Geo Targeting & Local Reality

What you'll be able to do

• Set geography from buyer data instead of guesses and gut radius
• Know when to run city-wide, when to run drive-time, and when the 2-mile play earns its keep
• Structure multi-market campaigns for touring shows without violating consolidation doctrine

The short version: DAS 100 established that geography is the one targeting input still genuinely yours - the show physically happens somewhere, so geo is a door constraint, not a preference. The craft: match the geo to where buyers ACTUALLY come from (your ticketing exports know; your gut doesn't), stay broad INSIDE that geo, and save tight-radius plays for the final-week escalation where they belong. Touring shows get per-market ad sets - a legitimate structural split, because markets are hard constraints, not audience cosplay.

The map is a door constraint

Quick doctrine recap, because this module lives in the exception: under Andromeda, almost every targeting input became advisory - except where you draw the map. Delivery can wander past your interest selections; it cannot sell a Boston ticket in Phoenix. Geography is where your judgment still directly steers the machine, which means it's one of the few places left where a judgment ERROR directly costs money.

Read the map you already own

Your ticketing platform's buyer exports (Module 2's habit, paying out again) carry zip/postal codes. Before setting any geo, pull last year of buyers and look:

• A downtown club can pull half its room from suburbs a 25-minute drive out - transit lines and parking reality shape the map more than distance
• A destination venue or beloved weekly pulls from the whole metro and beyond; a neighborhood bar show pulls from the neighborhood
• College-adjacent rooms live and die by semester geography - the map MOVES in May

Set the geo to cover ~90% of historical buyers, then stay BROAD inside it (city or metro level, no interest stacking on top - the door doesn't check interests, and DAS 100 Module 4 already litigated this). Delivery finds the right people inside the fence; your job was building the right fence.

›Go deeper: radius vs city vs drive-time thinking

Pin-radius targeting draws circles as the crow flies; nobody commutes as the crow flies. A 10-mile radius in a dense transit city covers millions and three rivers; 10 miles in a sprawl city might miss half your parking-lot crowd. Think in drive/transit time and let the buyer zips arbitrate. City-level targeting usually beats hand-drawn radii for anything metro-scale because it follows real administrative reality and spares you circle-tuning theater. The radius tool earns its keep at the extremes: hyper-local (the final-week play below) and multi-venue metros where one city name spans genuinely separate scenes.

The tight-radius escalation

The 2-mile play is real - as a FINAL WEEK escalation, not a default. Show week, a dark post (DAS 100 Module 7) with honest urgency running in a tight ring around the venue catches the people whose Friday is genuinely up for grabs: they're close enough that attendance is a low-commitment decision. It's a walkup-manufacturing tool. Run it as its own small ad set in that week only - a hard-constraint split justified by a genuinely different job. Running your whole cycle at 2 miles, though, is fishing in a bathtub and calling it focus.

Multi-market: the touring split

Touring shows are the structural exception DAS 100 Module 4 promised: per-market ad sets (or campaigns, at scale) are correct because each market is a hard constraint with its own inventory, its own on-sale, its own sellthrough. The rules that keep it disciplined:

• Budget by sales data, not market ego. Weekly, spend follows sellthrough gaps - the market at 40% with three weeks out gets the money; the market at 85% gets throttled before you pay to oversell it (a real and expensive way to annoy a venue).
• Shared creative backbone, market-specific skin. The announce concept travels; the date/venue layer localizes. Post ID doctrine still applies per market - and the cross-market comment roll-call effect (Module 7 of DAS 100's tour story) is the free bonus.
• Broad inside each market. The consolidation doctrine doesn't die on tour; it replicates per city.

From the field

A venue insisted on a 3-mile radius "because we're a neighborhood spot." Buyer zips said otherwise: a third of the room drove in from two suburbs 20+ minutes out, pulled by one specific genre night. The tight radius had been quietly starving delivery of the exact people most likely to buy - paying premium frequency to saturate the neighborhood while the actual fanbase sat outside the circle. Metro-wide with the genre night's creative doing the targeting (Andromeda's whole deal), the suburbs came back. The map was the ad problem. It usually is earlier than people check.

Common mistakes

• Drawing the geo from vibes instead of buyer zips (the data is one export away)
• Interest-stacking on top of geo "to be safe" - DAS 100 called it a comfort blanket; in a fixed metro it's also a reach tax
• Running the whole cycle at 2 miles - bathtub fishing
• Touring budgets set per market at launch and never rebalanced against sellthrough
• Forgetting the map moves: semesters, seasons, and a new transit line all redraw it

Take-home

Geo Worksheet (added to Downloads inventory) - buyer-zip pull instructions, the 90% coverage rule, drive-time translation table, the final-week radius play spec, and the multi-market budget rebalance ritual.

Sources & dates

DAS 100 cross-references as cited · buyer-data methodology is Darkroom practice, presented as such

Learn more

Optional extra credit. Nothing below is required for the quiz, the certificate, or the job - the full lesson is above. This is for the sickos who want more.

• Meta Business Help Center: location targeting options - the tool specifics, current as of your read date