Algeria AgencyDigital marketing
A hundred thousand views, and your shop is in one commune
The distribution is national and your catchment is not. Here is what to do with the people who watch you and cannot come.
The article accompanying this one devotes a section to the warning: this platform’s distribution does not care about your catchment area, and a much-watched video can be a figure with no use. It is right, and it stops there, because it has eleven other things to say.
This page is what that warning implies. You now have a national audience and a business at one address, and the question is no longer an advertising one: it is commercial.
It arises in three parts. How to count what actually concerns you, since the view count does not say. How to bring distribution closer to your commune where that is possible. And above all what to do with the large majority who will never come through your door — because the default answer, which is to ignore them, sometimes lets a bigger business than the one you were looking for go past.
A warning at the outset: nothing here is about getting more views. Several sections are on the contrary about deciding that certain views do not interest you, and ceasing to count them.
A hundred thousand views, and one address
Start with the calculation nobody makes, because it defuses the disappointment before it arrives.
The country has forty-eight wilayas. A nationally distributed video puts your business in front of an audience spread across all of them, while your real catchment is a radius of a few kilometres — sometimes a few hundred metres for a neighbourhood shop.
The useful proportion is therefore not small by accident, nor because the video was poor: it is small by construction, and would stay small with a video twice as good. That is a property of the distribution, not a mark on your work.
We put no figure on that proportion, deliberately: it depends on your commune, your trade and what you sell, and a percentage quoted here would be repeated as though it were general. What matters is the order of magnitude — most of the people watching you cannot come.
The practical consequence fits in one sentence, and the rest of the article follows from it: stop treating the view count as a result, and start counting something else. The next section says what.
Changing the judge: the question in one sentence
The instrument is ordinary and has no substitute: ask everybody who writes to you where they are writing from.
One sentence in the reply does it: "Which wilaya are you in?" It is natural in a commercial conversation, nobody finds it intrusive, and it produces the one piece of data the platform will never give you.
Record the answer. A stroke in a notebook or a column in a file — sophistication adds nothing here, and no record removes everything. After a month you have a distribution, and that distribution is the real dashboard for this platform.
What it measures is narrow and honest: it counts only people who wrote, so never those who simply turned up. It is a floor rather than a total, and a floor is enough to decide on — because the question asked is "does anybody from my town arrive", not "how many exactly".
A note on phrasing: ask the wilaya before you ask anything else. Placed at the end of the conversation, the question is only put to people who got that far, which is precisely the sample that will mislead you.
Geographic targeting only does part of the work
When you pay to distribute, you can restrict geographically. That is real, it is useful, and it solves less than people expect.
What the setting bounds is the paid distribution: the platform stops showing the advertisement outside the zone. What it does not bound is the free distribution that follows — reposts, shares, resurfacing — which sets off across the whole country again.
The consequence is that a video paid for locally and picked up nationally produces exactly the situation this article treats, in a more confusing form: your advertising report says "targeting: your wilaya" while your messages arrive from everywhere.
A second, less known limit: restricting the area reduces the available audience, and a heavily reduced audience costs more per person reached. For a thinly populated commune the gap is sometimes considerable, and it has to be looked at before concluding that the platform is expensive.
The rule we apply: geographic restriction is the right setting the moment you pay, and it excuses none of the other measures in this article. It bounds a spend; it does not bound an audience.
Say the place in the video, and exactly when
This is the most effective filter of all, and it is free: name your town out loud in the video itself.
The moment matters more than people think. Said in the first seconds, the place immediately sets aside those it does not concern and holds the rest. Said at the end, it arrives after everybody has already watched, which is the opposite of a filter.
Out loud, and not only written. Many people watch without sound, true — but many also watch without reading the caption, and a place both spoken and displayed reaches both. Subtitles are not optional here either.
Name the commune or the neighbourhood, not just the wilaya. "Algiers" tells nothing to somebody an hour’s travel across the city; the name of the neighbourhood tells them whether they will come. For a neighbourhood business that is the difference between information and an address.
One objection comes up often: "naming my commune will reduce my reach." It will, and that is the point. Reach is not what you sell, and a smaller reach made of people who can come is worth more than a large one made of people who cannot.
What to do with the people who cannot buy
The default answer is: nothing. It is acceptable, and it has to be stated explicitly, because unstated it turns into guilt and pointless work.
