Everyone starts with Facebook. As the saying goes, In the beginning existed the Word, and the Word was Facebook. The solvent audience, scrolling the feed daily, equally attracts beginners and experienced professionals who have already uploaded dozens of offers on other platforms.
However, there are always intricacies one must learn to succeed, and in this article, we will clarify the processes, giving practical advice and providing examples of working strategies.
Definition First
Affiliate marketing is traffic purchase for further redirection to advertisers’ sites. Each affiliate makes a profit from the difference between the funds received from the conversion and the cost of the purchased traffic. There are several payment models, among those cost per click and cost per impression are the most popular; further traffic is converted into registrations, app installations, or sales.
The task entrusted to affiliate marketers is to attract traffic to different offers by creating advertising materials. Before you launch an advertising campaign, you sign up for an affiliate program, select an offer for an appropriate GEO, and wait for an affiliate link issued by the platform. This is the link where you will drive your traffic. If everything goes according to the plan, you receive your commission after a hold period.
Affiliate marketing participants:
Users are people who leave leads after seeing ads;
Affiliates are specialists who attract users and resell them at a more favorable price.
Affiliate programs are intermediaries between affiliates and advertisers. Such platforms often provide offers, materials, and the necessary infrastructure.
Advertisers are initiators of the advertising process; they pay for the promotion of a product.
CPA Marketing
The world of affiliate marketing is diverse, but we'll draw a line at CPA marketing:
CPA marketing is an affiliate marketing model where advertisers attract webmasters who would find clients. In this model, advertisers pay only for user actions that lead to payment for their products or services.
There are several target actions:
CPS (Cost Per Sale) is payment per sale.
CPV (Cost Per Visit) is payment per lead.
CPI (Cost Per Install) is payment for installation.
CPL (Cost Per Lead) is payment for a landing page visit.
More often than not, CPA marketing is used for mass products with various GEO options: casinos, betting providers, online stores, applications and services, travel companies, and more. You can work with them through a CPA network or an intermediary.
Useful Skills
Being an affiliate is not an easy task. You must understand the intricacies of this area and learn to correctly analyze information. There are other qualities for you to perfect: stress resistance and personal willingness to spend money on campaigns before you actually start earning real money.
Perseverance, the ability to multitask, and constantly monitoring up-to-date information are the keys to success and stable income.
Facebook Audience
One of the main advantages of Facebook is the number of users. Here you can find the target audience for any product or offer, you just have to define what you actually want to do. This social platform can tailor affiliate marketing Facebook ads for any user and offer people products they are really interested in.
Cumulative number of monthly Meta product users as of 2nd quarter 2023(in billions)
Facebook is popular worldwide: it prevails on every continent, which allows you to work with almost every GEO of your choice.
Percentage of global population using Facebook
Facebook Advantages
flexible targeting settings;
more than 5 options for creative and campaign adjustment;
access to billions of active users;
low entry threshold;
work without purchasing a domain or hosting;
the only expense is advertising;
does not require technical knowledge or training.
Facebook Disadvantages
campaigns may get banned without any explanation;
poor technical support and assistance provided by the network administration;
strict moderation rules and ad rejection;
complex design of an advertising account;
limits and restrictions at launch.
To achieve good results and avoid problems in the process, we recommend that you carefully read Facebook rules and acquire new knowledge by checking out our materials: we will show you how to effectively work with this traffic source.
Special aspects
Just as any other source, Facebook has a number of features one should always keep in mind. Here are a few things for your consideration:
choose the right strategy;
add payment information before the launch;
warm up the fan page for longer operation;
analyze all creatives you post;
do not add other people to your advertising account;
use different IPs to log into your accounts;
do not use re-banned domains;
keep an eye on the funds when the campaign is running;
do not allow your ad to be rejected several times in a row;
do not start advertising with enormous budgets;
do not link one card to several accounts.
By following all these rules, you can reduce the number of errors working on Facebook. Eventually, it will result in a low testing cost.
How to work with Facebook:
Upgrade your own affiliate marketing Facebook page/community page. You'll be playing a long game, as this time-consuming option implies that you will spend your own resources. Sometimes it requires additional knowledge in targeting and purchasing from bloggers, but in the end, you will receive high audience loyalty, good conversion rates, and an adequate acquisition price.
Work with bloggers or influencers who already have their pages. This is a quick one. The only action you will spend time on is searching for the right bloggers who would agree to promote your product. However, this approach absolutely will not do if you deal with gray offers; but if you need traffic right here and right now, this is a perfect option, which will not entail additional costs for training. Is it expensive? Indeed. But the quality and speed will not leave you disappointed.
