Almost every owner sets this the same way. You look at a map, you think about where your students come from, and you pick a number that sounds sensible. Ten miles. Fifteen if the town is quiet. You say it out loud and nobody argues, because what would they argue with?
Here's a parent, four months into a five-year-old's judo, writing on Reddit about what that number actually costs them:
"for the last 4 months twice a week, I been driving and staying at the dojo for 1-1.5 hours (so he can hang with his buddies). In my head do I really need to do this for the next 10+ years?"
Their son is happy. He has friends there. Nothing is wrong with the school. They're sitting in a parking lot doing arithmetic about the next decade of their evenings, and their instructor has no idea the sum is being done.
That sum is what a radius really is. Not an area you advertise into. A commute you are selling to people who haven't agreed to it yet.
How big should your Facebook ad radius be?
Set it by population, not by miles.
Neil's starting point for most schools in the US, and it's in his book, is a local radius holding a reach of roughly 200,000 to 300,000 people, counted before any other targeting is layered on. Not three miles, not twelve. However far you have to go to hold about that many people.
Two schools can run the identical ad with wildly different rings and both be right. A school in a dense suburb hits 250,000 people in a few neighbourhoods. A school in a farming county might need forty minutes of road in every direction to find the same number. The mileage is an output. The population is the input.
The reason it works this way isn't a marketing trick. It's that population density is the best available clue to how far people in that area will travel for a class. In a city, nobody drives twenty-five minutes to a kids' class because there are four schools closer. In a thin county, a twenty-five minute drive is just Tuesday. Density tells you which of those places you're in, and the mile figure never does. It also tells you something about who else is competing for the same families, because the same density that puts people within reach of you puts them within reach of everyone else too.
Geography is also one of the few controls left that genuinely binds. Meta's own instructions for location targeting are explicit that Locations is an audience control, which means it "won't target beyond your locations unless Reach more people likely to respond to your ads is selected". That is not true of the interest and behaviour settings owners spend most of their worrying on. The students you actually want more of goes through what else has moved and what you feed back to make the system smarter. Short version: where the ad runs still decides a great deal, which is why the ring deserves more than a number that sounds about right.
You don't have to use a circle, either. Zip codes are a perfectly good unit and Neil's list of what to aim at includes them. One warning from the same Meta page if you go that way: the radius slider isn't available when you've entered zip codes, states or countries, because in those cases the area is the whole area. So you're choosing between a point with a ring around it and a hand-picked list of places. Both work. The list takes longer and is sharper.
The two other controls that still bind are the minimum age and the language. On age, a kids' campaign is aimed at parents rather than children, so the floor usually sits at 25 or 30 depending on your minimum age, and it's worth reaching up the age range as well because in plenty of towns it's a grandparent doing the school run. That argument has its own home in which age group your ads should target, so it isn't re-run here.
Can my radius be too small?
Yes, and this is the mistake owners make straight after reading the paragraph above.
Tighten the ring far enough and you've taken away the thing that makes the whole machine work, which is enough people for the system to find a pattern in. A few thousand people is not an audience. It's a rounding error, and no amount of good creative fixes it.
So there's a floor as well as a ceiling, and in some places the floor is what decides it. Sparsely populated areas and places cut off by geography can't get to 200,000 people at any sensible distance. Neil's book is clear about what you do then: the radius or the zip codes you target should cover the distance people are actually willing to travel often. Not the distance they'd travel once. The distance they'll do twice a week in February. Madscope works with schools on islands off the mainland US, where the population inside any ring is whatever the island holds and the real question is the ferry timetable.
If you're in that position, the population number is a target and not a test you're failing. What you're protecting is the second half of the sentence: often. A family who'll make a forty-minute trip twice a week for years is a different animal from a family who'll make it once to see what you're like.
Does a bigger radius get me more students?
It gets you more leads. Students are a different question, and the gap between the two is where a lot of money quietly goes.
Distance is one of the strongest predictors of quitting there is. Long drives and heavy traffic to get to a school very likely end with the family leaving, and they leave after you've paid to acquire them, taught them, graded them and built the timetable around them. Widening the ring doesn't just add families. It adds a particular kind of family: the ones furthest away, who are the likeliest to go.
