Let’s be real – affiliate marketing isn’t always the easiest way to make money online. There are tons of overhyped “gurus” out there selling get-rich-quick dreams that never materialize.
But I’m not here to sugarcoat things or sell you some fantasy. This post contains the cold, hard truth about using Facebook affiliate marketing to generate real income.
The good news? Making money through Facebook affiliate marketing is 100% possible if you have the right strategy. I’ve personally helped clients rake in thousands per month via Facebook ads promoting affiliate offers.
The bad news? It’s not easy, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there that could steer you down the wrong path.
In this guide, I’ll walk you step-by-step through how to succeed with Facebook affiliate marketing in 2024. I’ll expose common myths, break down what actually works, and give you a proven game plan to follow.
So if you’re ready to learn the real deal about profiting through Facebook ads for affiliate programs, keep reading. You might just be surprised at what’s possible when you do it right.
Let’s start with addressing some of the biggest myths about Facebook affiliate marketing that are flat-out wrong.
Myth #1: You Need a Massive Budget to Get Started
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the “gurus” claim that you need to drop $1,000+ per day on Facebook ads to have any chance of success with affiliate offers.
It’s complete BS. Sure, big budgets give you more runway to test and scale, but they aren’t a requirement.
In fact, one of my clients started with a measly $10 per day budget and was able to profitably scale their Facebook affiliate campaigns over time. All it takes is a bit of strategy and patience.
We’ll go over exactly how to do it later, but the main point is: that you don’t need a trust fund to get started with Facebook affiliate marketing. Even a tiny budget can work if you play your cards right.
Myth #2: You Should Focus Only on Evergreen Affiliate Offers
“Evergreen” affiliate offers are those for products or services that don’t go out of season and have consistent, year-round demand. Things like weight loss programs, language learning apps, VPNs, etc.
Most advice out there says to only promote these evergreen types of affiliate offers on Facebook because they have more stable, predictable earning potential.
While that may be partially true, it also ignores a huge opportunity that “gurus” won’t tell you about – newsjacking and piggybacking on timely trends.
For example, one of my clients promoted a cryptocurrency affiliate offer in late 2022 when that whole market went crazy. They ended up profiting massively for a few months because we crafted campaigns that tapped right into that short-lived hype.
Don’t get me wrong – evergreen affiliate programs are great for long-term, sustainable income. But don’t sleep on hot trends either. They can lead to huge spikes in earnings if you’re fast to capitalize.
Myth #3: Facebook’s AI Will Automatically Optimize Your Ads
I see this myth peddled all the time by lazy “Facebook ad experts.” They claim that thanks to Facebook’s advanced AI and machine learning capabilities, you don’t need to do any real optimization work after launching campaigns.
Just set them live, pour in your budget, and Facebook’s algorithms will automatically find your perfect target audience and make your ads profitable over time. Easy peasy!
What a load of crap. While Facebook’s AI is impressive, it’s not a magical solution that eliminates the need for human operators to optimize and make data-driven decisions.
The truth? Your Facebook affiliate campaigns will almost always start out losing money until you go in and make strategic tweaks based on analytics data. Stuff like:
- Updating audience targeting
- Split testing new ad creatives
- Adjusting budgets and bids
- Refining tracking and attribution
- And much more
Facebook’s AI can’t magically make up for a poor strategy out of the gate. You need to be hands-on and iteratively optimize over time to eventually achieve profitability. More on this process soon.
Now that we’ve addressed some of the biggest Facebook affiliate marketing myths out there, let’s get into what actually works based on my years of experience in the trenches.
The 3-Step Formula for Profits with Facebook Affiliate Marketing
There’s no big secret or proprietary system here. Making consistent income through Facebook affiliate offers really boils down to three core elements working in unison:
1) A Converting Affiliate Offer
2) An Effective, ROI-Positive Facebook Ads Strategy
3) Meticulous Tracking and Optimization
Let’s dive into each one of those elements in-depth.
Part 1: Finding a Converting Affiliate Offer
Not all affiliate offers are created equal when it comes to Facebook ads. Some types of offers simply convert better than others on this platform.
From my experience, the very best affiliate offers for promoting via Facebook ads tend to have these traits:
• Have a strong “want” factor: They appeal to visceral, emotional desires that your target audience craves. Weight loss, making money online, finding love – these all tap into deep human wants.