Try official targeted advertising through Facebook Ads. Actually, this is quite common among affiliates working with this traffic source. While it is overall a wonderful approach, it still requires knowledge and time spent on training and tests. The advantage, though, is obvious: you receive high-quality targeting options, and the time you spend on training quickly pays off. Using Facebook Ads, you can promote your own pages and accounts.
Setting Up Your Campaign
Advertising campaigns can contain no more than six ads with pictures, videos, texts, and links. But before you decide how many ads you want to post, examine your niche: in gambling, for example, it is highly inadvisable to create more than one ad per campaign.
There's an important element called creative and Ad Set duplication. Considering the nature of RTB, tests should be conducted on different accounts due to the difference in results. First of all, stop the advertising campaign and launch a new one, or stop the ad set and launch a new one. Sometimes RTBs can fail when you try to make changes. If you like the results, don't make changes during the training phase.
Ad Set adjustment recommendations:
do not work with a narrow audience;
try to launch a campaign with a small number of interests;
limit only gender, age, and GEO;
control placements, choose only those where your target audience is present to avoid budget waste.
Moderation recommendations:
do not use anything associated with banned accounts (creatives, payment cards, domains);
use payment cards of the country where you are located;
never go sky-high with your budgets;
do not work without anti-detection browsers and proxies;
remove ads that were rejected at the moderation stage;
do not create clickbait ads;
do not add text that would take more than 20% of the picture;
disguise offers using various tools;
do not connect several payment models;
do not use before/after, obscenities or similar prohibited materials.
Analyzing Results
Beginners are usually deeply immersed in each task they come across. Check the metrics. Our main goal is to make a profit. Impression frequency helps determine how many times an ad is seen by one user. Low click-through rates and conversions occur because your impression frequency is increasing. This means that they often see your ad, and it does not pique their curiosity.
Recommendations for ad frequency reduction:
track your budget and audience size;
exclude old audiences that have already had a connection with the ad;
change creatives, so the audience does not get used to the old ones.
Test the indicators to understand whether they align with the offer and GEO. Usually, 1-2 days are enough to understand the results (15 actions or 3 conversions).
Optimizing Campaigns
When you're done testing offers and identifying acceptable results, start improving them by campaign optimization. Here are some recommendations:
analyze which placements do not result in lead generation and disable them;
try to duplicate the ad sets that showed the best results;
disable ads that performed poorly and analyze which creatives perform best;
try to increase the CTR on ads with high conversion rates;
try to increase the limits on effective ad sets (no more than 20% at a time).
Scaling Things Up
If you want to scale up your campaign, try the following methods:
launch new campaigns on unused accounts;
increase in the budget;
test new GEOs;
duplicate campaigns and ad sets.
Recommendations
To scale effectively, expand your audience to include new interests by using look-a-like or retargeting. Test other advertising campaign goals. Always keep in mind that every 2 weeks creatives need to be changed to new ones that remind of the creatives that convert well.
Getting a Facebook Account
There are different types of Facebook accounts:
autoregistered accounts are accounts that are registered automatically and in bulk.
logs are accounts of real or fake people. This is a cheap option, suitable for gray offers only due to its low quality. Such accounts quickly get banned without the possibility of recovery.
farming your own accounts is a stable and high-quality option that costs time and money. This is the creation of accounts using our own approach, which differs from competitors and contributes to longer account operation.
rental and purchased accounts are accounts that people rent or buy for money.
Methods for working with accounts vary and depend on individual requirements. Some accounts passed advertising activity prohibition on Facebook, and others did not.
Advertising activity prohibition may be a thunderbolt from a clear sky that can plague accounts at any time, regardless of their actions.
A Few Words on Bans
Facebook often bans various accounts for:
behavioral activity;
advertising activities.
Make a few suspicious actions, and boom! Facebook is here to threaten you with a ban. In general, all accounts on this site get banned because of the strict policies and anti-fraud system, so you will need a constant flow of new accounts. Take care of this issue in advance and find a good supplier.
Here's how you can try to avoid bans:
use of trust accounts;
good farming and quality accounts;
do not perform actions that Facebook may consider suspicious.
Farmin’ ’n’ Buyin’
Account farming implies the creation of high-quality accounts that simulate the activity of a real user to bypass the anti-fraud system. The basis of high-quality farming is clean data. To achieve this, you will need proxies, anti-detect browsers, and mobile Internet.
