What is CPA marketing?

CPA marketing is a branch of affiliate marketing where affiliates get paid every time the customers complete an action. CPA stands for Cost per acquisition or cost per action.

The main difference between CPA marketing and traditional affiliate marketing is the point of the funnel where a conversion is measured.

In traditional affiliate marketing, the conversion happens only when a sale is made, whether it is a sale for a single product or a recurring membership. You only get paid when the advertiser makes money.

However, in CPA marketing, you have different points of the funnel to measure as an action, and you get paid by making people do that action. This could be a download, an email sign-up, a mobile subscription, an app installation, or even a sale.

Hence, it’s easier to get started with CPA marketing because you can focus on an upper point of the funnel while the advertiser will focus on the lower side of it.

To give you an example, if an advertiser sells a service that generates $100 of profit per transaction and on average they get 1 sale every 50 email subscribers, they can pay you $2 per lead you send to them.

This way you can focus on sending email sign-ups (leads) to them and getting paid $2 every time someone signs up. This is called lead generation.

However, keep in mind that they will adjust payouts based on the performance in the backend. If you suddenly start sending 100 leads per day but your leads don’t convert as well as before, they might reduce your pay per lead. Let’s say only one out of 100 email subscribers ends up buying their service, then you’ll get $1 per lead instead of $2.

On the contrary, if your traffic and marketing campaigns are performing great and you get a sale every 20 leads, they might pay you $5 per lead instead of $2.

It all depends on your performance, as no advertiser is going to keep paying you for your traffic if they don’t make money. Revenue drives everything and this is why affiliate marketing is called performance marketing.

In this course, we’re going to focus on mVAS offers and other mobile-focused offers from Golden Goose.