CPA Marketing: Guide For Beginner

Since the start of my internet marketing career, I’ve tried every monetization strategy under the sun:I started with Adsense… but was let down by the horribly low CPCs.Then I promoted Clickbank products… but I couldn’t get the traffic to convert.Finally, I built a list…but I didn’t know how to pitch products without losing subscribers.Then I tried CPA marketing…and quickly realized that it was one of the best ways for affiliates to monetize their sites.

CPA marketing is a popular way to make money online. CPA is short for ‘Cost Per Action’ or sometimes referred to as ‘Cost Per Acquisition’. For example you publish links on your website or blog, and get paid when people click on these links and take a certain action. That action could be:

• Providing an email address
• Providing personal details
• Accepting a free trial of a product
• Carrying out a short survey
• Providing credit card details

There are others, but the point being made here is that with CPA you’ll earn money even if product is not sold! This is not affiliate marketing where somebody must purchase a product for you to be paid. The payments for each action vary, but they can be 20 cents or 20 dollars. The more a CPA program pays, the further along the purchasing pathway a visitor must travel – though a final purchase is not necessary.

CPA Marketing Basics

If you have a blog with a few hundred regular visitors, then you can make a fair amount of money over a period of time by publishing CPA links on your pages and posts – or even on your sidebar. If you are looking for a longer term income source, then CPA meets that need. If you are new to blogging and want to make some money quickly, even if it is just a small amount to give you encouragement, then a CPA program would be a good supplement to Google AdSense.
One of the benefits of CPA over AdSense is that you can select the programs that are most suitable for each of your web pages or blog posts. Here are some of the ‘actions’ that can earn you money with the right choice of CPA programs. Keep in mind that once the CPA link (text or graphic) is published on your site, then you can forget about it – you have nothing else to do but wait for the cash you earn to accumulate.

Guide to CPA: Typical Actions

Email Address Submits

These are lead-generation programs that ask readers to provide their email address for more information. You get paid for each email address provided, after which the sponsor’s sales machine gets to work to convert leads to sales.

Leads are valuable to individual companies who do not have the blogging resources that you have. It is cheaper for them to pay you for each lead than to advertise themselves. You don’t earn a great deal per lead, around 20c – $1 on average, but you have next to no work to do once the link is on your site. It will make small amounts forever (until the program is withdrawn).

Filling Forms

There are two types of form your visitors may be asked to complete. The ‘Short Form’ normally requests at least a name, date of birth, email address and physical address. The ‘Long Form’, often requested by finance firms or companies offering free product trials prior to purchasing, will also ask for credit card details.
Short forms can earn you anything from $1 to $10 each, while long forms can earn anything up to $40 and more. The latter can be lucrative if you can persuade people to complete them.

Cell Phone PIN Submits

One type of CPA program that has proved lucrative to many bloggers involves readers providing their cell phone number, and then receiving a PIN code to send back to a number provided. This often involves services such as free ringtones or other cell phone services. You can earn from $2 to $10 or more per submit.

Free Trials

If a visitor to your website or blog completes a form for a free trial, you can earn from $10 to $40 for each one. These may be free trials of health products, weight loss supplements or even subscription services. Some people make a living just through offering these CPA offers on their websites and blogs.
These are just a selection of the main types of CPA programs available. Those that make thousands of dollars and more from them offer CPA links on multiple websites, many of them niche sites or blogs that focus on the type of product offered. Examples include health sites, weight loss or weight gain blogs, financial services and ringtone and other cell phone services.

CPA Marketing Offer Sources

Where do you find such CPA offers, and how do you place them on your blogs or websites? In fact, there are many different companies offering links. Most are CPA specialist firms offering multiple categories with CPA programs relating to each. This makes it easier for you to choose appropriate offers for your marketing campaigns.

The program is explained in detail on the CPA marketing website you choose, along with the offered payment for each action. The action required for payment is explained along with an example of the clickable graphic or link. You can also view the information provided to visitors who accept the offer. This is an insurance that your visitors are not being exposed to offers that you would prefer them not to be.

Examples of CPA Networks

Here are some examples of CPA networks that offer a variety of Cost per Action offers. The following are recommended to you if you want to make money using CPA marketing.

