Facebook Ads For Affiliate Marketing [2023] 11 Actionable Tips & Strategies

Today, I want to share with you how to do Facebook ads for affiliate marketing the right way in 2021 and beyond.

When it comes to running paid traffic for affiliate marketing on platforms like Facebook, things are always constantly changing.

And that’s something you have to get used to because as an affiliate marketer with, especially with Facebook it seems like every single day Facebook is updating their policies, their terms, and everything is changing.

And the bad news is that Facebook is going to be more strict and they’re going to be really scrutinizing ads, even more, and they’re going to be fact-checking things.

The reason being is Facebook does not want another Cambridge Analytica scandal to happen to them and so they’re going to be strict.

It’s all part of the game, it’s all part of the process, and so today I want to share a couple of tips for you to get prepared for even more restrictions, so that way, when you do your affiliate marketing with Facebook ads, you’re going to be in a better position.

I’ll show you one strategy that helped me drop lead costs from $2.50 to less than $0.10 cents per lead so make sure you read this article right to the end.

Let’s get started.

Does Facebook Ads Allow Affiliate Marketing?

There are so many people out there that say that Facebook hates affiliate marketers, they don’t like it but that’s not true.

What they don’t like is the way that many affiliates are doing affiliate marketing and promoting products.

So, if you do black hat stuff or you try to do some shady tactics, Facebook is not going to like you.

But if you play by Facebook rules, if you do what they ask of you, then good things can happen.

So, I want to share with you a couple of tips when it comes to making that happen.

1. Avoid Direct Affiliate Linking

Where most people start when it comes to affiliate marketing with Facebook ads is they found an affiliate product they want to sell, they go ahead and create a campaign and they simply paste their affiliate links.

And when they do that, Facebook pops up with all sorts of warning messages and things basically saying, you can’t do that.

Yes, it’s possible to put direct affiliate links in a Facebook ad and there are ways around it, but it’s not what I would recommend doing.

You should always use some sort of pre-sell page or landing page before running ads on Facebook and drive traffic to your affiliate sales funnel.

2. Use Facebook Ads To Build Your Email List

If you want to be serious about affiliate marketing with Facebook ads, building an email list is one of the important steps to take.

That way you’re not just going to get past any issues Facebook might have about the links that directly sending people to an affiliate offer, which often they don’t like but you’re also building your audience.

The best way to build an email list with Facebook ads is by promoting your affiliate lead magnet.

You advertise the lead magnet, get people to opt-in for the lead magnet, and join your email list.

Then, on the thank you page, you can send them straight to the sales page trying to sell the affiliate product or service that you’re offering.

So, you’ve only got a couple of minutes extra, even if that, for them to go to your landing page, opt-in for your lead magnet, go to the thank you page and then click through to the affiliate offer sales page.

That way you’re also building your relationship with that audience and your recommendation is going to carry more weight because they’ve taken an action with you.

They’ve downloaded your lead magnet, they’ve decided that you have information that’s valuable to them, you become more of an authority figure when you then make the recommendation.

So, your conversion rate is going to go up when people go through to the affiliate sales page.

But also, you have the follow-on abilities so if they don’t go ahead and purchase right there and then, you can hit them with an email autoresponder, you could have a 3-day email autoresponder sequence that encourages those people to go ahead and purchase the affiliate offer.

That’s a huge advantage to building an email list, building an audience, as opposed to trying to directly make the sale by sending people directly through to an affiliate sales page.

The long-term ROI on that approach as opposed to the direct linking is so much better because if you get someone on your email list, you might be able to sell different affiliate products to them over the next months.

3. Promote Your Brand, Not Affiliate Links

The first tip on how to do affiliate marketing with Facebook ads is when it comes to your offers, you need to be brand-focused. Facebook loves brands.

And the reason why is because when you’re a brand and you’re a company that means you’re legitimate, that means that you are not doing anything shady and it’s very structured and it makes a lot of sense. S

The same thing when it comes to your advertising for an affiliate product. Whether it’s ClickBank products or Digistore24 products or some other affiliate networks, it has to be brand-focused.

And what I mean by that is your fan page has to have a brand feel to it. So, you should, first of all, you should have contact information, you should have a support email, you should have your privacy policy and affiliate disclaimer in place.