• Sell via video: Offers that can use video for the sales pitch tend to drastly outperform those limited to text/images on Facebook. Video allows you to captivate attention and convey more persuasive selling.
• Promote continuity/subscription models: While not required, offers with recurring monthly charges and continuity plans tend to monetize better over time than single upfront payments.
• Offer high payouts: Your affiliate earnings are ultimately a percentage of total sales generated. Offers with high payouts (even as high as 90% of sales) make it easier to turn a profit after ad costs.
• Have scarcity/urgency: True or manufactured, some form of scarcity and time pressure helps boost conversions versus open-ended offers.
So where can you find affiliate offers that check those boxes? Here are my three go-to sources:
Affiliate Networks: Sites like JVZoo, WarriorPlus, ClickBank, and MaxBounty are goldmines of niche affiliate opportunities. All verticals and offer types imaginable. Review their marketplace listings and historical data to find potential winners. Just beware of ultra-hyped, lousy products.
Direct Affiliate Programs: Many companies running continuity subscriptions or high-ticket offers will have their own private affiliate programs you can join. SaaS apps, financial services, home services, and more. Do some Google searches or reach out to inquire about their programs.
simply go to Google search and tap:
your niche, or your topic + affiliate marketing
Affiliate Marketing Forums: Get plugged into the underground spaces where sharpshooters congregate and share what’s working now. Places like Stack That Money forum. You have to get vouched in, but the alpha is worth it.
Need a hot tip? Keep an eye out for brand-new offers that are blowing up in popularity. You can often ride those waves of momentum and get ahead of the heavy competition. Set Google alerts, join promo circles on FB, and do whatever it takes to hear about the next big thing before most other affiliates.
Finally, always always always review the affiliate offer’s promo materials thoroughly before deciding to promote it. You want to make sure:
- The offer’s sales process and funnel are air-tight and persuasive
- All claims made are reasonable (no wild over-hype)
- There are solid terms and policies to protect yourself
- All upsells/downsells are legit and make sense strategically
- You understand the analytics/tracking involved
Don’t rush into arbitrarily promoting junk affiliate offers. Properly vet them first or you’ll live to regret it. Trust me on that one.
Part 2: Crafting an Effective, ROI-Positive Facebook Ads Strategy
You will make or break your ability to profitably promote affiliate offers. This piece is just as important as the offer itself.
In my experience, there are 5 interdependent elements of a Facebook ads strategy that all need to be on point:
1) Audience Targeting
2) Ad Creatives
3) Offers/Landing Pages
4) Bidding & Budgets
5) Analytics & Attribution
Let’s go over each of those in-depth and the best practices for affiliate marketing on Facebook in 2024.
Audience Targeting
The #1 most important factor in any successful Facebook ads campaign is putting your offers in front of the right audience. This is something most affiliates drop the ball on.
You have to get hyper-specific and surgical with your targeting in order to get your ads seen by the EXACT people who are likely to be interested in your affiliated offer. No more spray-and-pray to random cold audiences.
There are really three key audience types you need to focus on when running Facebook ads for affiliate offers:
1) Lookalike Audiences
These are special audiences that Facebook creates by analyzing your best existing customers/subscribers to find households with similar demographic and behavioral traits. It allows you to expand your targeting to new laser-focused segments that mirror your proven buyers.
To create a solid lookalike audience, you’ll need to provide Facebook with a source list containing at least 1,000 people who have purchased your affiliate offer or engaged heavily with your brand. This could be:
- A customer list exported from your CRM
- An email list of buyers/subscribers
- A list of your best social media engagers
- Website visitors who took valuable conversion actions
Whatever source you use, Facebook’s algorithms will analyze that data and build out a “lookalike” audience of brand-new prospective buyers that share striking similarities. The closer the match, the higher the potential for conversions.
You can get really granular by creating multiple lookalike audiences at different percentage match levels (1%, 2%, 5%, etc.). This allows you to adjust your targeting breadth vs. specificity for different funnel stages and objectives.
Insider Tip: Lookalikes absolutely crushed it for Facebook affiliate marketing in 2024. Test them out aggressively as you scale.
2) Interest & Behavior-Based
While Facebook’s granular interest targeting has its limits these days, it can still be extremely powerful when combined with layered behavior-based targeting. The goal is to find extremely specific sub-niches of users based on their digital footprints.