MaxBounty

This is a major CPA company that offers anything from a few cents to more than $40 per lead. It provides searchable lists of campaigns in a large number of niches. It also informs you of the type of advert you can place: a search link, banner ad, email (good for those with large email lists) or even incentivized offers, where visitors are offered an incentive to complete the action.

Neverblue

Similar to MaxBounty, with a more structured list of programs. Not so many offers, however, although Neverblue is highly regarded by those that use CPA as a major source of income.

Find CPA Offers and Associated Networks

Offer Vault

This is an extremely useful site for CPA offer search programs. It itemizes the various offers and programs available online along with the companies and CPA networks offering them. Many new to this type of marketing will start here.

There are many others such as PeakProfits, DirectLeads, Revenueads and Inuvo. If you carry out a Google search for CPA programs you will find a whole list of advertising companies that offer CPA links.

Incentivized CPA Programs

Have you ever seen these online adverts where you are asked if you want a free laptop or TV? All you need do is to check out the offers or complete the surveys! When you click, you are given one offer after another where you are asked to provide your email address, full details or even your financial details.

These are what are known as incentivized CPA offers. Sure, you might get the laptop, but you have so much to fill and so many offers to take up that you wonder if it is worth it! In fact, many people believe it to be worth it, because these CPA programs make some people a lot of money!

You can do this yourself. First you must make sure that the offers you make are ‘incentivized’. CPA companies such as MaxBounty and Neverblue state whether or not you are allowed to offer an incentive for people to complete the offer.

If they are, then you can compile several into one advert and offer your own free bonus for completing all the offers. What you must do is make sure the payments per action for all the offers involved exceed the cost of the product you are offering – and only provide that product is 100% of the offers have been completed.

Guide to CPA: Conclusion

It is possible to use CPA marketing to make money online without any prior marketing knowledge. You are unlikely to make a living with just one blog or website. However, if you run several, then the potential income is unlimited.

Cost per Action Marketing is virtually a maintenance free income source – get it going and forget about it. Check each site over now and again to make sure the adverts are still running, but that’s basically all there is to it. Try it for yourself using this guide to CPA as a starting point.

Cost per action (CPA), also known as pay per action (PPA) and cost per conversion, is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for each specified action - for example, an impression, click, form submit (e.g., contact request, newsletter sign up, registration etc.), double opt-in or sale.

Direct response advertisers consider CPA the optimal way to buy online advertising, as an advertiser only pays for the ad when the desired action has occurred. The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser. Radio and TV stations also sometimes offer unsold inventory on a cost per action basis, but this form of advertising is most often referred to as "per inquiry". Although less common, print media will also sometimes be sold on a CPA basis.

What is CPA (Cost per Action):

CPA goes one step further than CPC (Cost per Click) or PPC (Pay per Click). In a CPC/PPC campaign the advertiser has to pay whenever a user clicks on his ad and is directed to his website .

CPA Marketing

Now let’s compare affiliate marketing with CPA marketing. First of all, what does CPA stand for? It’s Cost Per Action, or sometimes Cost Per Acquisition.

CPA is available for just about anything, the same way as affiliate marketing. You can find it for a variety of products and services, in a wide range of niches.


One difference between affiliate marketing and CPA is that usually affiliate marketing comes from the manufacturer or seller of the products. CPA, on the other hand, comes from networks with a range of offers from various sellers, more like a marketplace than a single store. Becoming a part of, say, Joe Blow’s Affiliate Shack gives you access to just what Joe Blow sells. Becoming a part of a CPA network can give you access to a lot of different offers from various manufacturers in different niches.

CPA also doesn’t rely on a sale. You still have the same customer – CPA – seller layout, but instead of requiring a sale to get paid, you can get paid for other actions. They might be form fills, or email submissions, or sales calls, or ebook downloads, or app installs, anything else the seller wants. Essentially, you’re being absolved of the need to sell. Instead, all you need to do is hook the customer up with the sales people of the seller. Some CPA offers will give you a bonus if the sale happens, while most just pay you for the lead.

If all of this sounds an awful lot like affiliate marketing, well, you’ve found out the dirty secret of the industry. CPA marketing is a subdivision of affiliate marketing, with a slightly different framework and a different process.

Which Should You Use?

So, the debate between affiliate marketing and CPA marketing is often one that comes down to the simple choice of which you should use to make money. Which is easier? Which earns you more?

