What is CPA Marketing?

CPA, otherwise known as cost per action or cost per acquisition, is an advertising or affiliate marketing model that involves paying your CPA partners a determined commission after a sale occurs or a desired action is completed. With the right affiliates and the right audience, CPA marketing can effectively deliver results. Instead of just driving impressions and clicks, CPA marketing can generate leads and push conversions, enabling businesses to scale up. 

For affiliates, CPA marketing can expand their potential to earn through advertising. Most affiliate marketers partner with different companies in order to diversify their content and CPA offers, which allows them to provide options for their followers or site visitors and various solutions to their distinct pain points. 

CPA marketing has three main categories:

🔍  Pay per Sale

As the term suggests, pay per sale is when you, the marketer, are paid when a visitor uses your affiliate link and makes a purchase through your partner website.

🔍  Pay per Action

Affiliates get paid for the leads they’ve generated. Pay per action involves a set of actions that a visitor must perform or complete, such as watching a video, filling out a form, or signing up for a free trial.

🔍  Recurring Payments

If you can regularly attract new subscribers to your partner website, you’d be able to get regular commissions from the monthly subscription fees.

CPA Networks

CPA networks act as a bridge that links advertisers and publishers. They specialize in implementing cost-per-action campaigns and are the agencies that determine whether or not you’re a legitimate business that can send qualified leads to them. 

Because the premise of making money online without necessarily selling something is so appealing, CPA marketing tends to be exploited. Because of their strict criteria and requirements, joining CPA networks can be challenging. However, it’s not impossible. The key here is to be transparent and take proactive measures that can help you get accepted.

CPA networks aren’t just for experienced affiliate marketers. They’re great for beginners as well. And while joining one can be a bit tricky, it does have a lot of benefits, including:

✅  Relatively high payouts

✅  Low barrier to entry—affiliate marketers can start with little to no upfront investment

✅  A wealth of CPA offers

✅  Listings that you can filter according to your expertise or niche

If you’re planning on joining a CPA network, here are some of the best networks for advertisers and publishers. Some of these networks have a minimum payment threshold ranging from $10 to $100:

HOW CPA MARKETING WORK

Dictionary of the most commonly used concepts related to making money on Affiliate Network.

Cost per action - it is the rate for the campaign we promote (the action is performed by someone else - and we only advertise our link).

The CPA consists of:

CPD - cost per download - rate for downloading the file;

CPI - cost per install - rate for installing our file;

CPL - cost per lead - rate for obtaining a sale lead (correct filling out the contact form);

CPS - cost per sale - rate for the sale made through our affiliate link;

CPR - cost per registration - rate for each registration in a given website/game/portal/other;

CPM - cost per thousand (“M” as Roman 1000). The concept means rate for 1000 views/clicks/other actions. The most popular use of CPM is the rate for 1000 page/advertisements views;

CPC - cost per click - rate per click on our affiliate link;

CPO - cost per order - rate for the order (regardless of the value of purchases).

Types of CPA offers:

DOI - Double Opt-In - lead is approved after the user confirms the e-mail address;

SOI - Single Opt-In - lead is approved immediately after entering the e-mail address, the user doesn't have to confirm it;

Incent - an offer can be advertised anywhere, including generating motivated traffic;

Non-Incent - an offer requires only high quality traffic, motivated traffic is prohibited;

E-mail submit - lead is approved after entering the e-mail address in the DOI or SOI;

PIN submit / Confirm PIN - lead is approved after confirming the PIN from SMS message. In this category there are also SMS MO offers;

Lead Gen - lead is approved for obtaining lead sale (CPL);

Sell Gen - lead is approved for generating sales (CPS);

Credit Card - lead is approved after connecting and charging the customer’s credit card;

Survey Completion - lead is approved after correct completion of the survey.

Referrals system:

The referrals system is actually the standard in this type of earning programs. More specifically, I would like to explain the issue with which new people often have problems - which makes them feel used. Every Network partner receives a private link to further recommendation of the website. A person registered from such a link is assigned to the user who gave them the link, with which the other person gains a commission (5%-10%) from the earnings of his or her registered person. In no case does this mean that anything is lost when registering with someone’s link (reflink). You earn as much as you would earn when registering with empty links. The generated commission is an add-on that doesn't subtract anything from your earnings.

Use the referral system and start earning! We have prepared special graphics for you that you can use!

Others:

Affiliate Marketing - affiliate marketing that consists in recommending someone else’s goods/services in exchange for a commission on generated sales; affiliate program;

Branding - building brand awareness, for example, through banner campaigns;

Cloaking - hiding partner links or pages (for example, through "serving" search engine robots a different version of the page);

Cookie stuffing - abuse used by dishonest partners; tossing cookies to unsuspecting Internet users in order to obtain a commission;

CTR - Click-Through Ratio - indicator defining the ratio of users entering a particular link to all users visiting the site with this link;

Active income - income requiring work, ending in the event of discontinuation of work;

Passive income - income not requiring work (for example, gained from a ready, positioned website or from actively operating referrals in a given service), lasting despite the end of own activities;

FB - social website Facebook.com;

FP - fan page on Facebook, “facebook page”;

YT - YouTube.com service;

Fraud - commission obtained inconsistent with the regulations of a given partner program;

Conversion - takes place when someone performs the most-anticipated action on the landing page you are promoting (the most-anticipated action could be, for example, sending a Premium SMS, registering an account, downloading a file and other);

Landing page - an advertising page that aims at the highest conversion possible;

Lead - is the person who left the data/correctly filled in the contact form on the sales page;

Niche - a segment (part) of the market characterized by specific needs of potential customers;

PP - short for partner program or PayPal;

Referral - a person registered from our reflink - referral;

Reflink - a unique affiliate link used to promote website/goods/services or search for referrals;

ROI - Return on Investment - an indicator defining the percentage return on investment; formula: (revenue - cost)/cost*100%;

Motivated traffic - the opposite of natural movement; in the vast majority of partner programs, this is a forbidden practice of offering money or other goods in exchange for using your affiliate link (motivating to perform the action - “do X, and in return I will give you Y”);

S4S - share for share - promotion method (for example, fan page on Facebook);

SCAM - a dishonest earning service, fraud;

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - processes to increase the visibility of the website in search engines: in addition to organic SEO, it also includes paid search results (ads displayed in results);

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - processes used to improve the position of the website in search engines; we distinguish the methods of “white hat” (consistent with search engine regulations), “black hat” (inconsistent with search engine regulations) and ”grey hat” (mix of regular and non-regular practices);

Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) - processes to improve the image in search results; SEM + SEO + activities aimed at removing negative reviews from search results;

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) - page of results on which the analyzed page appears; commonly, the position in the search engine;

Affiliate network - a service that is an intermediary between advertiser and partner (marketer);

Spam - e-mail/message/content containing commercial information on which the addressee did not agree;

Referrals system - a system that allows you to recommend a partner program and recruit new partners in exchange for a percentage commission;

UU - Unique User - a unique user visiting a particular website;

Viral - viral advertising; an advert encouraging or forcing users to perform a “viral action”, i.e. further advertising of the website (usually through social media).