For a local service business, is broad targeting really better than picking interests?

The radius is the targeting

A national advertiser starts with an audience of hundreds of millions and has to narrow it. A home services company starts with the adults inside its drive time and has already narrowed by orders of magnitude. Those are not the same optimization problem, and advice written for the first one does not transfer.

Inside a metro service area, the delivery system has enough room to find responsive people on its own, provided you give it a clear conversion signal. Adding interest layers takes room away from a system that did not have much to begin with.

When detailed targeting is worth the narrowing

• It encodes a hard qualifier. Signals related to homeownership or property type screen out people who cannot buy the service at all. That is a real constraint, not a preference.
• It encodes timing. Recently moved is one of the few behavioral signals that reliably precedes demand for a long list of home services.
• It defines a genuinely different offer. If you are running a distinct campaign for commercial property managers, that is a different product, not a slice of the same one.

How to tell if your layers are hurting

Two diagnostics are quick. First, watch estimated audience size as you add each layer; if the number collapses, you are not refining, you are starving. Second, watch frequency over the first weeks. Rapidly climbing frequency on a small audience means you are showing the same people the same ad repeatedly, and response will decay whether or not the targeting was smart.

The third and slowest diagnostic is the honest one: run the broad version alongside the layered version and compare cost per booked job, not cost per lead. Interest layers often look better on lead cost and worse on job cost, because they select for people who engage with content about a topic rather than people who need the work done.

The signal matters more than the audience

The practical trade is this: spend your effort on the conversion signal rather than on the audience definition. A campaign optimizing toward a real booking event with broad targeting will usually outperform a campaign optimizing toward a form fill with beautifully crafted interests.

That means the highest-leverage work is often plumbing, not media buying — getting Meta connected to the systems that know what happened so the feedback loop is honest. See home services marketing for how this fits with the rest of the channel mix.