How to Research Vertical Demand Using Facebook and LinkedIn Groups

Most people pick a [pay per call](/choosing-a-pay-per-call-vertical/debt-relief-pay-per-call-rules-risks-and/) vertical the way they pick a lottery number. Gut feeling, a screenshot someone posted, maybe a payout that made their eyebrows jump. Then they buy traffic and wonder why the phone stays quiet.

There's a cheaper way to find out what's actually hot and it's sitting in free Facebook and LinkedIn Groups, hiding mostly in the comments, where nobody bothers to look because everyone's too busy staring at the flashy screenshots up top. You just have to read them like a detective instead of a fan.

Let me walk you through how I do it.

Why groups beat gut feeling

Groups give you unscripted talk. Nobody's writing a sales page in a comment thread when they're mad about a cap getting slashed. That honesty is the whole point.

Facebook Groups usually surface the publisher and media-buyer side. These are the people actually running traffic, and when they complain, they complain with specifics. LinkedIn skews more B2B, more buyer-side and agency talk. Check both and you hear both ends of the same market. One side tells you where the money wants to go. The other tells you why it keeps getting stuck.

That cross-reference is the real trick. A vertical can look starved for traffic on the buyer side and completely oversupplied on the publisher side, which means payouts are about to drop and you're walking into a fistfight for scraps.

Finding the right groups without drowning

Not every group is worth your time. A lot of them are ghost towns with an admin who posts motivational quotes on Mondays.

For Facebook, use the group search filter and target the 5,000 to 50,000 member range. That's the sweet spot. Below a few thousand and the activity's too thin to read a trend. Above 100,000 and it's mostly bots, recruiters, and people asking how to make money online (spoiler: not by asking in a group of 100,000 strangers).

LinkedIn caps you at 100 groups. Don't max that out. You want the 3 to 5 most active ones in your vertical, because spreading across 40 half-dead groups is a nice way to light your afternoon on fire. Sort by activity. Be ruthless about leaving the quiet ones.

Beyond the free stuff, a few named communities are worth knowing. STM Forum is paid, usually somewhere in the $99 to $199 a month range, and the signal-to-noise there is higher because people paid to be in the room. AffiliateFix is free and busier, so you'll filter more. The Performance Marketing Association is handy for broader vertical trends rather than day-to-day chatter. I keep the free ones for daily reading and treat the paid forum as a spot check when I'm about to commit real budget.

What are you actually looking for in a vertical?

You want sustained demand, not a single loud post. A keyword or offer that shows up across multiple threads over several weeks means real appetite. A one-day spike means somebody launched something and got excited. Review 30 to 60 days of posts before you decide anything, because a shorter window will fool you every time.

The high-demand verticals to watch are the usual heavy hitters: home services like HVAC and plumbing, insurance, legal, and healthcare. Payouts across these commonly run from around $10 on the low end to $100 or more per qualified call, with legal and insurance sitting at the fat end. When you see people in a group talking about a vertical the way a gambler talks about a horse, that's your cue to go count how often it comes up.

So sort the Facebook group by recent activity and just read. For a month. I know that sounds slow. It's also how you avoid buying into a vertical that peaked in March.

Read the complaints, not the wins

Here's the part most people skip, and it's the best part.

The main posts are usually noise. Screenshots of big days, humblebrags, someone announcing a new network (translation: recruiting). The gold is in the comments and the complaints. When a publisher vents about a cap getting cut, a payout dropping, or a call duration threshold nobody can hit, they're accidentally handing you a map.

Think about what a complaint actually tells you. If ten people are furious that a health insurance offer keeps hitting cap by noon, that's a demand signal screaming that buyers want more of that traffic than publishers can supply. If everyone's grumbling that a legal offer needs an 8-minute call to convert, that tells you the buyer's picky, the payout's probably high, and there's room for someone who can deliver quality.

I once found a whole quarter of good HVAC volume this way. Not from a post. From a guy complaining in a comment that his buyer kept asking for more calls in three specific states and he couldn't fill it. That's not a complaint. That's a job posting.

Track the GEOs too. When the same states or regions get named repeatedly across weeks, that's where the buyers are hungry. If you want a deeper framework for reading these signals and turning them into campaigns, I get into it more on AdamYoung.com, and the mechanics of the whole model are laid out in The Pay Per Call Revolution.

Don't trust the numbers you read

Now the caveat, because groups will lie to you sometimes.

Payout figures posted in comments go stale fast. A number that was true in October might be gone by December. And plenty of the people posting have a reason to make a vertical sound better than it is, usually because they want you in their network. So verify independently before you spend a dime. Ask the network directly. Pull real numbers from your own tracking once you start testing, which is exactly the kind of thing a platform like Ringba exists to give you.

Then cross-check timing against the calendar. Tax lives in the first quarter. Insurance open enrollment runs roughly October to December, and demand in that window can look enormous right up until it vanishes on January 1. Home services shift with the weather, so HVAC in July is a different animal than HVAC in January. A vertical that looks red-hot in a group might just be seasonal, and if you build for it in the wrong month you're buying a ticket to an empty theater.

Anyway. The pattern is simple even if the reading is slow. Find the active groups, watch both sides of the market, mine the complaints, and confirm everything before you act. Do that for a month and you'll know more about real demand than most people who've been "in the space" for years.

FAQ

How many groups should I actually join? On Facebook, 5 to 8 active ones is plenty. On LinkedIn, cap it at 3 to 5. More than that and you stop reading and start scrolling.

Free forums or paid ones like STM? Start free with AffiliateFix and Facebook Groups. Add a paid forum in the $99 to $199 range only when you're about to put money into a vertical and want a cleaner second opinion.

How long before I can trust a trend? Give it 30 to 60 days. Anything shorter and you're reacting to a spike, not a pattern.

Facebook or LinkedIn for pay per call specifically? Both, but Facebook first. It surfaces publisher and media-buyer sentiment. LinkedIn fills in the buyer and agency side.

What if the payout numbers people post are wrong? Assume they are. Confirm with the network and your own tracking before you build anything on them.