How to Promote Betting on Facebook

Online betting has become a more competitive field than ever before. It attracts new audiences on a regular basis and continues its growth. That’s why nowadays it’s pretty tough for any webmaster, especially a newbie, to get more traffic and attention from bettors as a whole. But a smart marketing strategy with the right approach can change a lot. In today’s topic of 888STARZ Partners blog we’ll look closer on how to promote Betting on Facebook!

Why is Facebook a primary traffic source in affiliate marketing?

First of all, Facebook offers a lot of opportunities for precise targeting. With one of the best targeting systems available, it’s no wonder why many webmasters reach for this platform. Facebook can help you find the right audience for virtually any product or service, including the vertical of online Betting products.

How come? There’s at least one simple explanation for this — Facebook stands as the most popular social network globally, surpassing all competitors in both reach and active user count. According to DemandSage’s recent research, published in May 2024, Facebook, as a stand-alone platform, gets 3.07 billion active monthly users. Even more so, 68,11% of them visit this traffic source on a daily basis. That accounts for 37.90% of the worldwide population and 60.91% of the global social media users.

That’s not all of the pros — we’re gonna give you top 10 why Facebook is the right choice for iGaming advertising:

1. Optimized source of traffic:
   Facebook is the world’s finest optimized traffic source, capable of finding leads for any kind of advertisement within your budget.
2. Minimum threshold for entering:
   Spending just a few dollars per day can generate leads immediately. Facebook’s algorithm attracts advertisers by offering better results at lower budgets.
3. Advanced targeting capabilities:
   As we already mentioned, Facebook allows for highly specific demographic targeting, ensuring ads reach potential customers who are interested in online sports betting.
4. Increased return on investment (ROI):
   Precision targeting and optimization increase the likelihood of ad success, improving the ROI for advertising campaigns.
5. Robust analytics tools:
   Affiliates can track sports betting ad performance in real-time, enabling continuous optimization and more effective campaign management.
6. Global reach:
   The platform’s limitless user base allows businesses to market beyond local markets, reaching a diverse and expansive audience.
7. Versatile advertising formats:
   Facebook supports various creative ad formats (video, carousel, sponsored posts), allowing for engaging ad campaigns.
8. Ease of running traffic to apps:
   Facebook makes it simple to drive traffic to iGaming apps, as it trusts applications listed on the Play Market or the AppStore.
9. Automation services:
   Ad administration on Facebook is made easier with dozens of process automation services, hundreds of stores with multiple accounts, and Business Managers.
10. Flexible ad management:
    Ad frequency and performance can be used to modify your approach. You can start new sports betting ad sets, add placements, or make manual bids with ease.

Combining these features, Facebook emerges as a powerful platform for promoting online betting services.

“Well, I still remember one Facebook case that I can truly call a success and a personal point of pride. Here’s how it went: GEO — Egypt, vertical — betting, period — Champions League. We worked with a PWA app adapted for the region. Used a large number of creatives with welcome bonuses, as well as hooks based on top matches — all strictly tailored to the local context. And here’s what we got out of it:

Install cost: ~$0.8-1
Registration: ~$3-5
Deposit: ~$25
ROI in the first month: over 60%

A good example of how proper localization + working with a relevant event (Champions League) + simple but catchy visuals can deliver a stable and predictable funnel”.

888Starz Partners affiliate

Challenges of Betting advertising on Facebook

This all sounds so good, but there is one catch. The main issue is that any mention of betting or gambling on Facebook is banned. For instance, you won’t be able to launch any iGaming campaigns at all if you don’t have specific understanding about how to manage cloaking services.

Wish to overcome these challenges easier? 888STARZ Partners works with numerous webmasters on a long-term basis and has extensive experience in iGaming, so if you want to understand current market needs better, we are here to help!

There’s a lot of peculiarities of running Betting campaigns on Facebook. One of the features is that it’s important to take into account the specifics of the GEO you selected. Here we have a product that is not allowed everywhere. There are countries where:

• Sports betting is completely prohibited;
• The market is regulated — for example, bookmakers can work only with a local license (and bets are not allowed on all events);
• Online betting is legal.

“To avoid ending up deep in the red, the first and most important thing is having a clear understanding of your own economics. If you have a rough idea of how your traffic converts, you need to define acceptable lead costs in advance — and stick to those limits strictly during your campaigns.

Is your campaign exceeding those numbers? Then stop it without hesitation. Hoping it will ‘catch up later’ or that ‘delayed conversions will kick in’ rarely works out.

Another key point — don’t spread yourself too thin across many GEOs right away. It’s better to pick 1-3 directions where the product performs steadily, and focus on finding working angles within them. Focus brings depth and predictability; spreading out only leads to unnecessary financial costs”.

888Starz Partners affiliate

Sometimes webmasters who start to work with betting offers find surprises in certain geos. For example, the United States has many restrictions at the state level, where online betting is basically prohibited.