There are several things you should have on there that any legit brand would have.

Now, also when it comes to your Facebook fan page, you want to be posting content regularly and get some decent engagement.

So, I would recommend anywhere from 3 to 5 posts a week that include content that’s relevant to your brand that you’re trying to build on that fan page.

And what people make the mistake of is they’ll create a fan page and they’ll post 2 or 3 times and then they’ll never post again.

Of course, Facebook’s not going to like that because Facebook is all about engagement, and the more time people spend on their platform, the happier they are.

So, make sure your fan page looks like a legitimate business. And if you do that, you’re going to have a lot more success.

4. Avoid Big Claims

The next Facebook ad tip is to make sure that you are not making any crazy claims on your landing page, you’re not making any crazy claims on your ad copy and also on your VSL.

So, for example, if you create a weight-loss campaign you want to make sure on your ad copy that you’re not saying things like:

“Joe lost 10 pounds in the last 6 weeks – click here to see how you can do it too”

With Facebook ads, you can’t have any claims in terms of time-based things like pounds or weeks.

Also on your ad creatives make sure you don’t have before and afters. This is not allowed on Facebook as well.

5. Start With Engagement Campaigns

When you advertise using your ad accounts, make sure you’re getting lots of engagement and run some Facebook engagement ads campaigns.

Don’t just do those conversion ads to make money right away.

And the reason why it’s really important is that you want to build that trust with Facebook. You can’t just have a brand-new ad account on Facebook and then starts to spend money on it.

It’s really important to take time and be gradual and be very methodical about how you set it up.

So, make sure to run some engagement campaigns first, boost some of your posts, set up a professional landing page.

It takes a little bit more time but by doing that you’re going to have a lot more success with Facebook ads. Your campaigns are going to last longer and more importantly, you’re going to make more money.

6. Make Your Ads Congruent With The Product

The next tip is not just on Facebook, but where you’re taking people off of Facebook so, your website or your sales funnel.

Wherever you’re going to send people to before you send them to an affiliate offer, you have to make sure that that’s brand-oriented too.

It also has to be congruent with the offer and the brand on the fan page. If it’s not branded, Facebook doesn’t like that because Facebook is all about their users and having good trust with their users.

So really important whether it’s your website or landing page, you need to have your terms and conditions, privacy policy, you need to have brands type stuff.

Most affiliate marketers are lazy and they’ll copy not ad creatives from somebody else so they won’t create their own. And that’s where you get in trouble with Facebook.

So, take the time, create your own content and get some articles on your website as well if you send people to your affiliate website.

And if you can’t write your own blogs you can hire somebody to write some articles for you or you can take advantage of some of the AI copywriting tools like Jarvis that will do the heavy lifting for you.

And then on the last step, you’re going to send people to your affiliate offer.

7. Traffic vs Conversion Campaigns

The next thing I want to mention when it comes to Facebook ads and affiliate marketing is that obviously, you can’t usually install your Facebook pixel on the vendor sales page to be able to track conversions within your Facebook ad account when you’re directly sending people to an affiliate sales page, it’s just not going to work.

Every now and then you’ll come across some that will allow you to do that; they’ll create unique sales pages, but most of the time that’s not going to be possible.

The company will usually provide you with affiliate data in the backend. So, you’ve got to see how many sales you’re generating, but your Facebook ad campaign can’t optimize for that specific purchase, which means you can’t really run a conversions campaign because there’s no conversion event for them to optimize for.

Whereas if you go with the email list building approach, you could run a conversions campaign that optimizes for people joining the email list that allows you to run a conversions campaign.

Conversions campaigns in general perform much better than traffic campaigns. And that’s another advantage to building an audience first, and then looking to sell your affiliate products and services to that audience, as opposed to doing it directly.

8. Split Test Your Ad Copies

The next tip is to always do split testing ad copies as well as targeting.

This is how I systematically drop lead costs from $2.50 to even $0.10 cents per lead and I’ve got thousands of leads.

And why do we even split tests?

Anytime I’ve tried to just guess which ad copies are going to work or which image I’ve got no idea and I really doubt that you do as well.

