How to run Facebook Ads to your affiliate offers without getting your account banned, ads disapproved or wasting a tonne of money!

OK, so if you’ve been in affiliate marketing for more than 5 minutes i’m guessing you’ve tried Facebook ads and either had your account banned, your ads disapproved our wasted a tonne of money and shouted the following “Facebook ads don’t work, there impossible”

Well, I’m here to tell you there is a light at the end of the tunnel and Facebook ads can do wonders for affiliate marketing business, but first you’re going to need to take one step back to take two steps forward. I’ll explain more in just a minute, but first I want to explain why Facebook is such a great traffic source for affiliates.

Targeting

Facebook has an insane amount of data that you can use for free to create huge targeted audiences. OK, yes you have to pay to show ads to these audiences, but they are free to create!

If you look at places native ad networks like Taboola and Outbrain whilst you have some control over the audience selection it’s very broad, and there is no ability to optimise the campaign, unlike Facebook.

Interests & Behaviours

Facebook’s interest and behaviour targeting offers great amounts of targeting for affiliates for example let’s say you were promoting a sales CRM software. You could target competitors Facebook pages, people who follow influential sales gurus and people that were sales reps, it doesn’t get much better than that does it?

Well yes actually it does!

Lookalikes & Custom Audiences

This is where the magic happens in Facebook. Lookalike audiences are created by either uploading a list of emails or phone numbers. Facebook then looks to see if these numbers or emails match a Facebook profile. If they do you can then ask Facebook to go and find other profiles very similar to those you just uploaded. Now that’s targeted traffic!

So for example. Let’s say you had run a promotion for an affiliate offer and built a list of say 1,000 people. You could upload that list into Facebook and have Facebook find other people similar to them! Now that’s targeted traffic!

A custom audience is another great tool. This is where you can building audiences based on events tracked via your Facebook Pixel. One that I generally create is “People who have visited my bridge page, but not clicked the get offer button”.

This allows me to segment anyone that has visited my bridge page, but not clicked the offer. I can then show them more ads to reiterate the benefits of the product I’m promoting.

OK, so now we know how great the targeting options are, how do we run ads, that don’t get our accounts banned, are ads disapproved or waste a tonne of money!

In this next section I’m going to breakdown the main reasons affiliate run into trouble with Facebook ads.

Direct Linking — This is one of the most common reasons I see affiliates fail. They take their affiliate link and plug it directly into their ads. Facebook hates this, they are not that keen on affiliate marketers to begin with and can smell an affiliate link a mile off.

Resolution? The bridge page! You need to create a page that your visitors go to after they click your ad that pre-sells them on your affiliate offer. This is far better as Facebook sees the ad going to a really website, plus if your create a good bridge page, you’ll end up getting far more referral commissions.

Too Many disapproved ads — This one is harder to spot unless you’ve experienced it. I remember running ads and despite having done everything correctly they just weren’t reaching as many people as they once did and my CPM (cost per thousand impressions) had more than doubled.

I jumped onto the phone with my Facebook rep who advised that the account I was working on had a black mark next to is as it had lots and lots of disapproved ads previously.

OK, but what causes your ads to get disapproved? I thought you’d never ask :)

Causes for disapproved ads

• 20% rule — this is when you have more than 20% text to image on your ads. Before uploading your images use this tool to check them https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay
• Slow loading landing pages — if you landing page takes forever to load you ads will get disaproved you this tool to check you landing page speed — https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
• Unrealistic claims — this tends to be in the make money online or health and fitness space that you run into these issues with headlines like “Lose 30 pounds in 30 days” or Checkout how i made £30k in 30 days”. As a rule of thumb don’t have two numbers together Facebook just doesn’t like it.

Try these alternatives. “Lose 30 pounds, without giving up the food you hate or becoming an obsessed calorie counter” or Checkout how i made £30k, and quit my job with affiliate marketing.

• High Negative Feedback — This won’t happen until you begin running you ads. The best thing to prevent this is to keep a close eye on your comments and reply to any bad ones. If you are getting bombarded by bad comments. Pause the ad create a new one. But take note of the things that were said.

Do not just copy the old ad and run it again. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

And finally here are some other things to avoid doing / promoting via Facebook ads.

Restricted products — Facebook doesn’t allow gambling or dating ads to be run on the platform. I have previously ran ads for a dating company. However we had to go through a white listing process which took 3 months and they seemed to just strangle the ads.

So there you have it folks a guide to running ads on Facebook to drive traffic to your affiliate offers. Please be sure to look over this post before you run your next campaign.

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

If you’re looking for more in depth training on affiliate marketing strategies, how to get started or how to grow your affiliate marketing business, then you seriously need to check out the One Funnel Away Challenge.

As i’m a very cool guy :) And genuinely want you to do well, I’ve created some FREE bonuses to help you become a better affiliate and help you get more out of the One Funnel Away challenge. Click here to check it out!