For example, if promoting a weight loss affiliate offer, you could target:
Interests: Keto diet, low-carb, fat-burning foods + Behaviors: Using fitness/health apps, interacting with influencers in the space
The more relevance and qualifying factors you can stack, the better your results.
Just don’t go so hyper-niche that your audience sizes get ridiculously small. There’s a balance to strike.
3) Engagement Retargeting
These are hands down some of the most valuable audiences you can leverage for Facebook affiliate campaigns. People who have already engaged with your content in some way are significantly more likely to convert.
You’ll want to install a Facebook tracking pixel on all of your affiliate promotional assets (landing pages, blog posts, video content, lead magnets, etc.). That will allow you to build retargeting lists based on specific engagement events, such as:
- Website visitors (all, or by specific pages/posts)
- Video viewers (3-sec, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% of view)
- Lead magnet subscribers
- Email list subscribers
- Previous purchasers of the offer
Retargeting based on these engaged, lower-funnel segments with specific offers and creativity is straight-up one of the highest ROI tactics for Facebook affiliate marketing. Don’t sleep on it.
Keep in mind, that your targeting strategy will almost always involve combining multiple audience types into highly specific ad sets and campaigns within Facebook Ads Manager. There’s an art to proper audience targeting that takes practice to master.
Solid targeting alone isn’t enough to guarantee results though. Let’s talk about ad creatives…
Ad Creatives
This refers to the actual advertisements you run on Facebook – the images, videos, copy, and overall visual designs that combine into marketing assets to be shown to your targeted audiences.
There are really two core types of Facebook affiliate creatives to be aware of:
Prospecting/Acquisition Focused
These are top-of-funnel ads designed to affordably generate mass awareness, attention, and initial engagement from cold audiences. You’ll typically send these to blogging content, lead magnets, quizzes, or other viral-style assets to start nurturing interest.
Goals: Video views, landing page visits, lead captures
Examples: Attention-grabbing videos, unicorn question-based link ads
Conversion Focused
These ads are lower in the funnel and are designed to create direct registrations or purchases of your affiliate offer from warm, engaged audiences. They’ll be much more direct-response in nature versus brand awareness creative.
Goals: Affiliate offer registrations/purchases
Examples: Carousel ads showcasing benefits, long-form direct-response video ads
The key to success with Facebook affiliate creatives is not to just aimlessly slap random creatives together. There needs to be an overarching cohesive strategy behind each asset and how they intertwine into persuasive conversion funnels and customer journeys.
For prospecting/acquisition, your creatives should be eye-catching conversation starters that engage on an emotional level and leave a lasting impression. You want to spark curiosity and inspiration to get people to voluntarily raise their hands to go further.
For conversion-focused ads, your creatives need to be benefit/desire-focused sales pitches that speak to prospects’ core wants and motivations. They need clear calls-to-action directing folks towards your affiliate offer’s registration/order process.
There’s both an art and science to crafting effective Facebook creatives. The creative process should involve:
- Extensive personal research into your target audiences
- Analyzing winning control ads/funnel assets for inspiration
- Crafting irresistible cold hooks and writing persuasive copy
- Producing premium creative assets (videos, animations, designs)
- Extensive testing and optimization of hooks/angles over time
Don’t just start blasting out random junk Facebook ads and wonder why they flop. Invest real time and effort into creating strategic, high-quality creative assets that are built to convert your specific targeted audiences.
Another major component that goes hand-in-hand with ad creatives is your offers and landing pages…
Offers & Landing Pages
For prospecting and acquisition stages, your “offer” could be anything from a free ebook, video series, quiz, tool, content asset, etc. that provides upfront value in exchange for engagement.
For the conversion stage where you’re promoting affiliated products/services directly, your “offer” will be the sales pitch and registration process around that money-making offer.
Regardless of the funnel stage, the strength of your actual offer presentation assets (landing pages, opt-in pages, video sales letters, etc.) will make or break the profitability of your Facebook ads.
You can have world-class audience targeting and creatives, but if you’re sending people to a lousy, un-optimized offer presentation, it will crater your conversion rates and ROI.
