Best traffic sources for CPA offers
What’s CPA?
CPA (cost per action) – is an advertising model where the affiliate pays the affiliate marketer after a client perform the target action. A major advantage of this payment model is that the advertiser doesn’t spend any funds on ads, while the webmaster understands the exact result they need to secure. Currently, around 70% of all online goods and services are being sold via the CPA model. You use it to work with advertisers directly if you drive large volumes of traffic. For beginner affiliates, there are CPA affiliate programs that have a large selection of offers for various verticals.
Different CPA offers require different target action, here are the most popular ones:
- purchasing a product or service;
- registering or purchasing a subscription;
- installing an app;
- filling out an order form;
- filling out a feedback form;
Currently, you can work via the CPA model in any popular vertical. The easiest offers to promote via CPA are gambling and betting, cryptocurrency and finances and nutra and ecommerce ones.
You can find an offer in a betting or gambling affiliate program. Launching ad campaigns for CPA offers is pretty simple. It’s easier to motivate a user to take a specific action with a call-to-action creative. Also, the CPA model allows you to quickly get your investment back. The average payout period for CPA offers is 15 days.
Main criteria for choosing traffic sources for CPA offers
In order to identify the most effective traffic sources for CPA offers, let’s cover the basic criteria that affect the conversion rate and ROI of the entire ad campaign.
Targeting
With the right goals, you can identify your target audience and significantly preserve your budget. Targeting increases the CTR and CR of your ads. With the CPA model, it’s important to get motivated traffic. If you aim your campaign at a large audience, lots of users will see your ads, but few who will actually follow the link and perform the target action. Most small and large networks let you configure the GEO, display time, age and sex. Social media provides the most extensive targeting options. The networks collect and analyze data about users and their behavior. Such analytics helps draw up an approximate portrait for each users with their age, sex, nationality and interests. Since one of the largest digital footprints a user leaves is the one in social media and search engines, the targeting opportunities in these advertising sources are the most extensive ever.
Expenses
CPA traffic sources can be paid and shareware. Naturally, paid traffic sources are better quality since they let you display your ads to a more relevant audience. Shareware traffic sources are always used as a supplementary instrument.
Nowadays, there is a large selection of ad networks and exchanges where you can find both very cheap sources and more expensive and high-quality traffic. For example, push notification and pop-up traffic is the cheapest one out there, while Google Ads is one of the most expensive. The difference lies in the quality of the CPA traffic: while teasers and push networks provide large volumes of traffic with a small number of targets, titans like Google Ads and Facebook let you reach a narrow audience thanks to targeting settings, down to ad display area and user interests.
Restrictions, possible complications
You should also select a traffic source based on the offer you’re promoting, certain networks block ads promoting gray-hat verticals. Experienced webmasters know how to bypass restrictions, but this requires additional funds. For example, to launch betting and gambling ads on Facebook, you need lots of accounts, cloaking and anti-detect browsers.
Coverage
Before choosing a traffic source, be sure to check which regions the network covers. For example, Facebook isn’t popular in Asia, TikTok and Baidu Ads will provide much better coverage. Since Google is the most popular search engine, it is more likely that you can find your audience using Google Ads in any country, which is why the competition here is the most fierce and the price of traffic is the highest.
Best traffic sources for CPA offers
Among the many paid and shareware traffic sources, we have selected the most suitable ones for launching campaigns promoting CPA offers.
Search engine ads
Search engine ads are most effective because users turn to the search engine with a specific request and are prepared to spend money. Search engine traffic is the most expensive one out there, but the high conversion rate compensates for this.
Most often, the conversion rate reaches 15-20%. Search engine ad networks provide extensive targeting settings. You can set a keyword, GEO (country, area, city or neighborhood), display time, interests and device type. Proper targeting enables you to secure a 70-80% conversion rate.
The cost of search traffic in highly competitive verticals is higher compared to other sources, but a search engine lets you cover 100% of users in the selected GEO.
The main drawback of search engine ads – restrictions on promoting affiliate CPA offers from the gambling, betting and adult verticals. To launch ad campaigns for such offers, you’ll need to use cloaking and have a good number of spare accounts, since they’ll constantly get banned.
Social media
Social media emerged as a place where people could chat and share news, and it’s also the 2nd largest traffic supplier out there.
Social media provides affiliates with the most extensive targeting options available. You can set the user’s age, sex, interests, GEO, display time, promote communities by keyword.
The cost is determined via auction, the bids here are comparable to prices for contextual traffic for a particular GEO. This isn’t exactly the cheapest source, but it’s a high quality one, and with proper targeting, you can secure a decent conversion rate. Suitable for promoting betting affiliate programs, nutra offers, gambling affiliate programs.
Social networks are popular all over the world and, paradoxically, in some regions their coverage exceeds even that of search engines. But the last thing this sector is is homogeneous. Despite Facebook’s total global domination, this network isn’t #1 everywhere by far. Although it IS well represented in almost every GEO;
One of the issues with social media is restrictions regarding the offers you can promote. For example, Facebook doesn’t allow betting and gambling ads. But the policy may be a little less uncompromising in regions where gambling is legal. For example, Facebook allows gambling or medical product ads if it is allowed at the state level. In any case, you should expect some serious moderation of creatives here.
The most popular social networks for affiliate marketing are Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, Pinterest.
Native ads
Native advertising is a reimagined version of banner ads. The design of native ads makes them look more organic and can sometimes be embedded in news feeds. Users are less annoyed by native ads, they don’t cover the main content and don’t cause banner blindness.
Email ads
Email ads serve as an additional communication channel used together with landing pages. It’s a precise tool that helps put the squeeze on clients and help them complete the offer or send a notification and remind them of the brand. But it’s vital that the user agrees to the subscription, otherwise they’ll just mark it as spam and ignore it. An alternative option is to send messages via SMS or instant messengers.
ClickUnder, PopUnder traffic
At one point ad banners that would cover the entire screen and, when the user clicked, redirect the person to the advertiser’s website were present on almost every news and entertainment website. Now they are gradually giving way to native advertising. But they are still actively used, they give good ROI in many verticals that have trouble getting past the mods of other networks.
Push notifications
This promotion format has appeared relatively recently. Push notifications are pop-up messages that are sent to the browser directly from the server even when the site is closed. Their main advantage is that the user willingly agrees to receive them, meaning they won’t irritate them. It’s a cheap promotion method, comparable to teasers. But the CTR and CR are several times higher. Available targeting by GEO, interests, frequency and intervals of impressions.
Mobile traffic
Mobile traffic surpasses desktops in terms of the number of new users. In developing countries, Internet access arrives prior to computers and high speed devices. This is why mobile app ads provide such a high conversion rate there. Mobile traffic is effectively driven to betting and gambling offers, where users are seamlessly redirected to an online casino or bookmaker.
Conclusion
Working via the CPA model is a bit harder than the CPL one. You need to motivate the user not only to follow your link, but to perform the target action as well. In an ad campaign, high-quality, colorful creatives and targeting are the key to that. Working via the CPA model doesn’t mean the webmaster can just do whatever – hard work is still very much on the menu, just like any other business. Still, you can try promoting CPA offers with minimal investments, all you need is a simple website, a social media group and a small ad budget.