What Is CPA Marketing?
Cost Per Action (CPA) Marketing is a affiliate model where a commission is paid when a user takes a specific action. These actions include filling out a form, getting a quote, signing up for a trial, or making a purchase.
How Does CPA Marketing Work?
- Affiliate or Publisher: The influencer (blogger, brand, business) that promotes a business or product in order to drive traffic to the ecommerce site and make a specific conversion.
- Business or Advertiser: The brand that desires a partnership with an affiliate to drive quality traffic to the business’ website and increase sales, generate leads, or boost conversions.
- CPA Network: The platform that brings together the affiliate who wants to make money by promoting products and the businesses that want their products promoted.
CPA Network Terminology
- Affiliate Manager: A person who manages an affiliate program for a merchant. They are responsible for recruiting, engaging with affiliates, and generating revenue for the merchant.
- Category: The niche for which the CPA offer applies (sports, fashion, beauty, health, etc).
- Chargeback: When a sale “falls through” for an action an affiliate has already paid for. Since the sale was never finalized or an item was returned, the previously given commission is deducted back into the advertiser’s account.
- Commission: The payment an affiliate receives—either a flat rate or percentage—once a successful conversion is tracked.
- Contextual link: A text link placed within an affiliate website that links to the advertiser’s website.
- Conversion rate: The percentage rate at which a particular action is performed. In other words, the number of successful conversions divided by the total traffic.
- Cookies: In affiliate marketing, cookies are used to assign a unique ID to a user who has clicked the affiliate link to an advertiser’s site for a specific duration. The affiliate will receive credit for the conversion in this predefined window, typically 30-90 days.
- Cost per action (CPA): An online advertising strategy that allows an advertiser to pay for a specified action from a target customer.
- Earnings per click (EPC): The average amount an affiliate earns every time a user clicks an affiliate link.
- Offer page: The webpage where the conversion occurs after a visitor takes the required action.
- Return on investment (ROI): Refers to the amount of money made with a campaign. It is the revenue divided by the ad spend, multiplied by 100.
How to get Approved by CPA networks?
- Fill the form with all correct details.
- Mention only 2-3 verticals that you feel you can promote.
- In Geos, mention only a few locations rather than putting a huge list.
- Whenever the manager asks for the type of offers you will promote, answer him/her in a convincing manner by naming only a few. I already have mentioned the type of offers.
- When asked about traffic source, be very clear and mention a source that you know you can use. Paid ads (Adwords or Facebook Ads) will help you the most.
- About past experience, show your previous affiliate sales (from a blog or social media) stats.
Top 10 CPA Networks you must Join
- MaxBounty – Has the Best Range of Offers.
- CPAProsperity – Good for Health Trial offers
- ClickDealer – Many offers from almost every GEO
- PeerFly – A good collection of Offers
- AdCombo – Find many COD offers specially in Adult and health niche.
- CrakRevenue – A lot of mobile offers. Also famous for Adult offers.
- CPALead – You can get a lot of Mobile offers (CPI mostly)
- TerraLeads – COD offers from a wide range of GEOs
- AdmitAd – A wide range of offers including E-Commerce offers.
- AcNutrsyt – Nutra Offers – They accept only quality affiliates.
Types of CPA Offers
- (CPS)
- Cost Per Lead (CPL)
- Cost Per Install (CPI)
- Cash On Delivery (COD)
- RevShare
- Cost Per View (CPV)
- Pay Per Call
- Trial Offers
How to Promote CPA Offers
- Promoting Direct Offer Link
- Creating a Landing Page and driving traffic to it
- Cloaking – A badass way to make money
CPA Marketing Trends
- CPA marketing is expected to expand to developing countries in 2020 and beyond.
- CPA marketing should have a focus on copy rather than pop-ups and headlines.
- Influencer marketing will begin to overlap into CPA marketing, giving many new ecommerce businesses even more reason to join CPA affiliate networks.
- Ecommerce businesses will shift a portion of their budget from traditional marketing (PPC, social media, and banner ads) to affiliate and performance marketing.
Tracking in CPA Marketing
- converting Landing Pages
- Best Converting Cities
- Converting Devices
- Best Converting Ad copies
- Converting Keywords (ie; what keywords are converting people typing into Google before buying from your offer link)
- Best Ad sizes
- Track Sites on which your links convert the most
- Best Ads units/widgets (specially in case of Native Ads)
