An Introduction to CPA Marketing

2009-03-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

An Introduction to CPA Marketing

In a world of overloaded information this blog will give you a fair idea and understanding about how CPA works.

Definition

(CPA)cost-per-action
It is an online advertising payment model in which payment is based purely on qualifying actions such as sales or registrations.

Description

Cost-per-action agreement relates directly to some type of conversion, with sales and registrations among the most common but does not include deals solely on clicks, which are referred to specifically as cost-per-click or CPC.

In a CPA model, the publisher is taking most of the advertising risk, as their commissions are dependent on good conversion rates from the advertiser's creative units and Web site. The cost-per-action (CPA) model is at the other end of the spectrum from the cost-per-impressions model (CPM), with the cost-per-click (CPC) model somewhere in the middle.

Cost-per-action deals have several options. Publishers with considerable excess inventory may be willing to consider nonstandard offers. Sites specializing in incentive programs are in a position to offer CPA pricing on various types of leads, although the usual warning concerning incentivized traffic still apply. Of course, the most widespread use of performance-based pricing is affiliate marketing, whereby merchants/advertisers decide what actions they want to reward and how much they are willing to pay.

The latest buzz in the CPA marketing is the traffic and time which go against it and it is not as easy as it appears. It demands a lot of hard work, dedication and persistence to make a lot of money with CPA offers. CPA Marketing has been a great business for many affiliates since its introduction- 1990’s. Its market has grown a lot from a handful CPA networks to 100’s of networks to-day and still growing and spreads the opportunity for average people to earn thousands and even millions of dollars in the comfort of their own home.

The industry is still growing and presents the opportunity for average people to make thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars in the comfort of their own home.

Taking this opportunity, I thought, after days and months of research, let me write about the Internet marketing techniques to begin with ‘CPA Marketing Game’ with an aim to benefit the people who want to take the advantage of Internet & Affiliate Marketing opportunities and the avenues like CPA Offers (Free &Paid). I have covered a vast majority of them in this special report to help you get started in this amazing business.

CPA Networks

CPA networks are companies that work as a middleman between advertisers and publishers. They host CPA offers from their advertisers and then have their publishers (affiliates) push the traffic to these CPA offers and take a percent of the lead value. For example, an advertiser may pay the CPA network $10.00 for every lead generated on the network and the CPA network may pay a publisher only $8.00 for every lead generated taking a $2.00 commission cut. This is how the CPA networks make money.

You will be letting in with a unique affiliate ID, to browse through CPA offers, after logging in to CPA network, and choose which one you would like to promote. It is the CPA network which controls all the tracking of leads and commissions on your behalf.

CPA issues one single cheques for all the commissions you have generated from multiple advertisers. CPA offers may vary from network to network with some CPA networks having over 1,000 different offers to choose from in various markets.

The CPA enables the affiliates to select from various modes of Ads such text, email and banner ads that are already created for the affiliates’ use. A good banner is one that does not look like an advertising banner. That is why text banners generally have a better click-thru rate. The CPA network tracks all your affiliate data (impressions, clicks, leads, commissions, etc.) and then sends you a check at the end of the month for the
Commissions generated.

The first step to joining a CPA network is to fill out their publisher application to get started. This application goes through a review process and the network decides whether to accept or reject your application.

Applying To A CPA Network

It requires a simple application process by each network. When filling out an application, do not make it look like you are a newbie or beginner. CPA networks generally do not want people who are new to CPA marketing because newbie’s generally tax their resources and time.

You need to mention that you can drive a lot of traffic and that you know what you are doing. You need to sell yourself. Consider the application process like a resume. This will go a long way towards helping you get accepted into the CPA
network.

Most networks require you to enter a web site. What you should do is go out and create an affiliate blog. You can create a free blog at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. Write about 5-6 posts on affiliate marketing and if they are geared
towards the CPA industry, even better. CPA networks look favorably on affiliate blogs because they think you are an authority in the affiliate world.