For prospecting/acquisition assets, follow best practices for conversion rate optimization (CRO) regarding:
- Scannable, benefit-driven messaging
- Clear calls-to-action
- Social proof integration
- Clear unique value proposition
- Design/layout for focus and flow
But for your core affiliated offer’s registration process, you really have to go the extra mile. My top recommendations:
Review the Offer’s Sales Funnel In Advance for Flaws
Don’t blindly send Facebook traffic straight into an offer’s funnel until you’ve vetted it thoroughly. Look for conversion leaks like clunky checkouts, confusing upsell/OTO processes, misleading claims, etc.
Optimize Call Tracking for Proper Attribution
Since you’ll likely be sending people to call center sales operations for higher ticket offers, you must optimize call tracking and attribution to your Facebook campaigns. Services like CallRail can handle this.
Make Sure Landing Pages Match Ad Creatives
If your ad creative says “Get 50% Off Your First Order Over $200” but the landing page doesn’t honor that, it creates horrible conversion friction. QA everything to ensure creatives and offers are 100% aligned.
Test Funnel Tweaks, Bridge Pages, and Hybrid Funnels
You can try testing things like your own pre-sell/bridge pages before affiliate offers, hybrid funnels with affiliates, and self-hosted checkout flows. This gives you more conversion control versus out-of-the-box affiliate promos.
Set up Conversion Tracking/Attribution Correctly
Meticulous tracking and attribution are absolutely critical for long-term Facebook affiliate profits. More on this in a bit.
At the end of the day, your conversion rates and overall profitability from Facebook affiliate marketing will largely depend on the offers/assets you’re sending traffic to. Don’t get lazy or make assumptions here – always be meticulous about optimizing your full funnel.
Let’s keep things moving and cover bidding and budgeting…
Bidding & Budgets
Facebook’s ad bidding system and overall auction dynamics changed radically for the better in 2024. Rather than just mindlessly overbidding like most, it became advantageous to actually dial in your bids strategically based on your goals.
There are a few main bid strategies that made sense for Facebook affiliate marketing in 2024:
Biggest Recommendation: Start with Conversion-Optimized Autobid
Rather than fiddling with manual bidding, which is complex with Facebook’s auction system, you’ll likely get faster and better results by using conversion-optimized auto bid strategies like:
- Value Optimization: Focus on bottom-line revenue value per acquisition
- Cost Cap Optimization: Predictable cost per acquisition thresholds
With these options, you simply tell Facebook what results you want to optimize for (purchases, registrations, etc.) and your target cost constraints. Their AI will then automatically adjust your bids in the auction to hit those goals as efficiently as possible.
For most affiliate campaigns, I’d recommend starting with a Value Optimization bid strategy capped at a reasonable target cost per acquisition based on your affiliate payout rates and margins. This allows you to let Facebook chase top-line revenue numbers while constraining your costs.
Manually Adjust Bids by Placements & Schedules
While auto-bid strategies do a great job overall, you can often squeeze out further performance gains by making calculated manual adjustments to your bids:
- Increase bids for your top-performing ad placements (Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, etc.)
- Decrease bids for low-performing placements
- Increase bids during high-engagement hours/days
- Decrease bids for low-engagement times
The key is to use your campaigns’ real-time data and analytics to pinpoint positive and negative ROI segments, then adjust your bids to favor the winners. It’s an iterative process of constant tweaking and refinement.
Test Out Hybrid Bid Strategies
Another advanced tactic is to combine various automated and manual bid strategies into hybrid approaches customized for each campaign funnel. For example:
Cold Lead Campaigns:
- Use Autobid Value Optimization at the campaign level
- Manually increase bids for high-performing placements only
- Decrease bids for poor lead quality based on events
Warm/Hot Lead Retargeting:
- Use Cost Cap Bidding with high caps to aggressively re-engage
- Increase bids for highest-intent custom audience segments
There’s serious nuance and testing involved to nail the right hybrid approaches. But when you find the sweet spot, it can work magic for Facebook affiliate ROI.
Overall, keep your bids and budgets constantly tied to your targeted CPAs and ROI constraints based on your affiliate offers’ payouts. Let data dictate how much you should be willing to “pay” for each acquisition.
Which brings us to the final pillar…
Analytics & Attribution
Nothing wrecks affiliate marketing profits faster than crappy tracking and attribution practices. This stuff has to be airtight, or your numbers and optimizations will constantly be based on unreliable data.
As mentioned briefly earlier, you have to ensure that all conversion events for your affiliate offers are being tracked accurately back to your Facebook campaigns, ad sets, ads, and audiences. All major analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook’s tools have methods to set this up properly.
