LeadEnforce Review, how-to target Facebook pages & groups

If you’ve always thought that you can’t target followers of Facebook pages or the members of Facebook groups, think again… because with LeadEnforce you can.

You can show your ads to people who like your competitor’s Facebook pages.

You can show your ads to members of a specific Facebook group.Even when they’re small pages and groups that don’t have an associated interest.

In this in-depth LeadEnforce review I’ll show you how I used LeadEnforce’s free trial to test various “hidden” audiences and lowered my CPL (cost-per-lead) by 70%.

If you’d like to test LeadEnforce yourself after reading my case-study, you can sign-up for their free 7 day trial. If you do that through my link, you’ll get a 30% discount on your first month’s payment (if you decide to continue after the trial).

There’s a lot to tell about this unique tool for Facebook advertisers that was originally developed by a group of marketing agencies for internal use. After several years of internal usage, they’ve decided to make their tool available to the market.

And I’m thankful they did… 🙏

What is LeadEnforce?

LeadEnforce is a software-as-a-service that allows you to create audiences from the people that like specific Facebook pages or members of Facebook groups. They get their information from various 3rd-party sources outside of Facebook but the resulting audiences can be shared with your Facebook ad account as custom audiences.

I didn’t know that was even possible…

To be completely honest, I discovered this tool by accident while monitoring our SEO rankings in Google. I searched for some of the keywords we’re trying to rank for with InterestExplorer, our tool that reveals hidden Facebook interests you can target.

Then I saw this Google ad…👇

Outsmart FB Interest Targeting? got my attention, because our own software is built around enabling advertisers to find interests that are not shown in Ads Manager.

After testing LeadEnforce myself (I’ll share the results in this article) I know that it works, and that in my experiment it indeed outsmarted my ad set with interest-based targeting.

I think targeting competitors and groups is a very valuable option next to targeting people based on relevant interests and lookalike audiences. It’s not as scalable of course, but it’s highly targeted and not many competitors do it.

So you can benefit if you jump in quickly, before it’s saturated by others.

You’ll probably know this, but just to be sure…

You can’t just target any Facebook page or group, because in most cases there is no matching “interest” you can target (there are many big Facebook pages you can’t target, and some really small ones that suddenly have an interest you can target…)

I thought that was it.

But then I stumbled upon that Google ad…

So I was really keen on seeing how LeadEnforce works – and how it could help me target the page likes of my competitors and members of their Facebook groups.

Because I definitely had some interesting groups in mind, that I reached out to before to learn that “nothing promotional” was allowed (and least not for free).

Right…😅

My 7-day LeadEnforce experiment

LeadEnforce offers a free 7-day trial, to test their product without any risk.

I decided that should be enough time to run a meaningful experiment and decide based on the outcome if I would continue using the tool on a monthly subscription.

I have been running Facebook ads for many years, using mostly layered interest targeting and some lookalike audiences as well. I have an ad that I know performs really well when it’s shown to the right audience. It’s a video ad that generates leads for our software offer, by promoting a free PDF download.

This is a screenshot of the ad.

I created 2 Facebook campaigns, one with an ad set in it that targeted interests of which I know that they work well for me. The other was a CBO campaign with 3 ad sets that targeted 3 different audiences built from both page likes and group members.

The goal of this experiment was to see if that ad set could indeed outsmart FB interest targeting and to see if the increased performance would justify their pricing.

I chose to optimise the campaigns in this experiment for the Lead objective, because my goal is always to generate leads from cold traffic to market my products to.

Finally I made sure to target just my top countries.

I’ll show you the results first before showing you exactly how LeadEnforce works.

Drumroll please…🥁

As you can see both campaigns served around the same number of impressions and in total 229 leads were generated in my experiment. But if you look at the cost per lead, there’s a HUGE difference between the campaign targeted at groups vs. interests.

This is not a random interest campaign, but a very optimised set of interests that I’ve compiled over time. I know that these interests work really well for me, shown also in the $2.36 CPL that is far below the average CPL in the market I’m targeting (digital marketers in US/UK/CA/AU). But the group targeting leads were $0.75…

I turned off the interests campaign in this experiment and now I’m running new experiments to test various LeadEnforce audiences against each other. Obviously it can’t be scaled like interests or lookalikes, but the performance is insane 😯

So, how did I create these audiences using LeadEnforce?

Using LeadEnforce to build custom audiences

I’ve just showed you the insane results of my own experiment.

Needless to say, I’ve upgraded my LeadEnforce account to a paid plan. I started with the $99 per month personal plan.

The LeadEnforce tool is easy to use – so I’ll just show some highlights.

In the tool everything starts with a project. That’s like the umbrella under which you collect Facebook pages, Facebook groups, etc around the same theme.

With te $99 personal plan you can create up to 3 projects. This is the project I’ll show you in more detail.