Every owner has the counter-example ready, and it's always true. There's a family who drives fifty minutes because your school is worth it. Keep them, be proud of them, and don't build your targeting on them. Neil's position on this hasn't moved in years: a school is still better off aiming at a narrow radius, because not every new student will want to travel that far repeatedly. The family who does it gladly is the exception that proves other people's loyalty, not yours.
The retention side of distance is covered at more length in the students you actually want more of, which has the tally sheet for working out whether distance or price or schedule is really costing you families. What matters here is the direction it points the radius: in.
What should I take out of the ring?
A circle on a map is a shape. A drive is a route. Those two things come apart badly, and almost nobody does the subtraction.
Neil's list of what to cut out is short and physical: mountains, rivers, bridges, and anything else natural or built that turns four map miles into a thirty-five minute crawl. The family on the far side of the bridge isn't lazy. They're looking at a toll and a tailback, and there's a school on their own side.
Doing it today is less about drawing a shape and more about naming places. Meta's current interface lets you hover a country or region and choose Only include cities or Exclude cities, and lets you exclude cities inside a population range. Zip codes work the same way, up to fifty thousand of them. So the practical version of the ebook's advice is: find the towns or zip codes on the wrong side of the barrier and name them as exclusions, rather than hunting for a way to draw around the water. One thing worth knowing about how exclusions behave, straight from Meta: whether someone sees your ad depends on both their current location and their home location, so a family who lives inside your ring can still be shown the ad while they're visiting an excluded place. Exclusions aren't a wall. They're a strong preference.
The fifteen-minute radius audit
- Open a map and draw the ring your ads actually run in right now. Not the one you think they run in. If you don't know, that's the first finding.
- Cross out everything on the far side of a barrier. Rivers, bridges, mountains, a highway with no sensible crossing, a railway line, a canal. Say the drive out loud as you go: at six on a Wednesday, how long is it really?
- Write down the towns and zip codes you just crossed out. That list is the useful output of this exercise. It's what you hand over.
- Write the ten neighbourhoods your last twenty enrolments came from. Pull them off the forms. The pattern is almost always tighter than the ring you drew in step one.
- Ask whoever runs your ads one question: how many people are inside the ring we're running in? If nobody can answer, that's the number to go and get this week. It's the only number in this article that decides anything.
Those five steps need a pen and a map and no ad account access at all. You can do them tonight and hand the result to anyone.
Why is my ad showing up outside the area I set?
Two reasons, and one of them is a box you probably didn't notice.
When you pick a city or a region, Meta may tick Reach more people likely to respond to your ads for you, by default. Its own description of what that does is finding more people interested in travelling to your locations or making purchases there. For a shop near a tourist attraction, that's helpful. For a school whose students have to turn up on a Tuesday and a Thursday for the next four years, it is not, and Meta says in as many words to untick it if you only want to target your selected city or region. It's worth checking whether that box is on in your account.
The second reason is simpler and permanent. Meta's own position is that complete accuracy can't be guaranteed with location targeting, and that you might see some impressions, or receive messages or leads, from outside your location settings. So one enquiry from a town forty miles out isn't evidence your radius is broken, and it isn't worth rebuilding your targeting over. Twenty of them in a month is a pattern. One is weather.
That's also why the area name belongs in the ad itself. Location targeting reaches people who live in your area, have recently spent time in it, or go there often, which is a looser net than it sounds, and the fix Neil recommends for all of it is the same: put your area's name in the ad copy and the booking funnel so the family can plainly see where you are before they hand over their details. It saves you a no-show from somebody who booked without checking, and it helps the system work out who to show the ad to next.
In the ad copy, in the first two lines
On the booking page, above the class times
In the booking confirmation text
The landmark matters more than the address. A parent who can picture the building turns up; a parent holding a street name checks the drive, thinks about it, and sometimes doesn't book at all.
Why do I never see my own Facebook ads?
This is the question owners ask most often and the one that gets answered least honestly, so here it is plainly: because you're one person in an audience of a couple of hundred thousand, and you're not in the market for your own classes.
In an audience that size, any given person sees a given ad rarely. That's not a fault. That's arithmetic. Your ads are being shown to parents who are looking for what you teach, and you are neither of those things.
There's a second reason not to go hunting for it. If you find your ad and click it, you've just told the system you're interested, so it shows you more, and every impression it serves you is paid for and can never become a student. You're the one person in the audience guaranteed not to enrol. Hunting for your own ad is the most expensive hobby available in an ad account.
