This guide will show you how to set up and structure your campaign in Facebook for use with a Multi-Location Automation flow in WeatherAds. If you don’t yet know which type of automation flow is right for you, read about Single Location vs Multi Location Automation.

A Multi-Location Automation enables you to activate and pause delivery at a local level based on the weather. Multi Location Automations operate at the ad set geo level. They work by adding or including 'weather-positive' geos, and excluding 'weather-negative' geos, on a continuous basis. This enables WeatherAds to manage delivery of impressions for multiple locations within a single ad set, based on the local weather in each location.

Note: If no geos match your weather rules, WeatherAds will pause your ad set (since there are no locations eligible to receive impressions). Do not be alarmed if your ad set is paused in Facebook - this is only temporary. Likewise, please do not manually restart your ad set; WeatherAds will automatically reactivate it as soon as your weather moment happens.

A Multi-Location Automation is compatible with all Facebook campaign objectives and ad formats, except for 'Reach and Frequency' campaigns. A WeatherAds Multi-Location Automation is fully compatible with all placements, including Instagram, messenger and audience network.

Store Traffic Campaigns

Multi-location Automations are compatible with Store Traffic campaigns, but geo targets need to be input manually rather than being pulled from your store pages (IE if not using Facebook Location Framework). To do this, open up your ad set's settings, and hit 'target a geographical area' and enter the address of each of your stores, with a radius around it.

For weather targeting to work effectively, it is important that you correctly set up the geo targeting within your Facebook ad sets. Currently, the following geo types are compatible with WeatherAds:

NOTE: Please do not combine multiple location types within the same ad set, e.g. 'cities' & 'zip codes', as this will cause your automation to fail (the exception being 'addresses' and 'coordinates', which can be combined without issue.)

How WeatherAds Targets Large Geographies

If you are targeting large geographical region (E.G. a country or a state), WeatherAds will automatically atomize this region into more granular sub-regions. This enables WeatherAds to apply weather targeting at a granular level. This new location breakdown will be visible at the ad set level in Facebook once you have activated your automation.

Excluded Locations

At this time excluded locations are not compatible with Multi-Location Automations (although they will be soon!). If geo exclusions are critical to your strategy, consider a Single Location Automation for Facebook.

Targeting USA, Canada or Australia

Whilst a Multi-Location Automation is designed to enable you to weather target multiple locations within a single ad set, there are some limitations. Facebook has fairly tight restrictions on the number of locations allowed per ad set (250 custom locations, 2500 zip codes, 200 regions). Because of these limits it is not possible to weather automate USA, Canada and Australia within a single ad set. Instead you will need to create several ad sets, each targeting a cluster of geos. The steps are outlined in the guide ‘Weather Targeting Country-Wide Facebook Campaigns For USA, Canada and Australia’

Multi-Location Automations are compatible with all other audience targeting layers in Facebook (age, gender, demographics, interests etc).

All cost / bid controls and budget types are compatible with a WeatherAds Multi- Location Automation. The optimal budget settings for your campaign will depend on the structure of your ad sets. If you are targeting your total market within a single ad set, then budgeting can be set at the ad set level. Both daily and lifetime budgeting will work with a Multi-Location Automation. For evergreen campaigns, daily budget may be better suited, whilst for campaigns with set budgets and end dates, lifetime may be preferred.

Campaign budget optimization:

With campaign budget optimization, you can set a centralized campaign budget (either daily or lifetime) for all of your ad sets. Facebook will automatically distribute the budget to the ad sets that receive more weather activations. This strategy is useful when you have to distribute budget across a large number of ad sets (for example, if your campaign is set up to cover the USA, Canada or Australia as per our guide.)

Given that weather is inherently unpredictable (you don’t know where or when your weather events will happen), CBO is a good strategy for hedging your bets in order to avoiding a situation where some ad sets have under-spent whilst others have run out of budget early.

A common tactic is to have a second, backup ‘non-weather’ ad set, which activates when your weather moment is not happening.

This insures against under-delivery, in the event that the weather does not work in your favor over the campaign’s lifetime. This tactic is especially useful when syncing with short or sporadic weather events, such as thunder, hail, storms, etc.

For the ‘non-weather’ campaign, set the reverse triggers to your 'weather sync' ad set. This way, as soon as your weather moment happens in a given location, WeatherAds will show your ad in the weather positive geo, and pause your ad in the weather-negative geo (via inclusion and exclusion of geos). This ensures you never have both sets of ads active in the same geo at one time.

Tactics with short activation periods, that is those based on short lasting weather moments (thunder/ lightning etc), could require more aggressive pacing. For these types of weather events, delivery type can be set to ‘accelerated’. For the longer lasting weather events such as temperature thresholds, rain, sunshine, etc, and particularly when using past/ forecast timeframes (which will extend the duration of your activation period), standard pacing is fine.

At launch, your campaign in Facebook should be in an active state, with your ad sets paused but your ads on. Once you make your automation live, WeatherAds will activate the relevant ad sets and geos that match your weather rules.

Since a WeatherAds Multi-Location Automation works by making updates to your Facebook ad sets based on real-time weather signals, it can occasionally prolong the learning process, though for weather sensitive products and services this should not lead to any loss of performance. If the weather is a strong signal of demand for the product or service you are advertising, WeatherAds will boost engagement and conversions whilst driving down costs by segment-targeting your most receptive audience subset at any given moment.

Note: A new feature which will enable you to retain Facebook learning will be made available soon.

Once your automation is live, WeatherAds updates your ad set up regularly based on local weather events. Please do not make any changes to your geo targeting settings whilst your automation is live (other edits are fine). If you need to change your location targeting in Facebook, please follow these steps:

Please note that WeatherAds and Facebook are two separate platforms, and should be treated as such. Changes made in one will not necessarily be reflected in the other. If your ad set has run its course and you would like to deactivate it in Facebook, first remove the ad set from your automation (or deactivate the automation completely), then pause your campaign in Facebook.

Note: WeatherAds can reactivate a paused ad set, if it is part of a live automation.

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Similarly, switching off your automation in WeatherAds does not stop your campaign or ad set from running in Facebook. Make sure to switch both off when your campaign finishes.

Please also note that when your automation is switched off in WeatherAds, your campaign settings are not reverted to their original state. The changes made by WeatherAds in the last cycle will remain in place. It is the user’s responsibility to ensure their settings in Facebook are correct once the automation has been deactivated.

Next: Learn How to Create a Multi-Location Automation for Facebook Ad Sets