Ask Me Anything What do you struggle with in CPA?

[Alex admitad]

Hello!
Can anyone share here, what do you think to be an obstacle when you're monetizing traffic in CPA?
How do you think this issue may be solved?

 

[Patrick3333]

for me the most difficult thing is to establish a good landing page, so i really need to test it, and it's not really easy often to do it!

 

[CaramelRocks]

The main struggle I have with CPA is that low payout offers (around $2 to $4) have too low payouts to make an ROI and higher payout offers such as cost per sale generally have low conversion rates even if your targeting is accurate.

List building could be one way to solve this issue, but that requires expertise in a niche to be able to deliver value to subscribers and build a relationship with a list, etc..

I think this is one of the main problems why many people struggle with CPA. Low payout offers aren't profitable and sale offers are too hard to get conversions with generic keywords and most CPA offers don't allow trademark bidding.

 

[eMonetize]

@CaramelRocks

What you are saying is 100% true. I was lucky to figure out a solution for this back when I got started a little over 17 years ago. However, it was just dumb luck and how I got started.

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals (niches) I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the PPL offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. You don't want to get too caught up on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same or possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

I have also done just as good with dating website sign-ups and pretty good with free trial + S/H offers. I also promote a very limited number of offers that are straight up purchase offers. However, mass appeal needs to exist and I look for one of the following to also exists:

1) The product is new and/or novel-unique and you can't purchase it locally or even something similar. I don't waste my time with it once something similar shows up in Walmart.

2) The buyer can truly get what is being offered at a decent discount.

3) Solves a house is on fire type problem.

However, most of the above I will promote on the back-end. Which is why the first thing I look for is mass appeal.

Bottom line, it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

I drive traffic and build responsive email lists using fresh / targeted 3rd party email data and generating real-time, co-reg leads.

3rd party data is email leads of users that have shown an interest in a specific PPL niche or offer and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record of each user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

Co-reg is simply where I place an ad for a specific PPL offer on a co-registration network and their publishers display it at the time a user is signing up with them and can request more info about my offer. When a user requests more info their contact info is then automatically imported into my ESP account and they are sent a message regarding the offer. Which I pay on a per lead basis.

So with the above, I am getting fresh / targeted leads specifically for the PPL offers I'm promoting. However, they are not typically as responsive as a high-quality opt-in list that you build yourself. So to compensate for this you need to work with higher volume. This is not a big deal since the cost is much cheaper and highly scalable compared to traditional list building methods.

When mailing, you want to skim off the top any fast-track conversions and then for long-term success, you want to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting and removing unresponsive users...converting the leads from quantity to quality and into quality responsive lists. Which you can then also cross-promote other offers on the back-end.

There is really more to it than it sounds, but done right it can be extremely profitable.

Something to think about

 

[CaramelRocks]

@eMonetize.

That's interesting. I have previously considered promoting pay per lead offers as I thought it could be a happy medium between low payout offers and offers that are cost per sale. But when I did research, I saw that most PPL offers are in verticals such as loans, debt, etc.. as you mentioned so the CPC is very high with paid traffic so I didn't see how I could make an ROI by promoting PPL offers.

How does the cost of traffic compare with 3rd party email data and PPC?

 

[eMonetize]

@eMonetize.

That's interesting. I have previously considered promoting pay per lead offers as I thought it could be a happy medium between low payout offers and offers that are cost per sale. But when I did research, I saw that most PPL offers are in verticals such as loans, debt, etc.. as you mentioned so the CPC is very high with paid traffic so I didn't see how I could make an ROI by promoting PPL offers.

How does the cost of traffic compare with 3rd party email data and PPC?

With both 3rd party / co-reg you are getting the emails of users that are interested in the specific PPL offer(s) you are promoting. So you are building lists and can follow up and promote additional offers on the back-end. This is night and day compared to just paying for clicks!

However, as I mentioned, there is more to it than just acquiring the data and sending it.

 

[Alex admitad]

for me the most difficult thing is to establish a good landing page, so i really need to test it, and it's not really easy often to do it!

Hi @Patrick3333 Thanks for your response! I agree with you that to establish a good landing page is important. As CPA market and the industry has moved far away from its starting point in Europe and Russia, for example, now to be successful a publisher need to have active audience who are active customers as well, right? Some of our affiliates started from free Facebook group pages, attracted traffic and, then started to monetize it.
@Patrick3333 in which niches do you work? What kind of traffic do you have? Mobile/desktop?

 

[Alex admitad]

Hi @CaramelRocks Thanks for your response! I agree that CPA actually requires work and dedication. You need to learn about
Tell me about the niche and types of offers you are interested in because there are various suggestions across the Internet and every publisher has own preferrable niches to choose from. Which geos do you target and what kind of web site do you have as a source of traffic?

="List building could be one way to solve this issue, but that requires expertise in a niche to be able to deliver value to subscribers and build a relationship with a list, etc..

Yes, I agree with you. It is very important to know what does your audience like because otherwise you may waste time offering them things which they do not actually need. Myself, for example... Every day I get lots of emails, and many of these emails promote something ( ideas, offers, products etc.), that I am not interested in So, I even don't want to read them, right?

 

[Patrick3333]

Hi @Patrick3333 Thanks for your response! I agree with you that to establish a good landing page is important. As CPA market and the industry has moved far away from its starting point in Europe and Russia, for example, now to be successful a publisher need to have active audience who are active customers as well, right? Some of our affiliates started from free Facebook group pages, attracted traffic and, then started to monetize it.
@Patrick3333 in which niches do you work? What kind of traffic do you have? Mobile/desktop?

i work on mobile contents, just on app-installs dude.

 

[Alex admitad]

i work on mobile contents, just on app-installs dude.

I see, do you monetize your traffic already? CPI, right? That's interesting, because we see the raise of mobile globally. And, I personally feel that this trend will be a long-term trend.

 

[Patrick3333]

I see, do you monetize your traffic already? CPI, right? That's interesting, because we see the raise of mobile globally. And, I personally feel that this trend will be a long-term trend.

Yeah monetizing it already, and working to keep it good!

 

[Alex admitad]

Yeah monetizing it already, and working to keep it good!

Did you think about trying CPA also?