Recommendations:
use only new proxies;
imitate the activity of the real account owner; do not do everything at once;
start with low activity in your account and increase it every day;
perform actions in advertising accounts with pauses.
The account farming scheme is constantly changing, and you must keep up with Facebook and its updates. When creating your first advertising campaign, remember the rules you should follow. At the beginning of your journey, do not waste time on your own account farming, as you may make too many mistakes and splurge your budget.
Best Niches for Facebook
Nutra. Beauty and health products that can help get rid of various diseases or other body problems. The audience is often interested in such offers because they expect a quick result and want to solve their problem without going to the doctor. Works effectively for both younger and older audiences.
E-commerce. These offers are often in demand among young audiences who make impulsive purchases. The rationality behind such offers may be questionable, but with the WOW effect or the trendiness of the product, a person forgets about it.
Finance (microfinance, loans, credits, etc.) Here's your target audience if you work with the finance niche: students, pensioners, and hard workers who need money here and now. They rarely pay attention to conditions and are often in difficult financial situations.
Dating is in demand among men in completely different GEOs and social statuses. Their goal may be sex, relationships, or one-night stands that will satisfy their emotional and physical need for women (or men, if the offer is aimed at an LGBT audience).
Gambling/Betting. There are two incentives for the target audience: quick money and strong emotions. These offers are relevant for men and women in different GEOs and social statuses. This is one of the most popular verticals among all affiliate marketers; it has high rates and excellent ROI but is actively banned by Facebook moderation.
Sweepstakes are various prize giveaways for which you need to register on the advertiser’s website. Distributed in the USA, Canada, and other similar countries.
Crypto/Forex is one of the recent trends in CPA marketing, which has not yet become commonplace. The basis of the offer is to make money on cryptocurrency exchange rate fluctuations, which is especially popular among young and progressive audiences.
Gaming has recently been an unpopular vertical with a very closed community. Such offers are suitable for a young male audience who wants to occupy their extra time with something.
Adult promotes products for adults and various 18+ sites. Sometimes, such offers are more relevant than ordinary ones but require more profound knowledge in the field. This vertical also includes dating, Nutra, eCommerce, and all areas with 18+ products.
Offers on Facebook
There are several types of offers:
White offers are allowed in the traffic source. They do not harm or deceive the buyer. Example: a tour of Europe, a lamp for reading books, clothes, and more.
Gray offers are more profitable and are allowed by law but prohibited by the site rules. They often result in bans if you do not resort to hidden approaches in your creatives. Example: betting, playing in a casino, etc.
Black offers are deliberately deceptive and fraudulent. Examples: malware disguised as a harmless file, payment card data deception under the guise of filling out the necessary data on a website, and more.
Private offers are secret offers used by the affiliate program team. These are the best offers, access to which is given after many checks of your candidacy. Often, these are offers that are not yet on the market, so the luckiest affiliates can bring in the harvest long before the offer becomes publicly available.
Best Affiliate Programs
Affiliate CPA networks are numerous and multiplying, but we've drawn up the list of the best options you can find:
Leadbit is the largest international multi-vertical affiliate network with exclusive offers and instant payments.
Huffson Group works with gambling and betting offers in the CIS and Europe.
AdCombo is an international CPA network that operates in almost all verticals and has its own call center and internal media buying teams.
TerraLeads is a CPA network from a direct advertiser inside. They accept traffic from Europe and Asia and provide more than 400 offers.
Affshark is a CPA network from a direct advertiser in dating. They have been working for more than 10 years and have exclusive offers on the market.
Mostbet Partners is an affiliate program from a direct advertiser in the gambling and betting vertical. They accept traffic from almost all GEOs using the Revshare model or with fixed payments from $20 to $50.
LeadRock is an affiliate program that mostly works with insiders and white goods. Working with LeadRock, you will forget about moderation complications. More than 300 offers, training, their own call center, and the minimum withdrawal amount is $30.
Best Offers
You should select at least 2-3 offers for testing at once and always check whether these offers are suitable for work. So test the best offer and make a profit. Keep in touch with managers, ask for their help when you need to choose the right offer, and look for the best conditions from advertisers.
Mostbet
An online bookmaker platform, which allows you to participate in sports betting and work with online casinos. High-quality support and instant withdrawal of funds in various ways.
