Imagine, you are an affiliate marketer who's been terrifically successful with a cost per action (CPA) campaign selling high-quality branded phones. Then the advertiser pulls back. You know the market for phones is hot. Quickly, working with your ad network, which also offers cost per click (CPC), you launch a new, generic phone campaign. That campaign takes off too, and your profits soar.
This scenario could become more frequent in the future. It differs from most existing affiliate marketing scenarios in one critical way: the ad network has the capability to offer both CPA and CPC, and the affiliate has the flexibility to utilize both, either in tandem or in separate campaigns.
By using a single network, affiliates have the flexibility and diversification they need to find the right fit for each scenario. With many advertisers’ media plans utilizing multiple options, this hybrid payment opportunity is particularly timely and valuable now.
The single CPA-CPC partner model also provides another important benefit. The online advertising industry is subject to complex, fast-changing compliance and regulatory guidelines. By working with a single ad network that focuses on these issues for CPA and CPC, affiliates can feel more comfortable that they’re operating in full compliance.
Simply having access to CPA and CPC within a single network doesn’t guarantee that affiliates will be successful. To truly benefit,affiliates must thoroughly understand both CPC and CPA models, including their benefits and drawbacks, and know how and when to deploy them to achieve their objectives.
An Account Manager should be your trusted ally at your network of choice, someone who fully understands your business model and can provide timely and relevant recommendations based on actual publisher performance.
Affiliates who have achieved success with CPA or CPC campaigns can work with a single ad network, offering a hybrid CPA-CPC model to make quick, informed decisions about running additional offers within that network’s same category or verticals.
Affiliates who have achieved success with CPA or CPC campaigns can work with a single ad network, offering a hybrid CPA-CPC model to make quick, informed decisions about running additional offers within that network’s same category or verticals.
Education is just one industry where this strategy can be successful. An affiliate may have chosen CPC to help hedge against the volatility of individual schools’ budgets in the EDU vertical. When it becomes clear, however, that people responding, perhaps because they can’t find jobs or associate late summer with back-to-school, the affiliate can switch to or add a branded-education CPA campaign to help meet the needs of the targeted audience.
In a different scenario, where the campaign or offer is backed by offline spend such as TV, radio or print, and brand recognition is high, the affiliate may start with a CPA offer. Not only does a highly-branded CPA offer instill trust in customers, it also benefits from the offline buzz and capitalizes on existing goodwill the brand has already generated. Once the product category is firmly established and publicized -- think the generic “blankets with sleeves” that followed Snuggies -- a CPC campaign might be a logical complement or next step.
The table below illustrates some important points to understand as you consider running campaigns with multiple payment methods. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. For the savvy affiliate marketer, combining both types of campaigns my help maximize the ROI from your traffic.
Having a strong relationship with your ad network also offers another big advantage. Affiliates can be confident -- provided they choose the right partner -- that whatever campaign or offer they run satisfies both regulatory and compliance guidelines.
Typically, affiliates depend on their networks to protect them by providing creative assets, offers and instructions that meet compliance standards. This is crucial because very few affiliates have the time, training and/or expertise to master the legal landscape. A combined CPA-CPC network offers increased scrutiny over a wider range of online advertising issues, as well as a broad awareness of compliance requirements for different industries and mediums, because of its sheer volume of advertisers and tens of thousands of campaigns. Even the biggest CPA networks can’t offer this level of oversight.
Affiliates looking for innovative ways to utilize their resources and build their businesses could steer this trend towards networks that provide easy access to CPA and CPC. That single point of contact adds a critical dimension of speed, flexibility and diversification.
In today’s dynamic and challenging performance marketing landscape, affiliates must use every available resource in their quest for growing revenues. CPA and CPC are effective mediums on their own, however, when used in tandem as complementary tools, they can powerfully transform an affiliate’s business and profitability.