Logan Thompson

Facebook Advertising for Affiliates

Posted on 05. Jan, 2009 by Logan in Affiliate Tips

Recently I have had the itch to try out advertising with social media websites such as Facebook and MySpace. If you’re like me, you have probably read other blog posts from people who have tried them out and either succeeded or failed horribly. One thing I have learned about affiliate marketing though is that you really need to try a lot of things out for yourself before forming an opinion. So to see if either of these advertising opportunities worked for me, I spent some time creating and tweaking a few ads and ventured into the world of social media advertising.

For the record, I tried about 8 or so of my programs with Facebook and MySpace, and about half of them did fairly well. Today I want to talk about Facebook advertising and may save MySpace for another day. Here is what I did and some results that I got.

Facebook

The first ads I setup were with Facebook. I actually started because I got a $100 ad credit by signing up with The Visa Business Network on Facebook. Once signed up, they make it very easy to create and target your ads based on things such as geography, age, education, colleges attended, and even what books, movies, music, and activities the user likes. Although the ad is text, they allow you to add an image. Through a little trial and error, my most clicked on ads where those that actually had people in them as users of Facebook are in a “people looking” mood.

I am still running some ads so I don’t want to say the exact programs that I tried out, but they were the following types of offers:

• Apparel
• Contests
• Games
• Kids
• Outdoor Gear
• Tickets

I’ve learned a few things while tweaking my ads about how to increase click rates that has worked for me so far and has saved me money as the higher the click rate, the lower price you need to pay for clicks is.

1. If applicable, always use real people in your ads.
   Especially if your offers have to do with apparel or kids.
2. Keep your ads short and to the point.
   There is now need to explain every single detail in your ad. I like to try and keep the ad to 3 lines or less.
3. Target as much as you can.
   You will get higher click thru rates if you target your ad. Make sure your ad copy reflects this as well. For example, if your offer is for college sweatshirts, target people that attend or are fans of the University of North Carolina, include a picture of a Tar Heels sweatshirt in your ad and direct them to a landing page with Tar Heels apparel. This can be time consuming as you are needing to create more ads, but it will be worth it.
4. Read and understand Facebook’s advertising guidelines and help section.
   Trust me, this will save you a lot of time by understanding what is allowed and what isn’t. I had a number of ads that I created rejected for different reasons listed here. Take a few minutes and read through it entirely.
5. Include prices when you can.
   The most successful ads that I had on Facebook included pricing in the headline or text for products that were on sale. This might not always be the best option, but if you have a low price, people love to know about it.

Overall I had decent success with advertising on Facebook. Below you will see my results for 1 campaign. This was one of my first so the profit wasn’t as large as others due to the fact that I was still learning and tweaking. One thing you will notice is that there are more click throughs in my affiliate network report as there are in my Facebook report. This is due to the fact that when I was starting out, I was sending traffic to a landing page that had multiple products on it and what was happening was people were clicking through to a product, hitting back, and clicking on other products. This skewed the click throughs and made the conversion rate lower than it really was.

Facebook Data

Affiliate Network Report

As you can see, this campaign was succesful in the fact that I didn’t lose money, I learned a lot, and I am confident these numbers will look a lot better in future campaigns.

If you have been thinking about trying out Facebook advertising, I would suggest you try it out for yourself. If you have a Facebook account, sign up for The Visa Business Network and get your free $100 in advertising and do some testing. Good luck.

Tags: advertising, facebook, PPC