You are interrupting, not answering
Someone on Google typed a query. Someone on Instagram was looking at their friends. That difference decides everything about how the ad should work.
Search ads can be plain and still convert, because the intent arrived with the user. Social ads have to earn the attention first, which is why creative carries most of the performance here and targeting carries less than people expect.
It also changes what you should measure early. A social campaign that produces no sales in week one may still be working; a search campaign that produces no calls in week one usually is not.
The practical consequence for a local business is that Meta suits things people do not search for: a new location opening, a promotion with a deadline, a service people did not know existed, or a category where the buyer needs to see it to want it.
Local audiences on a border
Meta's location targeting has the same border problem as search, with an extra wrinkle: its default includes people recently in a location, not only residents.
For a business in Tijuana that can be an advantage or an expensive accident. If you want San Diego residents who visit Tijuana, that setting is the feature. If you want people who live and shop locally, switch it to residents and watch the delivery change.
Radius targeting deserves the same suspicion here. A twenty-kilometre radius drawn from most of Tijuana crosses an international border.
Keep audiences broad enough to let the system work. Over-segmenting a local audience produces audiences too small to optimise, and Meta's delivery gets worse, not more precise, when you starve it.
Creative is the campaign
On Meta the creative does most of the work. Two ads to the same audience with the same budget routinely differ by more than any targeting change would produce.
Video shot on a phone inside your actual business tends to outperform polished stock production, because it looks like the platform it is on rather than like an advertisement placed on it.
Bilingual matters here too, and it is not a translation job. Run separate creative per language and let the results tell you the split, rather than assuming the city's mix.
Plan for fatigue. A local audience is small, so people see the same ad repeatedly and stop responding faster than a national advertiser would experience. Rotating creative on a schedule is cheaper than diagnosing the decline every time it happens.
Measuring something Meta measures generously
Meta reports conversions using its own attribution model, and that model is inclined to take credit. The numbers in the dashboard are usually higher than the ones in your bank account.
This is not an argument against the channel, it is an argument for a second source of truth. Compare platform-reported conversions against actual customers recorded on your side, and manage to the gap rather than pretending it is not there.
Install the pixel properly and set up conversion events for the actions that matter. A pixel firing only page views tells the optimiser nothing useful to optimise toward.
For a local business, add the offline half: ask new customers how they found you, and record it. It is the least sophisticated measurement on this page and frequently the most accurate.