If you still get rejected, don’t be discouraged as there are hundreds of other CPA networks that you can apply to. I have listed here with a comprehensive list of CPA networks you can join at the end of this report. If you really want to get into a particular CPA network that has rejected you, I suggest you make a phone call to the CPA network and sell yourself on the phone. Almost 90% of the time, a phone call will get you accepted into the affiliate network.

But be cautious, when you get accepted by a major corporate CPA network because there are a lot of “mom and pop” type CPA networks that may be too risky to send a lot of traffic to. Smaller “mom and pop” networks don’t have even the cash flow or resources to do weekly payouts, while the bigger players have no problems paying you sooner or even in advance.

CPA networks generally pay monthly (30 days after month end) and say NO to CPA networks that insist on paying you net 60 (60 days after month end) If you are paying to send traffic to CPA offers, you want to have a liquid cash flow to keep your profitable CPA offers running like clockwork.

CPA Affiliate Manager.

There will be assigned a dedicated affiliate manager in CPA network, to look into your account. This is a real person that will work with you to bring more traffic to the CPA network. They have a vested interest in your success because a portion of their compensation is based on how much money you generate for the CPA network. Having a dedicated account manager is a huge asset and you will not find this type of account service when you are promoting Click bank products.

Affiliate managers are there to support you and tell you what CPA offers are performing the best on their respective network. You should also negotiate with your CPA affiliate manager for a higher payout on the CPA offers as they all have some wiggle room to increase your payout over the street price listed on the network. They are also responsible for having your conversion codes or tracking pixels placed on an advertiser’s success page. This will help you track conversions on tracking systems such as the one in Google Adwords.

You want to develop a good relationship with your affiliate manager because they can increase your payout on the CPA offers and also give you access to private exclusive offers running on the CPA network besides indicating to you what CPA offers are performing well on the network and for what forms of traffic such as natural SEO, email or pay per click traffic.

Selecting a CPA Offer

When promoting a CPA offer, you want to make sure that you select an offer that has a demand for it. Like I mentioned earlier in this report, the two things you have going against you are traffic and time. It would be a complete waste of time to throw up as many campaigns as you could without measuring the demand first.

In my experience, you can generally expect 7 out of 10 campaigns to fail when you first start. You need to find the 3 winners and scale (ramp) them up. You can dramatically improve these odds if you are working with CPA offers that you know are in markets with a large demand.

Gauge the Competition

Come to the next to gauge the competition. There are many software tools out in the market that will tell you how many ads are running for certain keywords on Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

The quick way to see how many offers are running for a CPA lead offer that you would like to promote is by simply typing in the most relevant keywords for that CPA Offer into Google, MSN or Yahoo and you will get an idea of how many sponsored Ad listings are showing. Many times you will find a highly searched keyword that doesn’t have very many ads running. These keywords are like golden nuggets that can really help you get a lot of leads for a targeted CPA offer.

Even if you find a CPA offer that is in a market that is highly competitive, this is not necessarily a bad thing. This means that this offer is in demand and the people who are competing in this market are making money. If you can find obscure keywords for a competitive market or even just write better ad copy than your competitors, there is no reason why you wouldn’t be able to compete in this market.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Engine Traffic (Paid Traffic)

The first successful pay per click search engine (formerly known as Overture and Goto) came on to the scene in 1999 which is now christened Yahoo Search Marketing.

Prior to 1999, many companies and individuals resisted the bid on placement idea
and that is why Open Text and AltaVista both failed in their attempts to charge
advertisers for rankings a few years before Goto.com (now Yahoo Search Marketing) came onto the scene. That is why the market initially had resisted the idea of using a search engine that charged for placement, because they had the apprehension t the results would be tarnished and irrelevant.

Over the time while many pay per click search engines only allow advertisers to bid
on relevant keywords to keep the quality of their search results high, Google Adwords contrary to the former, lets their users decide what ads are relevant by assigning a click-thru rate on paid advertisements.

On pay per click search engines, advertisers simply bid on keywords that are
related to their product or service. Their ad listings will be displayed when a
prospective customer types any of those keywords into a search form. Rankings
on the major pay per click search engines are based primarily on the bid price
and the click-thru rate on the advertiser’s ads.

