What is CPA (Cost per Action)

CPA aka as cost per action is a marketing strategy in which the advertiser is paying the publisher a predetermined price for a traffic that completed a pre-specified action. Example; advertiser, in this case is the merchant or product owner will pay any publisher in this case is the person who promote or direct traffic to the merchant site or product page for completing a specified action, such as filling in zip code or email address or perhaps completing a survey,  in return the publisher is compensated by the merchant/advertiser for his or her effort. Yes! that’s basically the concept of CPA in a nutshell.

CPA Basics Terminologies

Before we carry on it will be helpful especially if you are reading this article and you are happen to  be a newbie to the world of cost per action or CPA.  Its important to understand the basic terms of CPA marketing world. There are more fancy terms on CPA world but to keep things simple and comprehensive all you need to start CPA marketing are the following terms;

1. CPA (cost per action or acquisition) which has been explained above.
2. Advertiser: In CPA marketing this is the merchant who own the products
3. Publisher: Is the  person that great lead and direct traffic to the offer for a commission
4. CPA Network: This is the middle man that collected all the CPA offer into one place plus take care  of paying the publishers and billing the advertisers
5. Ad Network: This the broker that compiled paid traffic sources for the publishers to use for their CPA campaigns
6. Landing Pages: is where the traffic are directed to by the publisher.
7. Direct linking: This is where you direct to the traffic directly to the merchant sales page without any pre-sell page in betweens the traffic source and the merchant page
8. Analytics: this is the measuring of the activities between the traffic source and the landing page which can consist of click through rate, conversion rate, source of traffics, etc.
9. CPM: It is the cost per 1000 impression i.e. in some traffic sources they would show you ads 1,000 times for an x amount.
10. CPC: It is the cost per click i.e. its the alternative to CPM in which the publisher is charged for every time a visitor is clicking on the ad link so its fair so say CPM and CPC is a pricing methods for advertising.

Now you have educated yourself with some basic but yet fundamentals terms about CPA marketing. The next step is learning  and eventually benefiting from the CPA marketing you have to apply  and accepted to the CPA networks.

Online Affiliate Marketing Network

There are networks that strickly  affiliate offers such as clickbank.com and paydot.com but of course the only action that you can get paid for on those networks is when you make a sale which may take more effort to motivated visitors to become sellers. There is also some network that kind of a semi CPA and semi affiliate like commission junction and linkshare. However the actual CPA networks like Copeac, Neverblue, Azoogleads, Clickboth etc is the best network to do CPA marketing.

Unfortunately beginners may find it challenging to be accepted to the CPA network because CPA networks especially the big and reliable ( in terms of ethical practices and payments) company can be picky as they only prefer experience publishers for obvious reason, the more successful their publishers become the more they are successful  as a company. The inexperience marketer can be training on the company resources and they usually underperformed compare to the season marketers. So its business sense to be picky.

How to get accepted to the CPA Networks

Fortunately there are resources that can help beginners successfully apply for those CPA networks and more importantly those resources also accelerate the skill of the newbies take advantage of the benefits of the CPA community. I have wrote a review on some of this resources and you can access them by clicking CPA reviews.

The best strategy on approaching the CPA networks especially if you happen to be a newbie is to make sure NOT TO SOUND OR LOOK LIKE  A NEWBIE! Prepare a website with perhaps at least 10 posts on it relating to affiliate marketing or better yet about the CPA marketing. That can be done cheaply by free website like weebly or a blog from blogger.com or wordpress.com. You will need this when they ask for your website. Avoid providing free email address account (such as yahoo.com, gmail.com etc)  if possible. Its also advisable to read up and educate yourself about cpa especially with those networks that contact you by phone as part of their approval process so that you will be comfortable and know what to say if they ask you questions. At the end of the day its a good business practice to know your business and try experience the fruit those knowledge. Faking it may work on the shot run but may not work for the long run. The good news its doable.

Once you are accepted to the CPA networks you will start to direct traffic to their offers and start benefiting from the CPAs.

However I think CPA is for those who have at least have  solid basic understanding of the internet affiliate marketing a ppc experience will be helpful although I don’t think its necessary. If you learn the fundamentals of CPA and proceed with caution in TESTING some of your campaigns then eliminate the unproductive one and refine the profitable campaign then step them up for higher ROI (return on investment) anybody who follows that approach should be OK!

I hope the above info helps explaining what CPA marketing is all about. I will cover more information later on CPA Marketing ranging from research tools to adserver, insertion form etc.

Check out some of the CPA products that we have reviewed

Stay tune and take action!

Pete