Does Facebook Ads Allow Affiliate Links?

To make money from affiliate links, you need to refer people to the destination of the link. With sufficiently high traffic, you can make quite a bit of money. Even with lower traffic, if your commission is high enough, you can pull in quite the haul. It seems like a no-brainer to use some of that potential cash to set up an advertisement that will convert for you. It’s like having most of the work of ad placement done for you.

Facebook seems like it would be perfect for this. Invest $10, reach 50,000 targeted users who you know are going to be interested in your affiliate product. Post the affiliate link in the ad, fill it with interesting copy and an attractive image, and you’re good to go.

There’s just one question; can it be done? Is it against Facebook’s rules, or does something prevent it from working?

Facebook’s Rules
If you run a quick search for “affiliate” in Facebook’s ad guidelines, you won’t find much. Nevertheless, the experience of thousands of users online indicates that affiliate links are not allowed through Facebook ads. Many of these users, however, go on to ask the obvious question; if affiliate links aren’t allowed, how come we see affiliate links in ads all the time?

The Fickle Enforcement of Policies
The answer comes in the same way that any question about Facebook’s 20% text on images rule, their rule against clickbait headlines and their rule about gated content comes. That is to say, technically all of these things are against the rules, but practically there’s no real way for Facebook to enforce them with 100% accuracy. The site administration does the best they can, but they don’t have a lot of power, time or breadth of actions they can take to really be effective.

As a result, one of the biggest factors to using an affiliate link with Facebook ads is tenacity. You can submit an ad with an affiliate link, and it might be denied, or it might not. If it’s denied, you can change up the ad slightly and submit it again. Once more, there’s a chance it might be denied. If it is, repeat the process until your ad gets through.
Redirects and Sandwich Pages

Another trick you can use to get an affiliate link through Facebook’s ads filter is to use a sandwich page of some kind, or a redirect. Redirects are a little more frowned upon than so-called sandwich pages, because they’re more obviously a form of cloaking to get your affiliate link posted. Even using a URL shortener may be enough to get your link passed through successfully.

A sandwich page is a page that sits between your target affiliate link and the Facebook ad. Essentially, it operates as the meat in between the two sites, hence the sandwich metaphor. You might also use a basic landing page for this purpose. The goal would be to create a landing page where ever relevant product link is your affiliate link.

Of course, a sandwich page requires that you have your own hosting and the skills or tools necessary to create such a page. There is an art to landing pages, and you can make use of that linked page to optimize your landing page in as many ways as possible.

This does tend to go against the idea of a no-website Facebook affiliate ad, but it’s a much better route to take in the long run.

source:http://boostlikes.com/blog/2015/01/facebook-ads-allow-affiliate-links