CPA (Cost per action) marketing is the most scalable and ROI-enhancing way to monetize your website. If you’re a blogger, website owner, or work online, when it comes to marketing your business online, your return on investment (ROI) is crucial to your success.

When you invest in digital ads, you’ll notice that it can be challenging to maintain a strong enough return on investment to grow your marketing efforts. If you’re interested in finding out what CPA marketing is and how CPA marketers make money with cost-per-action marketing, you’re in the right place.

In this article, you will learn how to get started with CPA marketing in 6 steps.

What Is CPA Marketing?

CPA marketing, also known as cost-per-action marketing, is a form of affiliate marketing that offers a commission to the affiliate when a specific action is performed.

In this advertising model, publishers are paid on a per-action basis. Every time a user clicks on an affiliate link and performs a specific action, which can range from purchasing, getting a quote, sending an email, creating an account, taking a short survey, signing up for a free trial, filling out a form, Etc.

Thus, with CPA marketing, affiliates can choose to promote sales offers (CPS) for which they will receive a commission on a sale and offers that pay for leads (CPL) that have no cost to the user. In other words, the user performs a free action, but the affiliate marketer will earn money.

CPA marketing is the same as affiliate marketing, except that in the latter case, you have to sell products to get paid, while in the case of CPA marketing, you will get paid even if the product is not sold.

Many CPA networks promote these campaigns through affiliates and businesses, and e-commerce sites worldwide can leverage CPA marketing to create different online marketing offers and campaigns.

How Does CPA Marketing Work?

To better understand how CPA marketing works, you need to know more about the people involved.

– Affiliate or publisher: The influencer (blogger, brand, company) who promotes a company or product to drive traffic to the e-commerce site and make a specific conversion.

– Company or advertiser: The brand that wants to partner with an affiliate to drive quality traffic to the company’s site and increase sales, generate leads, or boost conversions.

Unlike other marketing approaches where you pay to advertise your brand with no guarantee of sales, CPA marketing allows you to pay only after the sale, at a rate you determine.

In other words, in CPA marketing, you, as an advertiser, can spend your money only on actual business results – leads, conversions, and sales – instead of focusing your online ad spend on brand awareness metrics such as impressions and clicks. 

– CPA Network: This platform connects the affiliate who wants to make money promoting products with the companies who want their products promoted.

E-commerce companies use CPA networks to find and partner with influencers. Influencers who want to make money doing what they love and engaging their audience can turn to CPA networks to find companies that want to pay them to use and promote their products.

Influencers send their audience to the company’s website and earn a commission on every sale or lead conversion. Conversely, companies earn money from the traffic generated by influencers. 

Affiliate Manager (AM): a person who manages an affiliate program for a merchant.

 He is responsible for recruiting, engaging with affiliates, and website owners, sending them new promotions and generating regular revenue for the merchant.

What Are the Different Types of CPA Offers?

There are many different types of CPA offers, but the most common types of CPA offers are:  

– Cost per sale (CPS):

You only get paid for each purchase made from your affiliate link in CPS offers. 

– Cost Per Lead (CPL):

In Cost per lead or CPL offers, the affiliate gets paid when the user makes a free registration, fills out a form, submits their email address, Etc.  

Cost per lead is the simplest way for a CPA that allows you to earn money, even if you are a beginner, by promoting offers.

– Cost per installation (CPI): 

The Cost per installation is the payouts every time someone installs an application or downloads software or an extension. Some networks provide CPI offers.

– Credit Card Submit (CCs):

 The affiliate gets paid when the user submits their credit card information without making a payment, for example, for a free trial.

What Are the Benefits of CPA Marketing?

CPA marketing is very cost-effective when you target the right audience as an affiliate and connect with quality influencers as a business. Compared to other e-commerce marketing methods, CPA marketing offers several advantages, including:

-Easy to implement and promote

To use CPA marketing, you need very little initial capital. It would help if you got started with this marketing technique. When you partner with a trusted CPA affiliate network, you can use your website, choose a CPA offer, and start getting traffic.

-You don’t need to sell anything

In CPA marketing, you don’t need to convince people to buy something to earn money but ask them to fill out a short form or insert their email address Etc. It’s a significant factor because it’s usually much harder to convince someone to pull out their credit card and make a purchase.

– Low risk

CPA marketing does not require a considerable investment of time or capital. It is a very low-risk method for advertisers, as they only pay for desired actions after they occur, unlike paid traffic, where you pay for people to come to your site through ads.

As an advertiser, you do not pay for traffic that does not convert. If an affiliate’s referrals continually offer low-rate conversions, you can diversify your companions and shift your focus to a more successful influencer.

-Amazing revenue potential

CPA marketing types generate higher quality traffic and offer better value than most traffic sources. It makes CPA marketing amazingly profitable, with substantial earning potential.

If you choose your CPA offers correctly and have a website that receives hundreds of visitors daily, you can get a good number of conversions daily. Also, the more sales you generate, the higher your commissions can be. 

– Extend your marketing outreach

As an advertiser, CPA marketing allows you to build brand awareness by reaching the affiliate’s audience and getting your brand message out faster and more consistently to as many people as possible.

Almost every domain and vertical use CPA marketing, and you can always find an affiliate website in every vertical that is available for partnerships through a CPA network.

How to Start CPA Marketing In 6 Steps? 

Step 1: Build a Website

It’s much easier to start your CPA marketing efforts by creating a website to develop an audience. It is relatively easy and inexpensive to create a website today. Once your site is in place, you can optimize it for search engines to have a better chance of ranking. From there, you’re ready to add CPA offers to your content.

CLICK HERE TO CREATE YOUR WEBSITE NOW

Step 2: Choose a Niche

Once you have decided to start CPA Marketing, the second step you need to do is to select and choose the niche or category that you want to target. 

Learn More: 14 Best Niches for Affiliate Marketing

Step 3: Apply to CPA Networks

Once you have chosen your niche, the next step is finding an offer you want to promote to a CPA network. There are many CPA affiliate networks available, and applying for and joining these CPA networks is quite simple. Still, depending on your network, the requirements can be challenging.

 Networks that want to ensure that their offers won’t get spammed with traffic that doesn’t convert will ask you for basic but essential information, such as:

Your experience with CPA or affiliate marketing, whether you are already making money with other CPA or affiliate networks, the type of traffic you can send to their offers, and whether you have an established and functional website with decent quality content. 

You have the choice to search for offers based on price, keyword, category, or network. Here are a few things you need to know when searching for offers: 

Traffic types:

It’s all about how you can promote that offer. You can see the traffic methods on each network, such as email, contextual, display, search, incentive, social media, and mobile native advertising. 

All CPA offers have rules, which inform you about the allowed promotion methods to drive traffic to this offer and the ones that do not prohibit spam traffic, phishing, or sending email traffic, incentives, and mobile ads to this offer Etc.

Some offers allow you to promote any way you want, but others don’t let you do so and define the type of traffic they qualify for that offer.

If an offer allows you the Incentive traffic type, you can give your visitors an incentive to get a lead like a free ebook.

You can give your visitors non-incentive traffic to get a lead if necessary, such as social media, email, search engines, native traffic, mobile traffic, or any other traffic that is not incentive-based. Also, whether this traffic is mobile optimized, an offer can be mobile optimized or not. 

Authorized country means that the CPA is where you can promote this offer. 

If this offer is only for one country, you are only allowed to promote an offer in that country, and you will only get paid if the user comes from that country and completes the offer.

Pay per call offer means you will get paid when someone clicks on your referral link and makes a call.

Types of commissions offered.

Per Lead is a fixed price of the amount you will be paid after completing the lead or sale.

EPC (earnings per click): means that the CPA network pays you equally for each click. 

Sales mean you will be paid when someone buys the product through your affiliate link.

Rev Share or % Share: It means that you will receive the determined commission percentage after providing a sale.

Step 4: Create Landing Pages

When using a landing page in CPA marketing to promote products, it functions as a transition page between the visitor and the final offer to explain and present all the best things about the product, service or offer you are promoting.

Create a landing page to convert as many visitors as possible by talking about the product you want to promote, why it is so unique, and how they can get their free trial only if they go through your links.

You need to provide more information to make your users more excited and take the next step by clicking on your CPA offer link and taking action.

 For this, you can also write content on the product you want to promote, giving the best information about it to your readers and presenting the product in question as the solution, citing all the features and benefits of the offer you are promoting. 

You can then place a button and text like “click the button below and sign up for your free trial.” 

Learn More: Landing Page 10 Essential Elements that make it convert

Step 5: Promote Your Content to Generate Traffic

Once your landing pages are up and running or you’ve built your website with good content, it’s time to send traffic to them. There are many ways to drive traffic to your website or landing pages.

The best way is to create quality content and SEO on your website to get free organic search traffic. But you can also do paid advertising for CPA marketing. The most popular ways are as follows:

Promote via search engines:

You can also promote your CPA offers via Google, Bing, and Yahoo search engines. The advantage of advertising via search engines is that you can display your ads on your keywords, which makes your ads appear in the first search results and get more traffic and more chances to be clicked when someone searches for those keywords.  

