What Is CPA Affiliate Marketing?
What Is CPA Affiliate Marketing?
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), otherwise known as Cost Per Action, is a form of affiliate marketing where advertisers pay for a specific form of acquisition or action to be taken. Acquisitions can range from clicks to requests for service, to filling out forms, to installs and downloads depending on the details of the contract. CPA affiliate marketing has become a multi-billion dollar industry and many affiliate marketers partake in CPA affiliate marketing without even realizing it. CPA is simply a certain form of affiliate marketing.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, CPA refers to ways you can earn revenue without actually making a sale. For example, some companies like insurance companies will pay you simply for a lead. If you send someone to their website and that person fills out an insurance quote form, that may be enough to earn you some decent revenue.
First of all, I’m not saying that Google Adsense or Media.net ads will make you rich, because they certainly aren’t the most profitable monetization methods. You’re also going to need a pretty significant amount of traffic for display advertising to work for you. While display ads CAN earn you a full-time income, I’ve personally found display ads to be the “icing on the cake” so to speak. Between Media.net ads and Google Adsense ads, I earned approximately $45,000 last year. Keep in mind that type of income from CPA advertising has taken me YEARS to build, but that’s not pocket change!! So while I don’t think CPA should be your main monetization plan, CPA shouldn’t be ignored, either.
The Key Differences Between Affiliate Marketing And CPA Affiliate Marketing
Though CPA affiliate marketing is a type of affiliate marketing, there are some key differences. Affiliate marketers are basically proxy advertisers that work to promote a brand as well as their products and services. Affiliate marketers are then paid any time someone makes a purchase based on their recommendations.
Let me give you a specific example. I have a website that reviews dog food over at DogFoodInsider.com. On that site I have an affiliate partnership with the Amazon Associates Affiliate Program. If someone clicks on any of my links to Amazon.com and makes a purchase, I get a commission. It doesn’t even matter what they buy, so my reviews can be honest. I get to promote only the highest quality dog food and I get paid to do it! Pretty cool, right?
But unlike traditional affiliate marketing, CPA is not reliant on a sale. Instead you are really just creating a lead for another company. CPA is often compared to lead generation as opposed to direct sales. You’ll notice on my dog food review site I also have some Media.net display ads, so that site has a nice mixture of CPA as well as direct sales affiliate revenue. Diversification is the only way to truly survive long-term online!
GlobalWide Media
If this is the first time that you’re hearing about them, it’s great to know that they have been providing premium media solutions to some of the largest brands in the world such as Groupon, MindSpark, Jumia, and Hotels.com.
With the basics, this affiliate network has a payment threshold of just $100 and a monthly payment frequency. Affiliates can also get a 5% bonus for every sale made by anyone they refer to them. The network provides the affiliate with a dedicated manager as well, to help boost your lead generation.
Though this is something that even the best CPA networks can be guilty of – poor user experience. After some poking around we discovered that they have a lot of nice offers in enough niches to satisfy most affiliates.
All the attractive details about your offers are embedded within the membership area as with most of the best CPA networks. However, they assure publishers that they vet each of their advertisers carefully and only accept high-converting offers.
Make Money With CPA Guide
Alright, this is what you came here for. You want to learn how to make money with CPA marketing and below you will find a 6 step guide on how to get started and earn money by promoting CPA offers.
Keep in mind though, that knowing what is CPA affiliate marketing and how to do it, is not really enough, you also need to put everything you read here into practice, do a lot of tests, constantly optimize things, promote different offers in various niches and GEOs and striving to get better results all the time.
This is not too advanced, I’m keeping it simple so that you can learn the basics first, and later on, when I post CPA case studies on the blog or send you some awesome CPA tips to your email, you will already know some of the things that I’m talking about.
If you’re a more experienced affiliate marketer and you already know what is CPA affiliate marketing, then you shouldn’t really be reading this guide LOL. You should be out there creating hundreds of CPA campaigns on multiple traffic sources and getting that money haha. I will have some good stuff for you in the future though.
1. Apply to CPA Networks
Okay, so this is your first step. You need to apply and join a CPA network in order to get started with CPA marketing. In recent years though, this process has become easier, and you also have access to many CPA affiliate networks that are newbie and beginner-friendly.
Back when I was starting making money with CPA, there weren’t that many networks to choose from, you had like 4-5 main ones, and if you weren’t approved in any of those, then you were stuck with some lower tier CPA companies that had mediocre offers that were not paying that great.
You also had to do phone interviews (I don’t know if that’s still the case anymore, it probably still is for some elite networks out there), and you had to have a great website or know a lot about driving paid targeted traffic to their offers in order to get approved.
You see, the networks want to ensure that their offers are not going to get spammed with crap traffic that doesn’t convert, or potentially put them or their advertisers in danger of getting reported or sued, or shamed online, etc.