Affiliate Program: LeadBit
GEO: Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, India, Ukraine, Turkey, Russia, Spain, Poland, Czech Republic, Bangladesh.
Payouts: up to $120
Traffic channels: Advertising networks, e-mail newsletter, mobile advertising, social networks, contextual advertising, doorways, clickunder/popunder, SEO, adult traffic, broker traffic, banner advertising, branded traffic, cashback traffic, teaser networks, YouTube channels, Push-notifications, Toolbar traffic.
Verrulon
Anti-aging cream fighting against wrinkles, warts, and papillomas. A relevant offer among the female audience, as every girl strives to preserve her beauty.
Affiliate program: LeadRock
GEO: Philippines
Payouts: $9-10 per lead
Traffic channels: Any
Vulkan Vegas
Affiliate program: LeadBit
GEO: Philippines, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Portugal, Canada, Poland, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Germany, Norway and Japan.
Payouts: from $150
X-Tactical Drone
A portative quadcopter ideal for travel. Records video in HD format. The transmission range is up to 100 meters, and the flight duration is increased to 10 minutes.
Affiliate program: LeadRock
GEO: Austria, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, Portugal, Greece, Spain.
Payouts: $22-27 per lead, depending on the country
Traffic channels: Any
StudyBay
An online platform for students. Delegate your homework of any complexity to someone else, and enjoy your free time.
Affiliate program: LeadRock
GEO: USA, Canada
Payouts: 10$
Traffic channels: Doorways, websites, brand traffic, contextual advertising, teaser advertising, mobile traffic, traffic from social networks, cashback, clickunder/popunder, toolbar.
Cases
The market is abundant with various successful cases: different affiliate teams and individuals take it upon themselves to publish the results of their campaigns.
Case No. 1
Offer: Kombidress shapewear
Traffic source: Facebook Ads (target)
GEO: Italy
Drain period: 06/01/21-06/30/21
Spent: $1861
Earned: $5313
Profit: $3452
ROI: 185%
Payout: 21$
Number of leads: 253
Strategy: before the main launch, we tested three creatives, of which we approved the most profitable one. Next, we launched the advertising campaign with this creative, showing a little extra weight in the picture. The budget was from $10 to $80 per day; we have been running this offer in many GEOs for more than a year. The most important thing is to create new unique creatives that are not available in spy tools and test different landing pages with new approaches.
Case No. 2
Offer: Bline
Traffic source: Facebook Ads (target)
GEO: Greece
Drain period: 04/01/21-04/30/21
Spent: $739
Earned: $2790;
Profit: $2051
ROI: 277%
Payout: 50$
Number of depots: 55
Strategy: we took as a basis a creo with slots and emotions. The target audience included men from 24 to 45 years old. The installation price was a pleasant surprise, about $1. We also drove traffic from logs and autoregistered accounts, everything was quickly banned, but some accounts logged in well, and we got excellent results from them.
Such cases are often published when the product or service that received traffic becomes irrelevant. No one will expose working combinations, but successful cases can be a good tool for understanding how affiliate marketing and its mechanics work in practice.
Determining the Target Audience
To determine the portrait of your target audience, you need to know:
gender of the audience;
age;
GEO;
social status;
interests;
goals and motivation;
influencers and experts in the niche you want to promote;
personal qualities and weaknesses;
circumstances under which your offer will be interesting.
Affiliate programs often immediately provide information about the target audience and possible traffic channels to attract them. Nowadays, webmasters do not have to spend time on analysis; affiliate programs or advertisers already do it for you. Don’t forget to consult with affiliate managers and find out which audience your offer is most relevant to.
Making Creatives
Most often, on Facebook, you can encounter 3 creative formats.
Picture + text
The advantage of a picture is that a call to action can be depicted, and it will be immediately visible to the audience. It can also be quickly created or changed. The flaw is that such creatives do not always have a high conversion rate, and sometimes you can observe a case of a misclick (when you do not meet the client’s desires on the landing page). If you work with gray offers, you may find it difficult to convey the main idea in the picture.
Video + text
Video is great for high conversion rates. It takes longer to produce and requires additional financial costs, but it turns out to be much better than pictures (tested by practice). However, the CTR of this format is not very good and may affect the final result.
Gif + text
Similar to the video format in terms of pros and cons, but there's an additional advantage: a user can download a gif much faster than a video. Sometimes, gifs are also easier to edit.
Recommendations
Several basic recommendations will help you increase the quality of your creatives.
