drawn too wide dilutes it across people who were never going to visit. Finding the size that keeps delivery healthy without buying strangers is most of the job.
Common mistakes with radius targeting
The first is assuming people move in circles. They move along roads, across bridges, around a ring road, and they avoid crossing town at rush hour. A circle that looks generous on the map can swallow a district nobody drives in from, while cutting off the corridor that actually feeds you customers. Where the platform allows targeting by district or locality instead, that often fits reality better than any radius.
The second is stacking overlapping circles in separate ad sets — one per branch, or one per neighbourhood — so your own campaigns compete for the same people and the budget splits unpredictably. That is audience overlap, and it is far easier to prevent than to diagnose later. The third is forgetting that the pin is not the only setting: a broad location option quietly re-adds everyone the circle was meant to exclude.
How to act on it
Start from the customer, not from the map. Ask where your existing customers come from — delivery addresses, enquiry forms, the appointment book — and draw the area around that, adjusted for the roads people really use. Then set the location option to people living in or recently in the area, unless you have a specific reason to want the interested ones.
After that, let the data correct you. Both platforms report performance by location, so look at which areas produce enquiries rather than clicks, and tighten or widen from there. If the circle is small enough that delivery is struggling, widen it before you conclude the creative is at fault. For a shop or clinic advertising to its own neighbourhood, this is the foundation of local business advertising rather than a refinement of it.