No follow-up, no building a national community, no producing content for them. Each of those costs the attention of a person who, in most Algerian businesses, is already the one serving customers.
Replying politely does remain essential, and it takes fifteen seconds: say where you are and that you do not deliver yet. A short reply closes the conversation cleanly; no reply leaves a message hanging that other people see.
There is a value here not to overstate and not to deny either: these people talk. A business seen nationally is a business talked about to people who may themselves be in your town. The effect is real, it is not measurable, and it justifies no additional spend.
The discipline is therefore to accept a useless number without fighting it. That is harder than it sounds, because the number is visible every day and your queue of customers is not.
Delivery, and what starting it really costs
There is one case where national reach stops being useless, and it is the one most businesses either consider too quickly or not at all: delivering.
The prior question is not logistical, it is about the product. Does what you sell survive several days of transport, packaging, handling by third parties and a possible return? A dish, a treatment in a salon and a made-to-measure piece of furniture all answer no, and no amount of organisation changes that.
If the answer is yes, the cost of entry is smaller than people think and the running cost larger. Courier services cover the country and cash on delivery is the norm; what costs is the daily time — preparing, dropping off, following up, handling refused parcels and chasing.
Cash on delivery is the point to examine before anything else. It moves the risk onto you: a refused parcel has cost the packaging, the outward leg and the return, and it happens at a rate that is not anecdotal. Decide in advance the minimum order below which you do not deliver.
The honest test is small: accept ten deliveries, note the time spent and what came back, then decide. It is the same discipline as the bounded trial described elsewhere in this series, applied to an operation rather than to a channel.
Wholesale: the demand that arrives is not the one you expected
Here is the consequence of national reach nobody anticipates, and it is often the most profitable: the messages arriving are not all customers.
Some are traders. Somebody running a shop six hundred kilometres away has seen your product, cannot buy it from you as a private individual, and asks for your wholesale price. That demand arrives unprompted and it surprises people, because nothing in an advertising campaign prepares for it.
This is not a statistical accident. The commercial register held 2,419,913 registered operators in December 2025, of which 42.11% in retail — a million and ninety-two thousand traders spread across the whole territory. A national audience contains a proportion of them that a local audience never does.
That figure states the composition of the business population and nothing else: it does not say how many traders saw your video, and nobody can say that. It explains why this kind of message arrives, not how many will.
What has to be prepared is modest and takes an hour: a wholesale price, a minimum quantity, and a sentence to reply with. Without them the enquiry arrives, sits unanswered for three days, and goes to somebody else — which we have watched happen more than once.
CNRC, position at 10 December 2025
The messages you cannot honour
A national audience produces a volume of messages a single-address business has no means of handling, and that is a real cost nobody mentions.
The first effect is mechanical: time spent replying to people who cannot buy is taken from time spent serving people who can. In a busy week the trade-off makes itself, to the detriment of both.
The second effect is reputational and slower. Unanswered questions stay visible, and an account showing twenty questions with no follow-up sends a precise signal to the twenty-first person — including when they live on your street.
The remedy is three prepared replies, written once and reused: where you are, whether you deliver, and the wholesale price. They cover most of the volume and turn a daily burden into three pastes.
Set a moment rather than a rhythm, too. Once a day at a fixed time is enough and it holds; "as soon as possible" means in practice all day, which is the surest way to abandon it within three weeks.
When reach says the business has to change shape
Sometimes the distribution of messages does not say "your advertising is badly targeted" but "your business is bigger than its address". It is rare, it is serious, and it deserves recognising when it happens.
The signal is not the view count. It is the persistence of a named demand: messages returning from the same wilaya, month after month, for the same product, from people willing to pay for transport.
The possible sequels are known and modest. A distance-selling line for part of the catalogue only. A sale-or-return arrangement with a trader in another town. A second address, which is the heaviest and least reversible of the three.
What must not happen is treating this as a marketing decision. A second address is a decision about cash, hiring and a director’s time; the reach of a video is information that informs it, not a decision that takes it.
The safeguard we propose is simple: three months of counting before discussing it seriously. A demand that holds for three months is a market; a demand that follows one much-watched video is an echo, and it dies before the lease is signed.
The video that travels nationally is not the one that sells down the road
The two objectives call for two different videos, and confusing them is what produces a much-watched account and an empty shop.