According to the recent Statista Market Forecast, the online sports betting market worldwide is projected to grow by 7.47% (2024-2029) resulting in a market volume of US$65.14bn in 2029.

The average revenue per user illustrates that betting is a potentially lucrative sector that should not be ignored:

But not everything is as clear as it may seem — to shed more light, let’s compare two huge markets, where betting is entirely legal (UK), and the opposite situation, where it’s prohibited by law (India).

In the United Kingdom, online betting is regulated and licensed. Here most bets are placed on soccer, horse racing and greyhound racing. The market is extremely active — based on a recent Bromsgrove Standard report, over 24 million Britons bet at least once a month, and according to the UK Gambling Commission, gross gambling revenue (GGR) from the gambling industry reached £15 billion in 2023, up almost 7% year-on-year.

Betting has been legal in the UK for many years (since the Betting and Gaming Act back in the 1960), with comprehensive regulation ensuring fair play and protecting the interests of players.

“If the budget is tight, it makes sense to look toward low-cost GEOs. One of the most affordable options in terms of traffic cost is African countries. But it’s important not to chase price alone — you also have to consider the specifics of the product itself: each country has its own situation when it comes to payment methods and how reliably they actually work.

Before launching, you should always check how stable the product performs in the chosen region, so you don’t run into technical issues after the campaign is already started”.

888Starz Partners affiliate

Now let’s check out the reverse situation in India. Here online betting is highly restricted, with legal exceptions mainly for lotteries and horse racing. The legal status of online sports betting in India is ambiguous and varies by state. Some states like Sikkim and Nagaland have regulated online gaming, but most states prohibit it or have unclear laws, leading to a patchwork of regulations.

Despite the prohibitive laws, illegal gambling is constantly growing. Based on the recent IMARC Group report, the Indian gambling market is estimated to be worth $60 billion annually — nearly half accounts from illegal betting. 77% of all bets fall on cricket, the most loved sport here. According to CNBC, over 340 million Indians participate in it.

While most forms of gambling are illegal, there is no federal law specifically banning online betting. This gap allows offshore betting companies to attract Indian bettors. Even some local websites partner with foreign agencies to facilitate online betting. However, in the absence of comprehensive federal regulation, illegal gaming will probably keep growing, denying the government possible tax income and escalating related social issues.

These two examples perfectly illustrate how online betting regulations and legal challenges can vary significantly between different countries, affecting both operators and players.

“A bit more about rejects and moderation issues. These days, it’s pretty much the norm for the betting and casino verticals. From recent trends: Facebook reacts especially negatively to the use of well-known faces, particularly athletes. These and other restrictions are now being handled with the help of neural networks — they generate characters that visually resemble ‘celebrities’ without directly violating policy.

A common reason for rejections is mentioning promo codes directly in the ad text. This issue is easily bypassed by moving the promo codes to the creative itself, which Facebook treats more leniently.

As for promotion tools — both WebView and PWA are used, but PWA is prioritized: it delivers better registration-to-deposit conversion rates and higher retention compared to WebView”.

888Starz Partners affiliate

How to get around Facebooks’ sports betting ads restrictions?

Facebook prohibits iGaming ads, so we must appear legitimate to overcome these restrictions before launching a campaign. Key solutions include the following essentials:

Accounts 

The most suitable accounts webmasters choose to work with are usually self-farmed ones. They help to track what affects the life of an account and spend, to get a feel for how strict Facebookis at the moment. 

Automatically registered accounts are used in automated traffic flooding. Such accounts are cheaper than self-farmed because of their low quality and can be bought in online shops — you can find the right one through a search engine or in Telegram channels.

“Continuing on the topic — bans are also worth mentioning. Unfortunately, they’re part of the job too, especially if you’re running steady and high-volume traffic. The toughest ones are when an account that was bringing in consistent deposits at a great cost gets taken down.

For example, in one case: the account lasted three months, had already become unlimited, around $100k was spent through it, everything was running smoothly — and then, out of the blue, it got banned. No warnings, and practically no chance of recovery.

Cases like that aren’t rare, and it always comes down to being prepared: You need to have a backup pool of solutions and never get too attached to a single account, no matter how golden it seems”.

888Starz Partners affiliate

In addition to accounts, these shops offer Business Managers (BMs). Such tools are used to create advertising accounts within a social network and add auto registration or farm accounts to the Business Manager, which are then merged from a trust account. BM allows you to keep multiple accounts just in one place — it is convenient for running large volumes of traffic.

Cloaking

Cloaking in affiliate marketing is needed to bypass moderation on Facebook. It allows you to hide banned and unwanted ad materials from moderators and automatic filtering systems. This makes it possible to run sports betting ad campaigns that could otherwise be banned.

