On Tuesday, Facebook announced a new geographic ad feature for local advertising. The new program allows businesses to target users based on whether they’ve passed near the actual store location. The new location-based advertisements could pop up in your Facebook feed around the same time you walk by, or some time later.

Over the past year, small businesses have seen their online exposure decline as Facebook has modified its algorithms for promoting Pages. The new hyper-local could remedy this loss. By targeting customers, though “local awareness ads”, smaller businesses on Facebook could reach a larger number of would-be customers, and Facebook would have a new revenue stream in the process.

Facebook has designed the ads “to help businesses reach the most people possible in an area,” the company said. The targeting works through the location services feature on a phone. Businesses give Facebook their physical address and a geographic radius around which they want to advertise. Facebook then finds users who are nearby or who recently came within that radius. Businesses can further refine their targeting to reach, for example, only people of a certain age or gender.

Earlier this year, Facebook released an optional feature called ”Nearby Friends,” which let users continually broadcast their location to their friends. This new ad campaign is an extension of this service. The local awareness ads could work well for local businesses, if Facebook users are receptive to them.

Geographic location using device GPS signals has already factored into ads served by Google. But adding mobile location data to the mix could help Facebook advance on a goal many tech companies are trying to reach now: the delivery of contextually relevant information and ads.

The on-board controls within iOS, Android and Windows phones also let you adjust location services settings, so users can toggle their location services settings if they do not wish to see the new ads.