And this is the part worth sitting with, because it's bigger than ads. Seeing your own ad tells you nothing about whether the thing is working. Nothing. Not whether it's reaching the right families, not whether they're booking, not whether they're turning up, not whether they're enrolling. If you want to know whether ads are running, open the ad account and look at the data, which is where the answer actually lives. And before you change anything, work out which stage is failing. A no-show problem isn't an ad problem, it's a problem further down, and Neil's rule is you don't fix something that isn't broken. An owner who never sees his own ad and has eleven bookings on the calendar has nothing wrong with his ads.
Where we sit in this
We find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them.
Setting the ring is our side of that line. We target by population size and we don't carry one radius around and drop it on every town, because the right distance in a dense suburb and the right distance in a farming county aren't the same distance. We run across 400-plus schools, so we've already seen what a ring like yours produces somewhere else, and that is a lot more useful than a number that sounds about right.
It matters to us more than it might look, because of how we're paid. We're paid when a student walks into your school. A ring stuffed with families who are never going to make the drive twice a week costs us the same work and brings nobody through your door, so we have the same interest you do in the ring being tight, accurate and honest about the bridge.
What we can't see is the part only you have: where your current students actually live, which drives they complain about, and which families vanished in the second month. Bring that to a call with your timetable and the number of spaces you can genuinely take this month. If the ring is wrong, it's usually a quick fix and it changes who walks in for months afterwards. Neil's book, The Martial Arts Student Attraction Blueprint, covers the targeting side in more detail, and the numbers to send your marketing company covers what to report back so the ring keeps getting sharper.
Do this Monday
Open a map, draw the ring your ads actually run in, and cross out everything on the far side of a bridge, a river, a mountain or a highway.
Then ask whoever runs your ads what population is left inside it. If nobody knows the number, that's the number to find out this week.
The short version
- A radius is a population, not a distance. Around 200,000 to 300,000 people before other targeting is Neil's starting point for most US schools.
- Density tells you how far families will travel and hints at who else is competing for them. A mile figure tells you neither.
- There's a floor as well as a ceiling: too few people and there's nothing for the system to learn from. In sparse areas, cover the distance people will travel often.
- Subtract the barriers by naming the towns and zip codes on the far side, because a map distance isn't a driving distance.
- Wider isn't safer. The families furthest out are the likeliest to quit, and they quit after you've paid for them.
- Check whether Meta has ticked the box that reaches people beyond your area, and put your location in the ad, the booking page and the confirmation text.
- Not seeing your own ad is normal and means nothing. Don't click it. Read the ad account instead.
Questions owners ask
How do you set a local radius on Facebook ads?
In Ads Manager you set it at the ad set level, under Audience, in Locations. Enter your town or drop a pin on the school and Meta picks a radius by default, which you then adjust with a slider. Meta's own note is that the minimum and maximum vary by location type, and that a radius can't be set at all if you've entered zip codes, states or countries instead of a point.
Is a large radius or a smaller radius better?
Smaller, until it stops holding enough people. A wide ring reaches families whose twice-weekly drive will eventually end the membership, so you pay to acquire students who leave. The useful question isn't miles at all, it's how many people the ring holds and whether they can get to you on a wet Tuesday without resenting it.
What is the minimum radius on Facebook ads?
Meta doesn't publish one number. Its help centre says the radius minimum and maximum vary by location type, and that the radius is set with a slider once you've entered a location or dropped a pin. In practice the floor that matters to you isn't Meta's, it's the point where your ring stops holding enough people for the system to learn anything from.
How many people should my ad audience have in it?
Neil's starting point for most US schools is a radius holding about 200,000 to 300,000 people before any other targeting is added. That's a starting point and not a rule. In a dense city it'll be a handful of neighbourhoods, and in a rural county it may be the whole county, which is the point of using population rather than miles.
Why am I not seeing my own Facebook ads?
Because you're one person in an audience of a couple of hundred thousand, and you're not who the ads are aimed at. Everybody in an audience that size sees any given ad rarely. Don't go hunting for it and don't click it if you find it, because that teaches the system you're interested and spends your money on the one person who will never enrol. Open the ad account and read the numbers instead.