What travels far is what is understood with no context: a gesture, a transformation, a surprising object. None of that requires knowing where you are, which is precisely why the distribution sends it everywhere.
What sells locally contains, by contrast, three pieces of information the first does not: where, when you are open, and how much. Those three reduce reach and raise the proportion of people who can act.
The split we recommend is lopsided and deliberately so: most posts serve recognition, a regular minority serves local selling. The reverse — everything aimed at selling — produces an account the distribution stops picking up.
A note on scope: this section is about what a video has to say, not how to make one. Framing, sound, the tripod and subtitles belong to the article on video, which treats them better and at greater length.
What to count, once a month
Four numbers, read on the same day each month, on the same sheet. None of them comes from the platform.
The first is the number of messages received. The second is how many came from your wilaya, which follows from the question in section two. The third is the number of people who walked in and mentioned having seen you. The fourth, where relevant, is the number of orders shipped.
What those four allow is a reading the platform’s dashboard does not: the useful share of your audience, and how it moves. A share rising while views fall is good news, and it is exactly the movement local targeting produces.
Do not count views, followers or shares on this sheet. They are available elsewhere, they move for reasons that are not yours, and their presence on the page is enough to bring the conversation back to them.
Keep the sheets. Twelve months of this reading answers the question this article cannot settle for you — is this platform bringing you customers — and nothing else will.
What we do, and what we refuse
What we do here is bounded. We set up the count of the four numbers, we write the three prepared replies with you, we set the geographic restriction when you pay to distribute, and we read the sheet back once a quarter.
We refuse to present a view count as a result in a report. It is the most flattering figure we have and the easiest to lead with; on a platform whose distribution ignores your catchment it is also the one that describes least what you obtained.
We also refuse to build your delivery operation. It is not our trade — preparation, refused parcels and daily follow-up are operations work rather than marketing — and the provider selling you the advertising should not be the one selling you the logistics it makes necessary.
And there is one thing to do this month without us: ask the next thirty people who write which wilaya they are in, and count. If none is from your town, no better-made video will change that, and the decision to take is commercial — deliver, sell wholesale, or accept that this account serves recognition and nothing more.
Frequently asked questions
Does paid geographic targeting solve the problem?
Only partly. It bounds the distribution you pay for, not the free distribution that follows — reposts and shares set off across the country again. It also reduces the available audience, which raises the cost per person reached, sometimes considerably in a thinly populated commune. It is the right setting the moment you pay, and it excuses none of the other measures.
Do we really have to name our commune in the video?
Yes, out loud and in the first seconds. Said at the end, the place arrives after everybody has watched, which is the opposite of a filter. Name the neighbourhood rather than the wilaya: "Algiers" does not tell somebody whether they will make the trip. It reduces reach, and that is the point — reach is not what you sell.
What do we reply to somebody from another wilaya?
One short sentence: where you are, and that you do not deliver yet. It takes fifteen seconds and closes the conversation cleanly. No reply is the real cost — unanswered questions stay visible, and twenty of them send a precise signal to the twenty-first person, including when they live on your street.
When should we consider delivering?
First check the product survives it: a dish, a salon treatment or made-to-measure furniture all answer no, whatever the organisation. Then test small — ten deliveries, noting the time spent and what came back. Cash on delivery moves the risk onto you, so fix in advance the minimum order below which you do not deliver.
Why are we getting wholesale enquiries?
Because a national audience contains traders in a proportion a local one does not: the commercial register held 2,419,913 operators in December 2025, 42.11% of them in retail. That figure explains why the messages arrive, not how many will. Prepare a price, a minimum quantity and a reply — it takes an hour.
When should we conclude the platform is useless?
Not on views, and not before twelve monthly readings. Look at the share of messages from your wilaya and the number of people who walked in having seen you. If that share stays at zero over a year despite naming the place in the videos and targeting the paid distribution, the answer is clear — and the next decision is commercial rather than advertising.
Where we come in
Thirty answers to the wilaya question are enough to know whether your audience is reachable. What is missing are the sentences to send the other twenty-seven.
- We draft the three standard replies: your address, delivery, the trade rate.
- We build the four-indicator tracking once, in a spreadsheet that is yours.
- We warn you when the out-of-area share passes what you can actually serve.
We will not build your logistics: picking, parcels and returns are another trade, and not one we practise.
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