In addition, you only have to pay when someone clicks on your ads.  But even though you only have to pay when someone clicks on your ads in search engine advertising, it will be a bit expensive to pay for each click. 

Promote via social platforms:

Social media is another way to promote CPA offers or the products you want to the right people through ads. So, you have the option to run your CPA marketing campaign on major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, which offer the best advertising opportunities.

 You can promote your CPA offers, products, and deals on these platforms starting from $1 per day. 

Promote via native ads:

Another good way to promote CPA products is through native advertising. There are also native advertising networks like Outbrain, Taboola, RevContent, Content. ad, and Mgid. You can advertise on these networks and promote your CPA offers. 

Promote via push notifications:

You can also promote your CPA marketing offers via push notification ad networks to generate more leads and sales. There are networks like Megapu.sh that you can leverage to do push notifications.

Step 6: Track and Optimize Your CPA Marketing Campaign

Tracking your CPA marketing campaign is especially important if you are paying for traffic. Tracking your CPA marketing campaign lets you know which keywords brought you leads, which landing page worked better, which product gets more conversions, or whether you got more tips from mobile or desktop devices. 

By constantly monitoring your tracking data, you can make the necessary changes and optimize your campaigns to make them even more profitable. There are many tracking solutions for CPA marketing, like RedTrack.io, that you can try for free. 

The Best CPA Marketing Networks

Here are some of the best CPA marketing network platforms

 MaxBounty

Max Bounty works as a legitimate intermediary between sponsors who want to buy advertising and over 20,000 qualified affiliates who focus on the marketing needs of merchants.

You are more likely to be approved by MaxBounty if you have a website registered for a few months. In addition, MaxBounty will call you to conduct a phone interview to determine the promotion and marketing techniques you will use to promote MaxBounty. Upon approval, you can log in to the MaxBounty website and get links to the CPA offers you will be promoting.

Newcomers to MaxBounty have access to a plenitude of training materials, and the program offers weekly payments so they can deliver high-quality traffic to the merchant’s site.

 Perform[cb]

Clickbooth has been around since 2002 and is unified with Adperio and Ignite OPM under the global Perform[cb] brand. Perform[cb] enables brands to acquire new customers through additional digital channels on a pay-for-performance model.

Membership in Perform[cb] as an advertiser is free. Advertisers can view the traffic performance of each affiliate and, if they wish, manage budgets, payments, schedules, and campaigns themselves or let the Perform[cb]team do it.

Getting started with them would require that you submit your CPA marketing experiences and also seek to tell them your traffic sources and how much money you currently make. You must also describe your marketing and promotional recommendations in about 100 words. 

Perform[cb] has many support teams to help its advertisers and publishers meet their needs continually.

 Peerfly

Peerfly, launched in 2009, operates on a CPA basis and has won several CPA awards, including the “Best CPA Network” title in 2016. Peerfly offers several types of commissions, including CPA (cost per action), CPL (Cost per lead), and CPS (Cost per sale). 

Depending on the offer you sign up for, you may be eligible for commissions for leads you generate, completed actions, or purchases that users make on your website.

Peerfly’s range of offers is extensive. If you are a website owner, you can choose the suggestions that suit the tone of your website or publishing platform and then request approval from advertisers by performing your verification on the forum.

Peerfly’s minimum payment amount is lower than most similar platforms, starting at $50. The payment timeframe is 30 days net, 15 days net, or even weekly payments, but you need to verify the details with your assigned affiliate manager. 

Peerfly states that the application process for offers is quite long and challenging to complete. In the initial phase, you will have to provide all the basic personal information requested by the company, like your name, address, and website details, and information about the marketing tactics you used in the process.

Once the verification process is complete, you can perform affiliate marketing tasks with Peerfly. 

Admitad

Admitad, launched in 2009 in Germany, is an affiliate marketing network that focuses on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) payment model for its users. 

 The company provides anti-fraud technology, cross-device tracking, deep linking options, and the right services to advertisers and publishers to run high-performance affiliate campaigns. Affiliates only need a minimum of $10 for payments.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has given you the information you need to get started with CPA marketing. CPA marketing is a customizable and easy-to-launch strategy and a way to expand and spread your brand awareness while building strong relationships with partner websites.

Affiliates can also benefit from CPA marketing by choosing offers that reflect their own brand and website, allowing them to monetize their site content with relevant banners and contextual links.

Integrate CPA marketing into your strategic plans to extend the reach of your website, maintain a high ROI and feel a real business impact. But remember that learning everything there is to know about CPA marketing and how to apply it correctly to make money takes time.