The best thing about pay per click search engines is that you are in control, and
you decide the maximum price you want to pay for a visitor to be directed to your
web site. The links in the blue shaded area are sponsored links as are the links on the right hand side of the page. Obviously the objective for a paid advertiser is to make more money than they are spending to drive the paid traffic to their web site.

The following Ad companies that drive huge PPC traffic.

a) Google Adwords
b) Yahoo Search Marketing
c) MSN Adcentre
d) Facebook
e) Myspace
f) PPC search engines.

Pay Per View (PPV)Traffic

People started to tinker, about four years ago in contextual networks or Adware
applications to drive more traffic to CPA offers, called CPV (cost per view)
marketing and is extremely powerful and targeted. It functions well because you can pop up whatever you want to promote on targeted web sites and keywords.

The acronym PPV is now starting to become the industry term for this type of
traffic, so I guess one should be sort of flattered. The term pay per view is really for when you order a movie or sporting event at a set fee on your television.

These products or reports are poorly put together and do not compare to the tactics that are revealed in the Pay Per View Formula course which is otherwise known as CPV.

Publisher Network Traffic

Contextual networks allow advertisers to place their text ads on thousands of web
sites that participate in the contextual ad network’s publisher program as mini Google Adsense because they both are the same thing.

Anytime someone clicks on an advertiser’s ad on a publisher’s web site, the
publisher is paid a percent of the click cost while the contextual network keeps the
rest and the advertiser is charged per click.

The aim to driving targeted traffic from contextual networks is based on how well
they can place targeted ads on the web sites in their publisher program. The
better their ability to match the ads with the content on the web site, the better
Quality traffic you will get.

Here are a few major contextual networks where you can buy traffic from:

a) Clicksor
b). AdBrite
c) Valid Click
d) Pulse360

Text Link Traffic

Another source of paid traffic is buying static text links on various web sites. Buying static text links on web sites can help you increase the number of one-way links that are pointing towards your web site.

The aim is to finding targeted websites that are interested in selling static links on their web site and there are web services that work as middlemen for buyers and
sellers of text links.

Buying text links can help with search engine optimization by increasing your
web sites rank and creating direct links for traffic back to your web site.
Remember that 90% of the success of your web pages on organic search engines
is related to off page factors such as the number of one-way links coming in.

The two major web services a) Text LinkAds b) Text LinkBrokers sell static text links:

Co-Registration Traffic

Buying leads from companies is called co-registration that collects them from co-registration forms. A lot of companies can provide you with a large number of
single opt-in leads on a daily basis, sometimes as high as 100,000 leads per day!
The price for co-registration leads varies and can start as low as $0.10 an email
address.

One must buy these leads and convert them into traffic. So, better go with a
co-registration service that automatically puts these leads into an auto-responder
in real-time so you can get the prospect while they are hot. You can either direct them to your web site in an auto-responder email or try to sell directly to them in the email.

Banner Traffic

One can still drive a good amount of traffic though eye-catching banners to your web sites. It is observed that creating text banners can out-pull image banners by up to three times.

Just create a killer headline or punch line or tag line on your banner and try to allure the reader to click on the banner. Adding the keywords “Click Here” somewhere on your Banner will almost always increase the click-thru rate. One can literally start getting millions of banner impressions by using the site targeting feature in Google Adwords. If you have a Google Adwords account, instead of setting up a keyword-targeting campaign, you can set up a site targeting campaign.

You select the web sites that you want your banner to appear on and you can test
and track to see what web sites pull the best conversions for what you are
promoting. Google charges as low as $0.25 for every 1,000 banner impressions so you can test and track without losing your shirt.

a) Google Adwords
b) Casale Media
c) Valueclick

Media Buys Traffic

The Expensive Media buying simply refers to buying bulk advertising space for mass advertising campaigns for generating a ton of traffic from doing media buys. So the media buys does well to make sure that you have thoroughly tested the response rate of the landing page so that you have a general idea of what the conversion rate will be.

I welcome your comments and don’t forget to record the same here.

Wishing you success on your CPA journey.

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An introduction to CPA Marketing

An Introduction to CPA Marketing