How to Optimize a Facebook Campaign For an Affiliate Site

What you will find in this article is an efficient strategy that you too can implement if you’re running affiliate sites.  Since I know how valuable your time is, I’ll skip the common long intro and jump right to the point.

Read on, and you will find:

  • how to optimize your ads and tell Facebook to send you the right kind of traffic
  • what to do once that traffic is on your page
  • how to retarget the people that have the highest interest in the products you are promoting

Battle Plan: The Dynamic Events Campaign

Our battle plan will have 3 distinct steps, with each of them being crucially important for the success of our campaign.

Step 1 – Prepare your website. In this phase, we are going to add the Dynamic Events that will be used in the campaign. Don’t worry, is not complicated.

Step 2 – Create one or more Facebook campaigns with the RIGHT objective.  You want FB to send you people that are most likely to be interested in products you are promoting. That’s why choosing the correct objective is crucial.

Step 3 – Retarget the visitors that clicked on the affiliate links. Those visitors that clicked on the affiliate links are most likely to convert. Probably some of them already bought the product (good for you!), but most of them will need more time. You don’t want to loose them, instead, what you need is a highly targeted campaign to convince them to complete the final step.

Let’s take this one by one.

1. Prepare your website – Dynamic Events

I will assume that you already have the Facebook Pixel inserted on your website pages. If not, I encourage you to use PixelYourSite plugin to set everything with just a fee clicks.

What you need to do is to create a Dynamic Event that will be triggered when a visitor of your website CLICKS on an affiliate link.

What is an Event? Is a part of Facebook Pixel code that tells Facebook when something important takes place on your website.  There are two types of events: normal ones, that are triggered when a page is loaded, and dynamic events, that are triggered when an action is completed (like a click on a link or on a button).

Adding Dynamic Events may seem complicated, especially if you’re not an experienced coder, but with PixelYourSite Pro you can do it with no effort. We added a special section in our plugin from where you can add and manage Dynamic Events with just a few clicks (and copy/paste).

To make this guide more compelling, let’s imagine a common scenario. Let’s assume that we have a website that promotes affiliate products from Amazon. We have various pages within deep reviews or comparisons and on each of these pages, we have affiliate links to Amazon products. What we want is to add a Dynamic Event that triggers every time a visitor clicks on one of these links. Not when a page is visited, but when the reader actually clicks on an affiliate link.

We can do this by using PixelYourSite Pro plugin. There is a special tab inside the admin area of the plugin, with a link to a complete tutorial about how to use this feature at its full potential. We are not going to explain this process here because we want to concentrate on the strategy, rather than it’s technical parts.

Create a Lead Dynamic Event on affiliate links – Open the Dynamic Event tab from PixelYourSite and create a Lead event that will trigger on https://www.amazon.com*. Note the final *, because this tel the plugin to add the event to every link targeting a URL that starts with https://www.amazon.com. If you don’t use links, but instead have buttons on your website, then follow the guide about how to add dynamic events on CSS elements.

Give this event a meaningful content_name, like “amazon affiliate” or something that makes sense and you can remember. This is important because we are going to use it in our final step.

If you are using WooCommerce Affiliate Products, then go to WooCommerce Tab and activate the Affiliate Event from there.

2. Create a Facebook Campaign with the right objective: click on links

Now is time to send some traffic to your affiliate website. When you create the Facebook Campaign select “Increase conversions on your website”, and when you define your ad set, select “Lead” events as the Conversion Event” (or whatever event you added on the affiliate links).  This will tell FB to show your ads mostly to people that are more likely to convert. In our case, that means that Facebook will optimize the ads for clicks on the affiliate links we have on the website. Don’t ask me how they do it, but trust me, they are pretty good at this kind of optimization.

Now that you have traffic from the Facebook ads and more important, you are sending potential buyers on the affiliate product pages (Amazon, in our example), you will probably start to see some commission coming. That’s very nice, but don’t open the champagne just yet. We do have one important step to do before our strategy is completed.

3. Retarget the visitors that clicked on the affiliate links

In this final step, we are going to apply a technique that you are probably already familiar with. We will create a Custom Audience from the people who clicked on the affiliate links and retarget them with highly relevant ads, reminding to buy the products they are interested in.

Yes, there is a chance that some of the people from this audience already bought the products, but this is something we can’t avoid, since we don’t have access to the Amazon thank you page (or any other affiliate  that we are promoting).

Creating the Custom Audience is, as you know already, an easy process. Open Audiences, click on Create Audience > Custom Audience and then click on Website Traffic. Select Custom Combination, select Event instead of URL Contains, then add the name of your event, Lead in our case, add parameter content_name: amazon affiliate (the name you chose on step 2). Select the time interval, then create your audience.

This way you will have a Custom Audience formed by people who visited your website and CLICKED on the affiliate links. Target them with a campaign that will reanimate their genuine interest in the affiliate products you are promoting.

TIP: You should create another audience from the people that visited the website but never clicked on the affiliate links. While they are not as highly likely to convert like the previous audience, you might still get some nice results by retargeting them as well with a dedicated campaign.

Conclusion: This is just an example of what you can do with Dynamic Events. It is highly recommended that you take this strategy and customize it according to you your particular situation. It is only a strategic draft that can be the start of a real Facebook Campaign.

If you are not already one of the many PixelYourSite Pro users, click now on this link and download the plugin: Download PixelYourSite PRO and start using Dynamic Events

Free Download

Get traffic and new clients using Facebook’s AI

Get our Bundle Deal and join 100 000+ online business owners.

Improve your tracking and boost your ads return:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Find out when we have the next BIG OFFER!

Over 70 000 business-owners have access to our BIG DISCOUNTS. Don't miss the next one: