We may have heard CPA but what is exactly is CPA? CPA stands for “cost per action” or sometimes referred as “cost per acquisition” which should be the right term when saying CPA as most CPA offers by owners or advertisers are about acquiring something, typically a lead, sales or email address.
Cost Per Action is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement.
In CPA, you will earn if someone takes an action such as entering their email address in the form in response from an advertisement or offers from websites. Usually it lures surfers to enter their email address in exchange of something free gadgets like iPods, laptops or free trial of products like nutritional supplements or Free $500 gift cards. But there are certain conditions that apply, like it’s only available to country in the United States or Canada or you need to enter your postal address to receive the item.
Only advertisers will determine which desired action to be perform in the part of the potential client. The common actions perform are:
1. a product is being purchased
2. someone is filling their details in the form (email address confirmation)
3. someone is entering their ZIP code
4. response to a free trial offer
5. entering their cellphone number
Also they impose restrictions such as if incentivized traffic is allowed or not or search traffic, social media and email broadcast is allowed or not allowed. CPA Networks will have these information on the campaign description and on their terms and conditions. Affiliates are bound with overall campaign rules and restrictions so reading each campaign description is a must before starting to place your affiliates links anywhere.
In CPA, it involves around three players, The Affiliates, The Advertisers and the CPA Networks.
CPA Affiliates are those who are promoting CPA Advertisers offers in the CPA Networks. Affiliates are approved by CPA Networks in a case to case basis and often times in an overly strict policy. They ask for certain information about affiliates, ask questions over the phone, ask about your background regarding your experience, etc. before you are officially accepted as an affiliate. Whereas if you are an affiliate say for example for a Clickbank vendor, you just stick your username and you can begin promoting Clickbank products and services to your website or blog.
CPA Advertisers on the other hand, are those who give CPA offers that the affiliates will be going to promote. Advertisers provide the tools like banners ads in different sizes, the email template newsletters in text and HTML format, they are called Creatives.
Also they want you to only use them and not to change or modify these creatives. Sometimes trademark names and entities are not to be use in promoting these offers for fear of confronting legal problems for both Advertisers and the trademark owner.
CPA Networks are those companies that act as a middle man between Advertisers and Affiliates. They provide the members login area for both Advertisers and Affiliates for the creatives they wanted or provide. They provide Affiliate Managers for CPA affiliates to attend to their inquiries, problems and overall business activities. They also give you unique affiliate links and affiliates can get their needed creatives inside the website member’s area.
They update affiliates when new offers are available, and more importantly they will process affiliate commissions in the form of check or through Paypal.
These are the very basics of CPA and how each of the players in this business played and much of these setup not many are not aware of because in some way, some of the big players are operating in these spectrum of the market, where big profits are made. Unlike the traditional affiliate-to-vendor relationship where you earn percentage commission when each sale is made and signing up as an affiliate is open for everyone. So easy to join, and there is no restriction. In CPA it’s whole lot different.
In my next blog post, I will talking in depth about affiliates and advertisers and how you can play in each of them and profit from CPA.
You will learn how to be a CPA Affiliate, tips on how to get approved, and tutorials how to market or promote CPA offers. There are also courses that will help affiliates learn CPA, e.g. camtasia tutorials showing “how-to” video step by step, guides in promoting in PPC, Media Ads, and Social Networks.
As a CPA Advertisers, you will learn how to increase conversion on your landing pages, how to create compelling creatives, where to find CPA networks and so on. And like the affiliates, there are also trainings and course available in the market like the CPA Tsunami, now called Sales Tsunami by Mike Hill.
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