How to iframe an affiliate offer and run Facebook ad campaign to it: benefits, feasibility and sticking points

Our goal is to run a Facebook ad campaign, where visitors, who click our ad, will remain at Facebook, but see an advertisers landing page. In other words, we achieve, that the conversion happens inside Facebook, without to force visitor to go away. The benefit is clear, on this way we get much cheaper ad prices from Facebook and better CTR, cause visitors don't leave Facebook.
On the first look, we must do it following way:

1. Create a Facebook page for the affiliate offer;
2. Create an app, which is the page tab as iframe, with the iframe source our advertiser's landing page, where conversion happens;
3. Add this page tab to newly created Facebook page;
4. Create a Facebook ad campaign with the campaign goal "page likes" for our newly created page and selected landing view our page tab with iframed landing page.
5. The other interesting possibility is to create a Facebook ad campaign with a campaign goal "Clicks to website" and as the target url to set up the direct url of our page tab.

What we would get, if everything would be simple and so, like it is written? After visitors click on our ad, they would come to our Facebook page, where they would see an iframed advertiser's landing page, where they would make a required converting action and make us rich. Would would would... How are things in real life?

The headache beginns already at step 2: it could be tricky to get the tracking url of the advertiser's landing page as iframe source for the page tab app. If Facebook will not allow to do so, it is possible to take indirect way and fill in as the iframe source a specially for this purpose created simple html page, which must be hosted on our hosting and contain a redirect to the tracking url. In the next post i will go into redirecting to tracking urls more detailed.

After the page tab with iframed landing page is created, we add this tab to our Facebook page.

We run in browser manually following url:
http://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&redirect_uri=http://www.facebook.com, where the app_id is the app id of our tab with iframed LP. After running this url, there is the possibility to add the app to all of our Facebook pages (press Shift for adding to more then one page at once).

The other way to add a page tab with iframed LP is to use any third part app. I tested Woobox and this app is good: it allows beside of adding an iframe another interesting possibilities for free, like adding of fangate or redirects, or just pure html.

After the page tab with iframed LP is added to our page, we go to our page: our tab is shown in most cases as third tab. The first is the main, the second is "Photos", and the third is ours. Click on it, and if all is OK, we see inside of Facebook our advertiser's landing page, which is ready to get traffic, to convert and make us rich.

But in most cases not all is OK. In most cases we will see instead of iframed landing page just a blank place. Why? Because a part of it is not secure enough. In short words: the WHOLE content, which is shown inside of Facebook, MUST have secured, HTTPS connection. The whole means really the WHOLE:

• HTTPS must have your hosted page, where you do the redirect to the tracking url,
• HTTPS must be the tracking url,
• HTTPS must be the advertiser's landing page,
• HTTPS must have all assets of landing page, images, libraries, scripts, cloud hostet assets.

If just a one single asset, like any third part tracking pixel, is not HTTPS, we will see just a blank iframe inside our Facebook page tab. This issue is called "mixed security content" and exists on Chrome, Safari and Firefox browsers - so only an end-user could set off such behaviour.

Here is the place, where we get to know, that not each advertiser's landing page fulfills technical requirements to be promoted on this way. The advertiser's landing page MUST be fully HTTPSed, with all of its assets, so we are able to show it in the Facebook iframe and run traffic to it. The mixed security content issue isn't very new, but advertisers must rework landing pages, so will fit these requirements. Cause on this way it is possible to get good, targeted and cheap Facebook traffic.

My personal goal of this article is to spread the understanding of this issue, so the more the better affiliates will spek to advertisers and move them to reworks landing pages. Reworking of a site to make it fully HTTPSed isn't tricky or expensive - i've got a HTTPS certificate, valid for 6 monthes and renewable for free from Comodo, and this isn't a one single free offer in the web.

Wish you lucky iframing - enjoy summer!