How To Make Money Online With CPA Networks Part-1

If you are like most Internet marketers, you’ve probably heard about pay-per-click (PPC), but what is CPA? Sounds like some sort of certified public accounting network, doesn’t it? It’s actually a type of advertising network, similar to how affiliate networks operate, but instead of basing the payout on clicks or sales, they offer a payout based on cost-per-action (CPA), where you get paid for leads you generate to their site that perform a particular action.

CPA-based advertising models are also known by other names. Sometimes you will hear them referred to as “cost per acquisition.” The acquisition is either a sale or some type of information the advertiser is wanting before they will credit the publisher. Another term for CPA is pay-per-action too, in that publishers get paid per some action that a visitor takes on an affiliate’s site. Either way, they are still referring to the type of advertising model that requires some action to be performed by a website visitor before payment is credited to a publisher.

If you haven’t heard about CPA networks, don’t feel bad. They are just starting to heat up in the past few years. Estimates say that traditional affiliate programs that offer a PPC or pay-per-sale model take up about 80% of current affiliate advertising programs. Only approximately 20% of advertisers are opting for CPA, but that is swiftly changing.

Is It An Affiliate Program?

It is a type of affiliate program that works like other affiliate networks with one notable exception: they pay for the action, not the click. Networks offer a meeting place for advertisers and publishers, just like a traditional affiliate network, and payouts are done based on a cost-per-action (CPA). The advertiser in the CPA program will set up a payout for a particular action and publishers can sign up for that offer or not. So, you have the same components of a typical affiliate program: publishers and advertisers.

However, they are usually not exclusive to advertising a particular product or service sales promotion, but can also advertise a survey, a contest, or an email list signup. There are many forms that the action can take and we’ll go over a few of them here.

Types Of Actions

A sale

Yes, an action can still be outlined as a sale, and these would mean more effort, but probably for a higher potential payout.

Fill in a form

Maybe there is a particular form that an advertiser wants filled out in order to credit the publisher. This can be anything from an email signup to a more detailed form that takes in a lot more information.

Survey

Maybe they are running a survey and want to get more input. They can add that action to their CPA, and maybe collect emails at the end.

Subscriptions

You can also get paid if someone signs up for a subscription, like a newsletter subscription.

Expect To Hear More About CPA Networks

If you are an advertiser and you devoted a lot of time to generating a PPC campaign only to find out how people were gaming the system with click fraud, you are probably not too happy with this model now. The truth is that click fraud does take a chunk out of advertising revenues and produces very little benefit for the advertiser. In a PPC model, after all, the visitor may have landed on their website, but they may not have bought anything or signed up even for an email list. So, they essentially never even entered the sales funnel, which starts by knowing something about your visitors, preferably their email address.

That’s why many advertisers are actually shifting more towards a CPA model, because it at least gives them a benefit that they can measure versus the cost of the program. In PPC models, advertisers spent quite a bit of money only to find out later that click fraud meant they may never have had as much traffic as they thought. It might have been the same person harvesting clicks to get paid by abusing the PPC models. This is a real problem for advertisers, so many have decided it is better to pay out for the lead than it is to pay out for a click. And, a lead can be a sale too, it all depends on what the advertiser wants,either way you make money online.

This type of program is far more controllable and quantifiable from the advertisers’ perspective and for that reason it’s gaining in popularity. If it were just the advertisers that were benefiting, you might still find that CPA networks weren’t going to be that popular in the future. But, actually, there are other reasons that also make this model a good choice for publishers. In a CPA model, the payouts can be better than the PPC models and they are far easier to get. The CPA payout can be between $1 and $50, depending on the offer. Since the traffic converts in a higher ratio for CPA models versus pay-per-sale models too, it can lead to a bigger paycheck.

These models are so easy to implement for the Internet marketer, that they don’t even need a website to do them, unlike all the other models. As can be seen, the benefits to both the advertisers and publishers, will mean that we will be hearing more and more about these types of affiliate programs in the future.

End of part 1, will continue in part 2