Cost Per Action Marketing
In some countries the cpa abbreviation is a job position related to accountancy. Such a person is generally known as a certified public accountant.
In online marketing however the term CPA plays an important role but not as a job position. But first some terminology. Let’s look at the forerunner to CPA just to see how we got to this stage.
We first had CPM which was basically where an advertiser paid a traffic source X number of dollars per thousand impressions. So a CPM of 4 dollars would purchase 4,000 impressions of a banner on the traffic sources site. At a 10 dollar CPM a thousand dollars could by 100,000 impressions. You can buy cpm on the google content network or on facebook.
CPM is still doable and viable in cases where the traffic source can absolutely be trusted. It is difficult to totally weed out the fraud in this area and some traffic sources proved to be unreliable in terms of eliminating autobot fraud.
So the industry moved to CPC which stands for Cost Per Click. In this model, your banner might show 3,000 times but you only paid when someone clicked on it and actually visited your service or product offering online. For a while this proved to be a good model until clickfraud moved in. The model is still viable and still the most widely used but Google, Yahoo and MSN really had to put numerous expensive systems in place to ensure that click fraud didn’t go rampant.
Some pundits are still estimating that clickfraud went as high as 27% and claim that click fraud is still running somewhere between 7 and 15% depending on the search engine involved. Personally, I suspect it may be as little as 2% and as high as 7% but for the benefits we can usually live with this cost of doing business.
Which brings us to CPA which you might easily remember as Cost Per Action, where action is defined by the source willing to pay for the marketing service. The Action might be lead generation or it might an actual sale. Insurance companies and those related to the credit and debit business may sometimes pay up to 50 dollars or more to an affiliate for every lead generated online by potential clients pushed by that affiliate.
Typically, however the insurance company makes a deal with a middle man that becomes known as the cpa network. The network then prequalifies incoming affiliates and determines what incentives to give the affiliates to get the job done in a specific amount of time.
If you are an affiliate looking to get into cpa marketing, its not always easy to get into the larger more reputable cpa networks, even if you have substantial traffic brokering experience.
There are a number of highly recommended online courses available to aid with understanding this deep area and the kinds of monies that can be made by savvy affiliates. Suffice to say that certain affiliates in San Diego are having multiple 6 figure days in one month while others are still struggling with the basic concepts and losing substantive funds on PPC traffic brokerage purchases.
‘Free Advertising’ – This may be a great way to start out if you are limited on funds. But this is going to be slower than paid advertising and will take a lot more time. And time is money so figure out how much you’re worth and monitor your time.
