CPA Networks

Summary:

CPA Networks are simply brokers between advertisers and publishers, where publishers are paid per ACTION defined by the advertiser. Hence the name, Cost Per Action (or Acquisition) Networks.

Name of the pattern:

CPA Network

When to use the pattern:

Narrow "CPA Network" meaning: When you have or know how to get high quality traffic and you can get into a good CPA Network.

Wide "CPA Network" meaning: When you want make money by promoting other people and companies products, whether dedicated or complementary to selling your own products.

How to use the pattern:

Pick good CPA Networks, apply, get approved, start sending quality traffic to the offer.
For narrow "CPA Network" meaning the tricky part is the step 3: getting approved.

Attribution:

Very old, in fact terminology of "narrow" CPA comes from pre-Internet age, when advertisers used mass media publishers to present their offers, hence "advertisers" and "publishers" instead of "merchants"/"vendors" and "affiliates".

Related patterns:

Affiliate marketing

Related anti-patterns:

None

Details and comments:

Generally, CPA Network is simply a broker between somebody trying to sell, and somebody willing to advertise. In this definition, affiliate networks like ClickBank, PayDotCom, CommissionJunction, they are all also CPA Networks.

However, it seems that a new, much narrower definition of CPA networks evolves in the Internet marketing. In this meaning, "CPA Network" is only applied to closed systems, where the network approves applicants before they can advertise, and normally most applications are rejected.

While it looks arrogant to most people, being picky has a reason. CPA Networks work with large traditional companies that are usually highly alert to the ways their brand is exposed to the public. On ClickBank everybody can register, slap together a pseudo-blog with 2-3 PLR articles and start advertising ClickBank offers. It's unlikely that he will make much money with that, but still it's possible. Many traditional large companies find it detrimental to their brand and image to be featured on such sites. Some may say, it's arrogance, but that's rom where arrogance of CPA networks come, they just pass it from their clients.

A side note: why do I call it arrogance? A short answer is that the world changes and ambition of large companies to control their brands are going the way of dinosaurs and dreams of the recording industry to prevent MP3 format from being used. The companies, that get it, know that they cannot control public anymore and learning the new way to live and prosper in the new world. Read Seth Godin books to get a much more detailed answer to that question.

Anyway, currently "CPA Network" terms todays seems to be mostly applied to the affiliate networks specializing on offers from large companies with large advertising budgets. It means that sometimes offers in CPA networks pay per lead or maybe even per click, and they may pay ridiculous amount of money for that. So, if you are in, that may be very profitable. When the offer is so good, some barriers to entry are inevitable, in fact, barriers to entry may be the reason why those offers are so attractive. These barriers are acceptance into CPA networks.

In the last months I've seen 2 or 3 training programs promising top teach how to get accepted into CPA networks. Just last week Mike Hill was promoting his training program "CPA Tsunami" although it seemed to be more about getting into CPA Network with your own product making others advertise it. Another program specifically targeted to acceptance into CPA networks as affiliates/publishers was released a month or two ago. The latest one comes from Mike Filsaime and called AffiliateJump (naturally, .com). It's not completely clear who else is involved, but apparently Omar Martin and Joe Holland are also on board. This program is not just about getting in, but rather about getting into CPA Networks through the syndication through AffiliateJump, plus automatically built websites optimized for both CPA Networks requirements and SEO.