However, given the complexity of many affiliate funnels and offers, you’ll likely need more robust tracking and attribution solutions that standard tools can’t always accommodate.
Here are some mission-critical affiliate tracking/attribution elements to prioritize:
1) Track Funnel Stages & Quality Scoring
You need to be able to track and attribute credit not just for final conversion events, but for initial micro-conversions too. Things like:
- Lead magnets
- Content funnel steps
- Shopping cart/checkout funnel stages
- Up-sell/cross-sell funnel paths
Since users can enter and exit your funnels via countless paths across ads, sites, and channels, you need sophisticated funnel tracking to pinpoint what’s working.
Similarly, you’ll want to quality score leads based on engagement levels and behaviors to identify your highest-value entrance points, traffic sources, creatives, and audiences. Not just raw conversion volumes.
2) De-Dupe Across All Channels
You have to be able to de-duplicate conversions at the user level across all your marketing sources, ads, campaigns, and platforms like Facebook, Google Ads, email, SMS, etc.
Why? Because you don’t want to double-count or attribute that lead/sale to multiple sources. That destroys your ability to pinpoint effective traffic sources accurately.
3) Enforce Strict Click-to-Conversion Windows
For affiliates promoting time-sensitive offers with expirations, you have to ensure you’re crediting conversions back to your ads/creatives responsibly.
Set reasonable conversion windows so that any purchases occurring say 45+ days after an ad click aren’t getting attributed back to that old campaign data, skewing your metrics.
4) Track Phone Calls & Call Intelligence
Since so many affiliate offers involve phone calls and call center sales processes, you absolutely must track these touch points and attribute them properly.
Use services like CallRail that can capture call metadata, recordings, routing intelligence, etc., and integrate with your web analytics for holistic funnel tracking.
While having robust trackers like ClickMagick or tracking scripts/servers is helpful, for Facebook affiliate marketing, you’ll likely want to graduate to full-stack multi-channel attribution solutions like:
Affilimate
Improvely
Triple Whale
PostAffiliatePro
These allow you to connect all your disparate data sources, trackers, and ad platforms into one unified conversion routing and attribution command center. You can then build custom modeling, rules, reports, and pivot data in countless ways to uncover optimization insights.
No more disjointed tracking Frankenstein setups held together by duct tape and manual spreadsheets. Robust attribution is a must for sustainable affiliate income from any source, especially Facebook.
Whew! Those were the core elements for successfully making money with Facebook affiliate marketing in 2024. While I kept things as succinct as possible, we covered a ton of ground there. I want to quickly summarize a few key takeaways before we wrap up.
Key Takeaways for Facebook Affiliate Marketing Success
- Reject the Hype: Forget get-rich-quick gurus and overly hyped claims about easy Facebook ad profits. This stuff is challenging and requires diligent work, but it can absolutely be worthwhile with the right strategies.
- Offer Quality & Congruence Are Critical: Carefully vet any affiliate offers, programs, or funnels you plan to promote. Having an excellent quality offer that matches your ads is non-negotiable for long-term sustainability.
- Audience Targeting Is Everything: Skills like building laser-focused interest and lookalike audiences on Facebook separate the wheat from the chaff. You won’t make it far with subpar audience targeting.
- Multi-Channel Funnels & Creative Optimization: Top affiliates build out sophisticated promotional funnels across channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc. with heavy creative testing and iteration.
- Attribution & Analytics Are Paramount: Meticulous tracking and attribution for affiliates is a must. Be relentless about accurately measuring every dollar in and out across your complete sales funnel.
- Capital, Patience & Process Are Required: Succeeding with Facebook affiliate marketing isn’t about shoestring budgets or instant results. It takes time, a calculated process, and the ability to scale intelligently.
The road ahead for affiliate marketing on Facebook is filled with tests, analysis, and grind. But for those who have the hunger, funding, and strategic process, it absolutely offers a path to longterm success and income generation.
I sincerely hope this guide gave you a dose of the real, unvarnished truth about what it actually takes to make money through Facebook affiliate marketing in 2024. While it’s certainly achievable, there are no shortcuts to quick riches.
Only hard work, perpetual optimization, and a dedication to doing things the right way, ethically. Are you ready to put in the reps? Because that’s what it’ll take to come out on top in this game.
The choice is yours. Best of luck on your journey!