After presenting Facebook with a transparent landing page, the system directs its’ customers to a real prelander that warms up the audience. Since 2016-2017 for Facebook, all casino and sports betting landing pages and prelanders are prohibited. This is due to the fact that iGaming creatives have before and after aspects, guaranteed results, earnings and other forbidden elements. However, since most of the casino and bookmaker apps are initially cloaked, webmasters who are aiming to drive traffic to iGaming apps don’t need to worry.

At 888STARZ Partners, we provide our partners with more than merely cloaking; we have developed private traffic streams, where registration and initial deposit conversion rates are at least twice as high as those of traditional ones. This was developed in-house and tested on several traffic sources, including Facebook. Write to your personal manager for additional information!

Tracker

It’s a special tool for tracking the results and traffic distribution of sports betting ad campaigns. By using trackers, affiliates can monitor what kind of landing or pre-landing works better and what is the ROI of an advertising campaign. But most importantly, they can run traffic to one or several iGaming offers at once.

The tracker collects information on sports betting advertising campaigns and allows you to replace the link inside the tracker — here you don’t need to stop driving traffic on Facebook, but change the link if you switch to a more profitable offer. Most trackers have a built-in cloaking and are inexpensive, which can be crucial for a beginner.

“As for the number of campaigns launched during exact period of time, we don’t track exact figures — we don’t consider it a key metric. The main focus is on efficiency and budget performance within a specific GEO and vertical, not the sheer number of launches.

Very roughly speaking, one media buyer launches about 10 ad campaigns per day on average. But that’s more of a technical stat — what really matters is how many of them actually turn a profit, not just running”.

888Starz Partners affiliate

Creatives

Your creative is the message of the Facebook iGaming advertising campaign. The better it is linked to the landing page and prelander, the higher the conversion rate. The following kinds of creatives can be employed in iGaming

1. News, which tells about a lucky man who became rich thanks to the winning bet;
2. Emotional creatives, for instance such as those that display how a man or woman lays a wager in a video format and wins after the match ends. Such material evokes emotions to the random user and is commonly used in Tier 2 and Tier 3 GEOs;
3. Static format — a great example is a special offer with an image of money and welcome bonus.

If you’re using different creatives, make them unique and original — it should be your main goal.

After completing the preparatory work with the help of the tools mentioned above, a webmaster submits a request to the administrator to start the sports betting ad campaign. At this stage he’ll get the details of the Facebook iGaming advertising and its pricing.

Overcoming ad campaign сhallenges with 888STARZ Partners

At 888STARZ Partners, we offer a range of benefits and comprehensive compliance support to help affiliates bypass Facebook moderation and bring in quality leads.

In addition, we provide a wide range of tools and resources, such as complex tracking software and top ad creatives, to maximize campaign performance. Affiliates can improve their tactics and approach by seeking the professional advice of seasoned marketers and compliance specialists. 

“Right now, the most effective way to scale is by increasing the number of working combos, not by investing the maximum budget into a single one.

If a particular funnel is performing well, it’s better to launch it in parallel across multiple accounts rather than pushing a single source to the limit. This approach reduces risks and provides more stability — especially with Facebook’s unstable moderation and frequent bans”.

888Starz Partners affiliate

888STARZ Partners Affiliate Program offers lucrative revenue potential through attractive commission structures and ongoing incentives for webmasters. Our brand stands out in the betting industry for its reliability and esteemed reputation, adding an extra layer of trust and credibility for our partners.

The main features of the 888STARZ Affiliates program include:

• Variety of GEOs:
  Online betting services are available in more than 100 countries. We operate in Tier 1, 2 and 3 GEOs. To operate in these regions we have the necessary licenses, namely the license of Curaçao, Anjouan, Kahnawake and others. Our product is also localized to suit the specific regions.
• High conversion rate:
  Our statistics show more than 40% conversion of leads into registered and first deposited players.
• Clear terms of cooperation:
  Up to 50% RevShare, Hybrid (on request), and fixed payments on CPA (up to $200). The frequency of withdrawal is discussed individually with the manager. Also the webmaster can request a convenient periodicity of payouts.
• Sub-affiliate program:
  Webmaster can receive up to 10% of income from referrals.
• Abundance of promotional materials:
  Different tools are provided to attract traffic — creatives, advertising banners, SEO-texts, videos and so on.

Webmasters who receive a lot of high-quality traffic are granted VIP status and exclusive privileges. For example, first-priority processing of payment requests, and many more.

Conclusion

To run large volumes of traffic on Facebook, a webmaster must know a lot of things before starting a campaign. For example, how the cloaking works, as Facebook relentlessly bans everything related to this vertical. At the same time, a webmaster should make really eye-catching creatives.

We’ll say more about this — partnering with 888STARZ can help exclude these difficulties and enhance your campaign’s success. Our experience and resources are focused on maximizing profits in any traffic source. Join 888STARZ Partners — global success starts with us!