Meta enforces a 15 mile minimum radius on dropped pins under the Housing special ad category, and refuses geographic exclusions on the same campaigns. In a narrow, densely bordered state those two rules combine badly. We priced three New Jersey pins at the minimum allowed radius and one of them reached 6.2 million people.
- A circle does not respect a state line, and under Housing you cannot exclude what it catches
- Three New Jersey pins at the same 15 mile radius reached audiences differing by roughly fifteen times
- Counties are administrative polygons, so they never cross a state line and carry no minimum radius
- The test: draw the minimum circle and ask what share of it you would exclude if you could
Radius targeting feels precise. You drop a pin on a town, you set a number of miles, you get a neat circle. It reads like control.
On a Housing campaign in a dense corridor, it is the opposite of control, and the reason is geometry rather than anything Meta did wrong.
The two rules that combine badly
Meta's Housing special ad category enforces a 15 mile minimum radius on dropped location pins in the United States. Set 10 miles and the platform expands it. The floor exists because of the fair housing settlement history behind the whole category, and it is not negotiable.
Separately, Housing campaigns will not accept geographic exclusions. The excluded_geo_locations field is refused. We cover the full constraint list in Meta's Housing special ad category.
Either rule on its own is survivable. Together they mean this: whatever your 15 mile circle overlaps, you are buying, and you have no way to carve it back out.
In a wide state with low population density, that is a rounding error. In a narrow, dense state next to two of the largest metros in the country, it is the whole campaign.
What we measured
While building a manufactured housing campaign across New Jersey in 2026, we priced out radius pins before settling on a geography. These are Meta's own estimated audience size readouts at the minimum allowed 15 mile radius, taken at build time.
Voorhees, Camden County. Roughly 2.7 million people. Voorhees sits about 12 miles from Center City Philadelphia. A 15 mile circle crosses the Delaware River and takes in a substantial share of Philadelphia and its inner suburbs. The client does not operate in Pennsylvania.
Old Bridge, Middlesex County. Roughly 2.0 million people. The circle reaches north and east across Raritan Bay and picks up Staten Island, which is New York.
Caldwell, Essex County. Roughly 6.2 million people. Caldwell is about 15 miles from Midtown Manhattan. The minimum allowed circle is effectively a New York City metro buy.
A clean interior pin, placed well away from any border or major metro, came in around 400,000 people.
So the same 15 mile radius, the same setting, the same campaign, produced audiences that differ by a factor of roughly fifteen depending on where the pin landed. Not because the local market differs by fifteen times. Because of what the circle happened to touch.
Why this is worse than it looks on a reach chart
A large audience is not automatically a bad audience. The reason these numbers are a problem is more specific.
You are paying to compete in the wrong auction. Philadelphia and New York impressions are expensive, and they are expensive because a lot of advertisers want them. Your manufactured housing budget is now bidding against that. You get fewer impressions per dollar and the ones you get are mostly to people who cannot transact with you.
Advantage+ Audience will optimise into the mass. Under Housing, Advantage+ Audience is effectively the targeting model. It looks for converter patterns inside the geographic bounds you gave it. If 80 percent of the bounds you gave it is a metro your client does not serve, that is where a lot of the exploration happens.
The leads that do come back are unworkable. A Philadelphia rowhome owner answering a mobile home ad is not a bad person, they are just not a lead. And every one of them costs the same as a real one, which quietly inflates the cost per usable lead while the reported cost per lead looks fine. This is one of the mechanisms behind the gap we describe in what a manufactured home dealer lead actually costs, and it is a frequent cause of the early disappointment covered in why mobile home dealer Facebook ads fail in the first 14 days.
You cannot fix it after the fact. No exclusion. The only remedy is to change the geography.
The thing that is easy to miss
The instinct when you see 2.7 million is to move the pin. Pick a town a bit further inland, get the number down.
In a state shaped like New Jersey, that mostly does not work. The state is roughly 70 miles wide at its widest and much narrower in places. With a 15 mile minimum, a pin can be inside New Jersey and still have a third of its circle outside the state. Southern New Jersey is pulled toward Philadelphia, northern New Jersey toward New York, and the middle is narrow. There are interior positions that stay clean, but there are not enough of them to cover the markets that matter.
The same applies to Delaware, to Rhode Island, to the Maryland panhandle, to much of Connecticut, to the Chicago and Kansas City and Memphis and Cincinnati border areas, and to anywhere a metro straddles a state line.