Don't make long videos. Limit your video to 15 seconds. Almost no one watches long videos to the end. Try to present your offer to the audience in a limited amount of time.
Don't use blatant calls to action. Try not to use pointers and similar tools to navigate to the landing page; Facebook tends to block such ads more often.
Adapt your creatives. Make them understandable to your GEO, focus on their language, traditions, and general style, and pay attention to what is popular with the locals.
Solve customer problems. Illustrate an emotion or solution to a client problem, not a product or service. No one cares what color the pen in your store is; everyone wants to know how it writes.
Let's get emotional. The client wants a wow effect. Make them go crazy over your offer.
Quality isn't always the essential aspect: sometimes people want to see the content. Oftentimes, a silly video shot without proper skill can provide better results than a professional commercial, so work with different approaches and conduct tests, keeping in mind that your main task is to pique the client's curiosity from the first seconds of viewing our creative.
Tools to Conquer Facebook
These plugins, programs, extensions, and services can make your work easier. All solutions are popular among affiliates and are in demand among both beginners and professionals.
Cloaking
Cloaking has become necessary for many affiliates: everyone wants to bypass the moderation of various traffic sources. It also can show competitors another landing page instead of the one you're currently using, hiding the content from spy services.
BHOLE.SPACE is a cloud cloaking service with quick registration and launch. Perfect for Facebook.
Hide.Click is a multifunctional service with high-quality technical support and a large number of integrations. You can activate a trial period and test the functions.
FairLab is an expensive service that works with almost all teaser networks. More than 25 traffic checks are used for analysis.
Anti-detects
These programs replace device fingerprints, identify your online activity, allow you to work with multiple accounts, and provide complete privacy.
Octo Browser is a universal anti-detection browser that provides protection against browser identification. This browser is one of the best on the market and the most popular among affiliates; it's especially famous for its ability to replace browser fingerprints and complete confidentiality.
Multilogin allows you to emulate virtual devices, work with an individual browser fingerprint, and create a bunch of profiles.
AEZAKMI is a browser fingerprint builder for multi-accounts. A popular solution among many affiliates.
Dolphin Anty is a new anti-detect browser for affiliate marketing. It was created on the Chrome engine, not Chromium, and it integrates with other Dolphin products.
Chrome Plugins
Facebook Pixel Helper is a special extension for Facebook that allows you to monitor the correct installation of the FB Pixel on landings.
Eboost Ad Spy is an extension for searching for ads that a website uses on Facebook.
Window Resizer is the extension that helps to check the adaptability of the landing page. Useful if you work with an audience that accesses the site via phone.
Fonts Ninja helps you identify a font on a website and download it.
Picture Making
Adobe Photoshop is a multifunctional editor for photo and video files (raster images and several vector tools).
Canva was made for those who know nothing about Photoshop. On this platform, you can create images by dragging and dropping ready-made elements and changing templates. It has a built-in library of templates, stock photos, illustrations, and fonts.
Promo crops the image to the size required by Facebook.
Vision AI uses artificial intelligence to define what is depicted in the image.
DeepArt creates art based on photographs and pictures.
Photo stocks for downloading pictures and photographs:
Video Making
Adobe Premiere Pro is a professional non-linear video editing program from Adobe Systems.
Vegas Movie Studio is an excellent video editor with powerful editing tools and a huge range of video and audio effects.
Filmora is a video editing program that combines powerful features with an intuitive interface.
EZGIF quickly converts video to gif format.
Savefrom.net helps download videos and files from websites and social networks.
Trackers
Keitaro is the best tracker on the market, used by many teams and affiliates. It is possible to cloak and integrate third-party services.
Binom is a good cloud tracker that does not require hosting.
Voluum is a tracker with an application, integrations, and a pleasant interface.
Proxies
SOAX provides excellent proxies from residents that are installed on your phone from a factory in China.
Brightdata offers the best residential proxies from all over the world.
iProxy.Online is a service that will allow you to get mobile proxies from any Android phone.
iProxy.biz delivers great proxies for excellent prices and good quality. A far less professional, but nonetheless a worthy option.
Wrapping Up
Affiliate marketing is a tricky, time-consuming job. You will have to learn from your own experience that professionalism can only be achieved by spending a certain amount of time. Don’t expect to smash an imaginary money button to get quick unrealistic results from day one: as in every field, it requires experience and expertise.
In this article, we covered the basics of Facebook. Find a niche that appeals to you the most and burnish your skills. Godspeed, pilgrim: we're here to help!
FAQ