- Your experience with CPA or affiliate marketing in general
- What type of traffic you can send to their offers (for example Search Engine traffic, PPC, PPV, push, native, display ads, email, etc)
- If you’re familiar with certain verticals/niches (for example if you have a health blog and you’re already promoting other affiliate health products with success or if you’re just starting out but you would like to focus on health offers)
- The top countries of your website’s traffic, or countries you normally promote using paid traffic
- If you already make money with other CPA or affiliate networks (if they ask for this and your answer is yes, then you would have to include the average amount of money you make monthly or sometimes even be asked to tell them what other CPA networks you work with and provide them with screenshots, if you don’t make any money yet, just leave it at
Summary: What is CPA Affiliate Marketing
Not only time, but you also need to spend some money, sure you can do it all for free in theory, but in practice things will be much better if you are able to spend a few dollars on a domain name, for example, hosting, and useful tools like trackers and spying tools, paid traffic, etc.
Of course, this CPA marketing guide only covers the basics, and the steps you should follow to get started with CPA affiliate marketing, but there are more advanced techniques, tips, and in-depth case studies that I will share with you in the future, so stay tuned and subscribe to be the first one to read them.
Also since this is a completely FREE guide, don’t forget to share it, because there are many people out there that are interested in making money with CPA but they never know how to get started… well now they don’t have any excuses.
or pick the lowest amount
) - How did you find out about their CPA network (an easy one, either add Google, internet marketing forums, AffPaying, or why not, NetHustler.com)
- Your Phone number, and Skype or Telegram ID (they will try to make contact with you so make sure you add these ones correctly, sometimes they do a short interview so they need to get in touch with you)
Some networks will also ask you for an established website (meaning your site should be up and running by now and have some decent quality content on it). These days I don’t see too many networks asking for a website but it still happens though, so it’s good to be prepared though.
You can also tell them that you create landing pages for every CPA offer that you wish to run, so you don’t actually have a website but you will use landing pages for promoting their offers. But again it might be good to have some sort of domain/website ready.
2. Search for top-performing CPA offers
One option is to straight up ask your AM (affiliate manager) for the top converting CPA offers of their network. Almost every respectable CPA affiliate network will assign you an affiliate manager when you sign up and join them.
Frequently Asked Questions About CPA Marketing
A CPA affiliate network is a company that creates relationships between advertisers and publishers. Advertisers supply the CPA offers and publishers (you), promote these CPA offers, and earn money. Without these CPA affiliate networks, you wouldn’t really be able to make money with CPA, simply because you would have nowhere to get these CPA offers from.
Yes, CPA marketing still works, in fact it might work even better now in 2022 than it did 10 or 15 years ago. You have so many tools and resources to put to use that it’s very unlikely you wouldn’t earn any money with CPA affiliate marketing these days.
It’s up to you really. If you put in the work, CPA marketing can bring you over 800,000 per month easily. Most affiliates sit in between the 800,000-$10,000 per month bracket in my opinion. Of course, some CPA marketers can earn more, and some earn less. And in order to make A LOT of money from CPA you have to constantly run, promote, test, optimize, and scale lots of CPA offers, super-affiliates run hundreds of different campaigns every day!
Yes, CPA marketing is completely legal, and it’s a very good way of making money online. But you have to be careful because on some networks you might find some shady CPA offers that are either affiliate scams or a total rip-off. Also be careful when promoting branded products from advertisers that clearly have no relationship to those brands (for example Apple, Amazon, etc).
You don’t need a website to do CPA marketing. But I highly recommend you to promote your CPA offers through either a landing page or a website, because not only do you provide extra value to visitors, but you also have a lot of chances to increase your overall CPA profits.
Stephen is the author and founder of the NetHustler blog. With over 14 years of experience in Online Marketing, he now runs a number of successful websites, and occasionally shares his experience & knowledge on this blog.
GlobalWide Media
If this is the first time that you’re hearing about them, it’s great to know that they have been providing premium media solutions to some of the largest brands in the world such as Groupon, MindSpark, Jumia, and Hotels.com.
With the basics, this affiliate network has a payment threshold of just $100 and a monthly payment frequency. Affiliates can also get a 5% bonus for every sale made by anyone they refer to them. The network provides the affiliate with a dedicated manager as well, to help boost your lead generation.
Though this is something that even the best CPA networks can be guilty of – poor user experience. After some poking around we discovered that they have a lot of nice offers in enough niches to satisfy most affiliates.
All the attractive details about your offers are embedded within the membership area as with most of the best CPA networks. However, they assure publishers that they vet each of their advertisers carefully and only accept high-converting offers.
Conclusion:
So, these are some of the best CPA networks that you can currently find in the market. If you are looking to earn a lot of money, then CPA marketing is the best thing. You can easily earn hundreds of dollars for each sale with a CPA. We have done proper research on all of the CPA networks mentioned above and included the ones that offer the best quality service. There is a huge variety of CPA networks present in the market, and you should choose a CPA network after looked at everything they have to offer.
If you want to increase your sales and develop your brand more effectively, then CPA marketing is the best thing for a specific purpose. We have told you everything about CPA networks, and now it’s up to you. Remember always to choose the CPA network that provides offers specific to your niche and location, providing you with the most revenue.
Resources:
https://www.affiliatemarketertraining.com/what-is-cpa-affiliate-marketing/
https://www.nichepursuits.com/best-cpa-networks/
https://nethustler.com/what-is-cpa-affiliate-marketing/
https://www.nichepursuits.com/best-cpa-networks/
https://www.theadreview.com/best-cpa-networks/