You’ve got nothing to lose by split testing because we all have a win or we learn and I’m going to demonstrate this for you.

So this was an article that we did quite some time ago and I basically made 4 different ad images.

I put them head-to-head and what I want you to do is right now just mentally make a guess of which one of the 4 performs the best.

So pick one of those which one do you think did best with the cheapest cost per click, the highest click-through rate, and just outperformed the others.

So here are the results.

So as you can see this stupid one up in the top left-hand corner with a blackboard and a cupcake won and it won by quite a bit.

And it was basically half the cost of all the others and so that’s a pretty amazing result because it doesn’t seem like much because there’s just a $0.7 cents difference between that one and the second-best but what about the maths?

So imagine you want 10,000 clicks and if you’re running a large business you do want 10,000 clicks.

And if you do the math it’s around $800 or $1,900 if you were to get those 10,000 clicks that’s a $1,100 profit difference.

So this is the actual profit that’s what’s so important about split testing.

Anything that you save you’re literally putting in your pocket so if you’re large running large Facebook ad campaigns even the smallest differences can make a huge difference.

9. Research Facebook Ad Library

This simple trick is going to help you build ads way faster and test more offers more quickly with Facebook ads.

You see, one of the biggest challenges with doing ads, in general, is that you have to understand the business, who’s the ideal customer profile what kind of copy you can use to describe the offer and its benefits.

In any product or service are offered there are going to be multiple things that could make an appeal to the customer multiple value propositions but what are those value propositions?

Well, typically you’d have to research a lot of that by yourself. You can go on their website, you can go look at maybe sign up for their email list but the fastest way to find out that information that you can use in your ads is to use Facebook Ad Library.

So go into Facebook, type in the company name of the product that you want to promote, and go to “page transparency”, then click on “see more”

And then you can actually see all of the ads that they’ve ever published.

So this actually happened because of a lot of the things that were happening with Facebook’s privacy concerns there was the whole situation with Cambridge analytic that I mentioned earlier.

And as a result of that is they’ve made all the ads that a company runs public.

This is good news for us because we can see what’s working for the company itself.

10. Spy On Your Competitors

The last tactic I want to show you is how to spy on Facebook ads. And for this, you’re going to need a spying tool.

I personally use BigSpy because it allows me to find other affiliates who are running these ads.

So to get started, first visit a sales page of an affiliate product that you want to promote.

For this example, I’m going to be using “Ancient Japanese Tonic”

So what I’m going to do now is just search up the words that anyone mentions in their ads because with BigSpy you can actually filter by the text in their ads.

So if I type in “Ancient Japanese” and I can add that to my filters.

And it’s going to show us ads that mention “Ancient Japanese Tonic” in their actual copy.

11. Have a Long Term Strategy

Where a lot of people go wrong with affiliate marketing, particularly in conjunction with Facebook advertising is they don’t treat it like a real business.

They just try and sort of have quick overnight success, quickly throw something up, hope it works, hope it generates a profit whether you’re selling your products or services or affiliate products, you need to have a longer-term approach and treat it like a real business.

If you are just trying to generate a quick sale for an affiliate product, take your commission, and hope that that commission exceeds the cost of advertising, it’s going to be very difficult for you to scale and maintain a consistently profitable business with that approach.

You’re not capturing the majority of the value that comes from that transaction between you and the customer.

Yes, of course, you’re getting a commission in terms of the sale, but the real value in that first transaction with a customer is the fact that you have generated a customer for your affiliate marketing business.

The affiliate commission that you make is great but the real value is in building the audience that you can then sell affiliate products to and generate commissions again, and again.

So instead of directly looking to sell your affiliate products and services, it’s much, much better to focus on audience building.

Facebook Ads For Affiliate Marketing Final Words

So this is how to do affiliate marketing with Facebook ads the right way.

Most people in the digital marketing space are well aware of the power of Facebook and Instagram ads and how effective they can be in terms of generating sales and generating income for you as an affiliate marketer.

But as you saw there are things you do want to do and things you don’t want to do when it comes to affiliate marketing and selling affiliate products through Facebook ads.

If you liked this guide, you’re going to love the free affiliate marketing training where you’ll learn how to promote affiliate products with the recurring commission using free traffic as well as paid traffic.