The fact is, there are so many affiliates and so many CPA networks out there, with so many products and so many offers to pick through, that it’s impossible to recommend any one system, network or product above all others. Even the best high-converting offer earns you nothing if your site is terrible and you can’t sell. Conversely, you can make a ton of money out of bland, low-payout offers with a great site and a low-competition niche.

Here’s the thing; you can do both. In fact, you very likely should do both. If you design your site properly, and you integrate your ads into your content with appropriate disclosure, you can do very well.

Someone coming to your site might be looking for something somewhat related to the products you offer. If you’re limited to just affiliate marketing, you lose the conversion, because the items you have on offer aren’t exactly what the user wants. If you have a few CPA offers scattered throughout, however, then the user can contact various sellers to ask about a product that meets their needs. Rather than a bounce, you get paid for a lead.

One benefit of affiliate marketing is the lack of human contact necessary to be successful. I can easily write dozens of blog posts with affiliate links peppered in, and make money from people clicking through. I don’t need to talk to anyone at the seller, I don’t need to be a pushy salesman directly to the customer, I just set it up and make money.

CPA networks, meanwhile, often require an interview process before you can get started. This means at a minimum that you need to be in contact with the manager of the CPA network.

On the other hand, you can be successful with CPA without a website. You can run successful CPA ads on Facebook, for example, without needing a landing page and a website between the user and the seller. You just need to know your audience, know your niche, and have plenty to spend on ads.

When you bring both methods together, that’s when moneymaking harmony sings. Design a nice site in a good niche, run CPA offers and affiliate links, and make money from a dozen different sources at once.

Are you aware of what you are doing wrong when targeting audiences through AdWords? Based on the current scenario, it is found that audiences are given more importance than keywords to get a successful online business within less time. Therefore, audiences are considered as the important part of AdWords campaign. But, still many marketers do certain mistakes that bring bad impact on their overall efforts when setting up targeting in AdWords.

Common 5 mistakes in AdWords are as follows:

Generating Niche Lists Targeting Small Audience

Some create niche lists that target the small audiences. It is better to take help of Google Analytics to identify the number of unique visitors on definite pages for definite time period. You have to consider wider targeting list. Spending time in creating unusable lists is just a bad idea. The list sizes also depend on whether you are performing search or display re-marketing.

Inappropriate Ad Groups Settings

This mistake can lead to wastage of large cost or reduction of traffic. If you set up a bid campaign and bid-only ad group, you will observe more traffic than you expected, resulting in higher cost. If you set up a bid-only campaign and bid ad group, you will observe intensely reduction of traffic when you contracted the audience to only returning visitors. You must know the ad groups settings i.e. which one to target and bid.

 Also Read: 5 Reasons Why People Failed In Affiliate Marketing

Setting Lists with Improper Durations

Some marketers are not enough aware of the importance of duration. You must set up the lists with 180-day duration for RLSA campaigns and 540-days duration for display remarketing. If duration is not set up properly, it may leads to missing large amount of traffic or may mislead about the number of people you are reaching via the list.
Often, search marketers forget to subtract the duration from one list to another. It will end up reaching the audience through list with higher bid traffic. It means, you simply pay more than it was required.

Forgetting To Set a Frequency Capping

Some marketers make a big mistake by forgetting to set up a frequency capping. Setting frequency cap allows you to restrict the number of times a particular visitor is displayed the ad. It can be adjusted with variety of options such as limit for impressions set up for ad, ad group or campaign. Just select your campaign’s “Settings” Tab, then Click Edit option of “Frequency capping” under “Advanced settings”.

Also Read: 8 Reasons You Should Use Bing Ads To Promote Your Small Business

Inadequate Tracking of Seasonal Audiences

Marketers often make mistake of not tracking the audiences during definite time period. Tracking seasonal audiences is useful during seasonal products or services sale like festival gift shopping. Or, in example, services for students who need college essay, term paper, etc. will have most of their visits during finals and exams at universities and colleges. You must know when and how much people are coming around the specific time period. The list with improper duration needs to remove all users when you want to use it again, because selected duration has been passed.

The article will sure help you to set up the lists more effectively. Just need to access the bid adjustments regularly for the audience and analyze its effect with the right strategy. Tweet