My Experience with Facebook Ads & Affiliate Marketing

A few months ago, I jumped on the Facebook Ads bandwagon. I was using Facebook on a regular basis, and I found the targeting features on Facebook Ads platform very attractive. But best of all, the clicks were coming cheap, and  I was getting a whole lot of traffic from Facebook. Sometimes, I even got lucky and my campaigns went viral, but for that you need creativity and some hard work After testing the platform for a few months, I am ready to wash my hands off of it. This isn’t to say that you can’t make money with Facebook Ads. But you may want to know the facts before putting money up with Facebook:

• Clicks: you’ll get clicks. You’ll get a lot of them as long as you pay the minimum or close to the minimum bid suggested by Facebook ads. But those folks are simply not ready to take action. They don’t even know where their credit cards are. Don’t expect to become the next millionaire in the affiliate marketing world with Facebook Ads.
• Targeting: the targeting capabilities of Facebook Ads are interesting but still leave something to be desired. I tried marketing credit cards to entrepreneurs and got a lot of clicks on that, but I wish I could get more specific with my targeting. Result? I made no money from that campaign.
• Quality of Clicks: going back to the first point, the conversion rates are often atrocious if you take the same approach you would on Google Adwords. Facebook crowd is a special bunch, and they don’t fall for the same tricks searchers do.
• Rules: I am all for having guidelines and rules when it comes to advertising online. But Facebook is too strict for me. I couldn’t even get my weight loss campaign to pass their filter. Sometimes you get lucky but in most cases they disapprove your ad as soon as you go near something profitable.
• More Rules: Even after setting my expectations low with Facebook, I still find them to be too strict when it comes to marketing. Acceptable but not for affiliate marketing.
• Platform: the Facebook Ads platform is very easy to use, but there is a lot that can be improved. One would expect Facebook to build more tools to help folks use their platform in a more effective way. Maybe in 2009.

Facebook Ads is a wonderful platform and can get your site exposure, but it’s not right for every campaign. In fact, only a small number of offers can really make money on the platform. Of course, I won’t tell you which ones are making me money, so don’t even ask