The fix: target counties, not circles
A county is an administrative polygon. It has the actual shape of the jurisdiction. Most importantly:
A county never crosses a state line. A circle always can.
That single property solves the problem. Select Camden County and you get Camden County, including its irregular edges, and you do not get Philadelphia. There is no minimum radius to fight because there is no radius.
Counties are available as a location type on Housing campaigns. So are cities, DMA regions and states. ZIP codes are not, so the county is generally the finest usable grain.
Counties bring three other advantages worth naming:
- They match how most public data is published. Housing inventories, permit counts, ownership records and census tables are almost all county level, so you can plan the buy against real numbers rather than guesses.
- They match how the business already thinks. Dealers and investors describe their service area in counties, not in miles from a pin, which is also how the sourcing strategies in Facebook ads for mobile home investors and lead generation for mobile home park investors define a territory.
- They are stable. A radius is a number somebody typed. A county boundary does not move between campaign edits.
A county never crosses a state line. A circle always can. That single property is the whole argument.
When a radius is still the right call
This is not an argument that radius targeting is always wrong.
Radius works well in a large, sparse state where the nearest state line is 200 miles away and the nearest competing metro further than that. West Texas, most of Montana, much of the interior West. In those places the circle touches only what you intended and the county may actually be too big.
Radius also works when the genuine catchment really is a drive time around a single physical location and the surrounding area is homogeneous. A lot depot with a 40 mile delivery range in the middle of a flat rural market is the textbook case.
The test we use: draw the minimum allowed circle and ask what percentage of it you would have excluded if the platform let you. If the answer is more than about 20 percent, the circle is the wrong instrument and you should be selecting administrative units instead.
Draw the minimum allowed circle and ask what percentage of it you would have excluded if the platform let you. Above roughly 20 percent, the circle is the wrong instrument and you should be selecting counties, cities or DMAs instead.
Caveats
These figures are our own measurements, taken during a New Jersey campaign build in 2026, using Meta's estimated audience size readout. That readout is an estimate produced by Meta, it moves over time, and it is not a population census. Re-run it for your own market rather than assuming ours transfers.
Meta's minimum radius rules apply to the Housing special ad category in the United States and have changed before. Platform behaviour changes. Check the current floor before you build.
Our methodology
We built the candidate geography for a manufactured housing campaign covering New Jersey, priced each candidate pin at the minimum allowed 15 mile radius inside Ads Manager, and recorded the estimated audience size Meta returned. We then priced the same market as a set of counties and compared both reach and the share of reach that fell inside the client's actual service area. The county build won on both, which is what sent us down the path described in how we picked 11 counties over statewide.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Facebook's minimum radius for Housing campaigns?
Meta enforces a 15 mile minimum radius on dropped location pins for Housing special ad category campaigns in the United States. If you set 10 miles, the platform expands it. The floor comes from the fair housing settlement history behind the category and there is no override.
Why is a 15 mile radius a problem in a small state?
Because a circle has no regard for jurisdiction and Housing campaigns cannot use geographic exclusions. New Jersey is roughly 70 miles wide at its widest, so a pin can sit inside the state and still have a third of its circle in Pennsylvania or New York, and you have no way to carve that back out.
Can I just move the pin further inland?
In a narrow state, usually not. Southern New Jersey is pulled toward Philadelphia and northern New Jersey toward New York, and the middle is narrow. Clean interior positions exist but there are not enough of them to cover the markets that matter.
Should I use counties instead of a radius?
In dense or narrow markets, yes. A county is an administrative polygon with the real shape of the jurisdiction, it never crosses a state line, and it has no minimum radius to fight. Counties also match how public data is published and how dealers and investors already describe their service area.
When is radius targeting still the right choice?
In large, sparse geographies where the nearest state line and the nearest competing metro are both far away, and where the genuine catchment really is a drive time around one physical location in a homogeneous area. West Texas, most of Montana and much of the interior West are the textbook cases.
Does a large audience always mean a bad campaign?
No. The problem with these particular numbers is specific: you end up bidding into expensive metro auctions against people who cannot transact with you, Advantage+ Audience explores inside those bounds, and you cannot exclude any of it after the fact.
Keep reading
- Meta's Housing special ad category: the constraints nobody writes down
- How we picked 11 counties over statewide using a 268 community dataset
- What a manufactured home dealer lead actually costs
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