When you create a project within the $99 personal plan, you can add up to 10 Facebook groups or pages as the source for your audience. Although you can add only 5 links at a time (as you can see in the screenshot), the total allowed sources per project is 10.

I’ve simply pasted the URL’s of Facebook groups around the topic of “Facebook advertising”, because that’s the exact audience I want to reach with my ads.

These are the groups: Facebook Ad Buyers, Facebook Ad Hacks, Facebook Ads Agency Scaling Secrets, Facebook Ads Mastermind Group and Facebook Ads Rockstars.

Next to my “groups” project I also have an “un-targetable pages” project. Here I’ve input the page URL’s of Facebook pages that can’t be targeted with interest targeting.

It includes pages of people that are known for their knowledge about Facebook ads: Nicholas Kusmich, Alex Fedotoff, Depesh Mandalia, Tim Burd, etc. I didn’t include people like Ryan Deiss or Jon Loomer, because they are an interest you can target.

I know comparing interest audiences with “page likes” is not 100% apples and apples, this is just how I do it. Probably I’ll test them against each other at some point 🥊

Then when you’ve input these URL’s you hit ‘Analyse’ so LeadEnforce can do it’s magic. It can take a few hours before you’ll get an email saying that your audience has been analysed. Because they don’t rely on scraping public email addresses (like many shady Chrome extensions) but on various 3rd-party sources, they are able to find a decent percentage of all the users in each group or page likes.

According to the LeadEnforce team, the tool works better with open Facebook groups compared to closed Facebook groups in terms of member coverage.

But as said, I think my 66% and 45% is a pretty decent coverage and when you combine multiple related groups into 1 audience you’ll reach a good audience size.

When the analysis has been completed, you can choose to apply some filters to the audience in LeadEnforce. But I rather add filters in Facebook Ads Manager, for example to only target people within that custom audience that live in my top countries.

All that’s left now is to share your audience as a custom audience by entering your Facebook ad account ID. And that’s it. The audience will automatically show up in your ‘shared audiences’ section in Ads Manager – ready to be targeted with your ads 🚀

UPDATE:

After this first experiment I went on to create 3 new projects, structured like this:

Facebook groups (FB ads)

In this project I’ve included the 5 top Facebook groups specifically around the topic of Facebook ads. These include Facebook Ad Buyers and Facebook Ad Hacks. These are all closed groups, so the match rate is lower compared to pages. But still I’m able to target a combined laser-targeted audience of around 55.000 users.

Facebook pages

Because Facebook pages are open, LeadEnforce will show a higher match rate of people that like my selection of 8 pages. The audience is much bigger compared to groups. I chose to only include Facebook pages that don’t have a matching interest as sources for this project. Pages like “Alex Fedotoff” and “Depesh Mandalia”.

Facebook groups (entrepreneurs)

In this project the sources are Facebook groups around the broader topic of entrepreneurship. My assumption is that most people in these groups are interested in Facebook advertising, but I think it’s less targeted than my other groups project. Think of groups like “ClickFunnels Avengers” and Kevin David’s “Ecom Ninjas!”.

I’ll continue to add to these projects.

These are the initial results:

Ready to test LeadEnforce yourself?

I think after reading my experience, your hands must be itching to try LeadEnforce yourself. I highly recommend you do that – because my experience is not yours.

To be 100% honest, I’ve tested this product before earlier this year. And back then my evaluation was different and I didn’t continue after my trial. At the end of this email I sent to their support, I even went as far as saying “so far it’s really disappointing“.

I’ve thought a lot about this experiment and how it was different from my recent experiment. Looking back, I think the small number of purchases in my previous experiment was just too small to say anything meaningful about the results.

Now I’ve proven that it worked really well and lowered my CPL by 70%.

As you can read in my email, I’m quite a critical person. I’m always happy to test new tools and new strategies- but I don’t just buy the pitch. Only actual results count.

That brings us to the end of this review…

It’s actually really simple – you SHOULD just test it yourself.

It is a golden opportunity and I know that it worked for me. I’ll continue to explore the possibilities of targeting groups of people that are otherwise really expensive to reach.

Go ahead and sign-up for a free LeadEnforce trial now.

7 days is enough to know for sure.

You don’t need to enter creditcard details, so don’t worry about forgetting to cancel.

If you sign-up through my link, you’ll see a 30% discount applied to your first month payment should you decide to continue using LeadEnforce after your trial expires. The discount will be shown in your account settings, in the upgrade pricing table.

I’ve purchased the $99 personal plan after my trial and I’ll probably upgrade soon because I just need more projects, more groups and more shared audiences.

You’ll find all the information about their plans and additional features on their website. I didn’t mention all features in this article, because I haven’t tested them all yet.

If you’re interested to learn more about targeting Facebook ads to fans of competitor pages, I recommend to read my article about that as well.

I hope you enjoyed this LeadEnforce review and I truly wish for you that your own LeadEnforce experiment will turn to be as succesfull as mine.

Fingers crossed 🤞