Little Known Trick To Target Facebook Groups With Facebook Ads
Are you searching for a highly relevant Facebook Group whose members perfectly align with your product or service? Do you want to laser-target your Facebook ads to reach those specific individuals, thus avoiding wasted ad budget on broader targeting? Well, look no further! In this article, I’ll reveal a little known trick that allows you to target members of specific public or private Facebook Groups with your Facebook ads.
Understanding the Difference: Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages, and Facebook Interests
Before diving into the trick, it’s important to comprehend the distinction between Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages, and the Facebook interests available for detailed ad targeting within Facebook Ads Manager.
Facebook Pages, like ClickFunnels, are created by businesses and can be “liked” by users. For instance, the ClickFunnels page, created by an internet company, boasts an impressive 383K likes.
On the other hand, there are Facebook Pages representing individuals rather than businesses. Take Russell Brunson, the founder of ClickFunnels, as an example. He has a personal Facebook Page with around 680K likes and 800K followers. However, having numerous likes or followers doesn’t necessarily mean that the business or person can be targeted as an “interest.”
When searching for “ClickFunnels” in the Detailed Targeting field within Facebook Ads Manager, no results are found. This indicates that there isn’t a targetable ad interest specifically assigned to ClickFunnels.
However, when searching for “Russell Brunson,” Facebook does suggest an interest that can be targeted with ads. According to Facebook, the estimated audience size ranges from 443,835 to 521,950 people.
Additionally, there are two large Facebook Groups related to ClickFunnels: the official group with 278K members and the unofficial user group, ClickFunnels Avengers, with 92K users. Unfortunately, neither of these Facebook Groups has a matching interest that can be targeted with ads.
These examples clearly demonstrate that Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, and Facebook interests are entirely distinct from one another. While some Facebook Pages have matching Facebook interests that can be targeted, Facebook Groups never have a corresponding interest, making them untargetable with ads—at least, not without the strategy I’ll share in this article.
The Importance of Facebook Group Targeting
Facebook encourages advertisers to target broad audiences, as it directly impacts their revenue. The more ad impressions they can sell to advertisers, the higher their revenue (and stock value) becomes. Consequently, Facebook has gradually made it more challenging to laser-target small, highly relevant audiences, instead favoring broad targeting options and emphasizing the power of Facebook’s AI.
Paradoxically, the laser-targeting capabilities based on rich user profiles initially lured countless advertisers to the platform. However, as time has passed, Facebook advertising has become less targeted, veiling the question of who advertisers are truly targeting.
Despite this trend, it is still possible to achieve laser-targeting by focusing on specific Facebook Groups. People join Facebook Groups based on their passions and interests, resulting in a significantly smaller number of memberships compared to Facebook Pages. This smaller size makes Facebook Group membership a valuable variable for targeted ad campaigns.
How to Target Facebook Groups with Ads?
Although Facebook does not provide matching ad interests for Facebook Groups, there is a little-known software called LeadEnforce that can help you create custom audiences from Facebook Group members. This custom audience can then be shared with your Facebook advertising account.
LeadEnforce also works with Facebook Pages, allowing you to create audiences of people who have “liked” a particular Facebook Page, even if there isn’t a matching ad interest. This strategy enables you to target Facebook ads to fans of your competitors—a clever approach to hijacking their audience.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating targetable audiences using LeadEnforce:
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Sign up for a LeadEnforce account. You can find a free 7-day trial on their website, but if you sign up through my link, you’ll receive a 30% discount on your first month’s payment should you decide to upgrade to a paid account after the trial.
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After signing up, create a project in your LeadEnforce dashboard.
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Within the project, add sources—URLs of Facebook Pages or Facebook Groups. You can add up to 5 links at a time, with a maximum of 10 URLs per project.
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As an example, let’s consider Facebook Groups related to “Facebook advertising”: Facebook Ad Buyers, Facebook Ad Hacks, Facebook Ads Agency Scaling Secrets, Facebook Ads Mastermind Group, and Facebook Ads Rockstars.
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Once you’ve added the source URLs, click the ‘Analyse’ button and allow LeadEnforce some time to build your audience. Depending on the number of URLs, this process can take a few hours.
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After completion, you’ll be able to see how many members from each Facebook Group were successfully added to your audience. Remember, it won’t be 100% of the group members, and LeadEnforce generally works better with open Facebook Groups compared to closed ones.
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In our example, 45% and 66% of the group members were added, resulting in a decent audience.
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Finally, to use this custom audience, link your LeadEnforce account to your Facebook Ads Manager by entering your Facebook Ad Account ID and clicking ‘Share’. The newly created audience will appear in your Ads Manager under ‘shared audiences’, allowing you to select it when choosing your ad targeting.
Want to learn more about this powerful Facebook Group targeting strategy? Check out our in-depth LeadEnforce review, as well as our case study on targeting Facebook ads to people who like a competitor’s Facebook Page.
