With over 1 billion daily active users, Facebook ads remain a traffic juggernaut for affiliate marketers.

The social platform’s combination of massive user volume and expansive targeting options is unrivaled, allowing affiliates to find success promoting offers within a multitude of verticals.

Whether you’re looking to promote offers with Facebook ads for the first time or you’ve done so before, there’s something you should do that we consider mandatory: Use a custom landing page.

Why Use a Landing Page with Facebook Ads?

There are several benefits to using a custom landing page instead of direct linking to an offer with Facebook ads. Some are specific to Facebook while others are true for using landing pages when promoting any offer with any traffic source.

1. Increased ad approval

As mentioned above, Facebook isn’t the most lenient traffic source available to affiliates. They’re strict when it comes to what types of offers they’ll allow you to promote, and they often disallow links if they are blatantly promoting affiliate marketing offers.

Using a landing page can help with this because the offer link is no longer the URL attached to the Facebook ad. This means there’s a greater chance your ad will be approved, and you can start generating conversions and making money.

2. Pre-selling

A custom landing page allows you to pre-sell a product or service to the user before they reach the offer page. This means you can develop custom angles and messaging to bridge the gap between your Facebook ad and the offer you’re promoting from MaxBounty.

Pre-selling essentially gives you the opportunity to customize the sales path your way by utilizing your creativity.

Just remember to make sure that the offer permits the use of custom landing pages.

3. Building an e-mail list

Tailoring your landing page for e-mail acquisitions (squeeze page) is a good way to add additional value to your promotion. Over time, you’ll develop a list of leads that you can use to promote other offers to in the future. This is accomplished by adding a short e-mail/subscriber form in the HTML of the landing page.

What makes this so useful is that you’re essentially creating your own targeted audience. You already know they’re quality leads who care about a specific niche.

Pre-planning

Before you start creating or even envisioning your ideal landing page, you first need to understand Facebook’s Ad Guidelines.

Violating these guidelines is the quickest way to get your ad rejected or your link banned, ensuring all the work you put into creating your landing page and promoting an offer is completely wasted.

Using “before-and-after” pictures, sensational or graphic images, and promoting certain products to users who are under 18 are just a few of the ways you can set off Facebook’s alarms.

You can read Facebook’s full list of guidelines here to ensure your ideas are compliant before you start implementing them. It’s always a good idea to try and avoid their wrath.

Creating Your Landing Page

For a landing page to effectively transform the Facebook users clicking on your ads into conversions, the individual components of the page all need to fulfill their purpose.

These can be broken into five sections that are all equally important:

• Visual design/layout
• Headline
• Body Copy
• Images
• Call to action

Below, we’re going to go into detail on what you can do to make each component a useful piece of the conversion-prompting puzzle.

Visual Design/Layout

You don’t need to be an expert in graphic design to create an attractive, engaging landing page for your Facebook ad. You should, however, ensure the visual component of your landing page is helping you generate conversions rather than hindering your success.

As your putting together your landing page, keep in mind that it’s essentially a crash-course website. It should be approached the same way in that you want it to look nice, flow well, and not be confusing to a user.

Here are a few key things that ensure the look of your landing page doesn’t turn users away:

• Break up large blocks of text with frequent spacing
• Use subheadings to increase readability
• Try to keep the branding somewhat consistent with the Facebook ad and offer (colours, images, etc.)
• Keep it simple (don’t overwhelm the user with 100 different elements)
• Ensure it loads quickly (long load times can be detrimental to conversions)

You have a few different options when it comes to how to create the foundation of your landing page. Which one you should choose will differ depending on your experience level and skills.

• Make one from scratch yourself (if you have adequate design and/or HTML skills)
• Utilize a landing page builder:
  • Unbounce
  • LeadPages
  • Instapage

• Pay an expert on Fiverr or find a design professional online to make one for you

Headline

The headline of your landing page has two simple purposes:

1. To grab a person’s attention
2. To entice them to continue reading

Although the user may have seen saw a small preview of what it is you’re promoting from your Facebook ad, you still need to write a headline that keeps them intrigued. If not, they’ll leave just as quick as they came.

The best approach to writing an effective landing page headline is to appeal to someone’s self-interest.

We’re selfish beings. When something appeals to us by promising a personal benefit we pay attention – better teeth, more savings, a better body, etc..

Here’s a few examples that you can easily tweak to fit the offer you’re promoting by just changing a few words:

• Now You Can Turn that Beach Body Dream into Reality
• This New Dating App’s Feature is Changing Love Lives
• Here’s How Your Skin Can Look Younger by Summer

Pay attention to the first word in each of the above headlines. All of them are meant to create urgency. This can go a long way in enticing the user to navigate the rest of your landing page.

Copy

The copy of your landing page is integral in keeping users interested.

If a user clicks on your Facebook ad, is directed to your landing page, reads your headline, and stays on your page, it’s now up to your copy to do the rest of the work.

It needs to be good enough to then lead them to the call to action where they’ll hopefully generate you a conversion.

How do you write effective copy? You communicate instead of sell.

The best way to do this is continuing the conversation you introduced in your headline. From there, don’t just describe the features of the product or service you’re promoting, describe the BENEFITS the user would gain. Make the user the main character in the ‘story’ you’re telling.

Once you feel like you’re satisfied with your copy, use the following questions as a checklist to determine if you’re on the right track:

• Does it focus on how the reader will benefit from using this product/service?
• Do you try and differentiate the product/service from its competitors?
• Is what you’re saying believable?
• Do you use bullets or numbering to list important information?
• Do you sound excited about the product/service you’re promoting?

Images

Images are a great supplementary tool for communicating what’s in your headline and copy. Using similar imagery that you used in your Facebook ad will also help to create a cohesive feel during the sales path (Facebook ad > Landing page > Offer page.)

Try to include people in your imagery as we’ve done above.  If you can find one where a person interacting with the product or service you’re promoting, or at least something resembles it, then even better.

You should keep your images relevant to the content, but don’t be afraid to get creative.

Pexels.com and Unsplash.com are both great resources for large libraries of high quality free-to-use images that you can on your landing pages or Facebook ads.

Call to action

The final component of your landing page can also be considered the most crucial, as it’s the last bridge between your promotion strategy and the offer itself.

It’s important to be crystal clear here. Don’t be afraid to tell the user what you want them to do. Be direct, as this is your last chance to have any control within the sales path.

Placing your call to action inside a button is a simple and effective way to make it stand out on your landing page.

One mistake that affiliates make is thinking they can only include one call to action on the entire page, usually at the bottom. By doing this you’re ignoring users who might already be sold on what it is you’re promoting at some point before the bottom of the page. Instead, try placing one or two call to actions in your body copy unobtrusively. This can be especially useful if your landing page contains a lot of information.

Landing page builder Leadpages has a comprehensive post on their blog that goes into more detail on how exactly to create a call to action for your landing page. You can check that out here.

Conclusion

Although applying the landing page advice above will help improve your chances of generating conversions from Facebook, it’s not going to happen automatically. It’s important to test multiple landing pages with different angles in order to determine what works best and optimize your campaigns.

Facebook has the traffic you want. An effective landing page will help you transform them into conversions.