CPA Marketing and Expectations

There's often significant confusion amongst buyers about how CPA marketing works. Here a few pointers to keep in mind when planning a campaign.

1. It takes time to get a CPA campaign up.
Your network or agency usually must recruit publishers to run the offer and this can take 1-3 weeks to really get traction.

2. Payout, Creative, Landing Page, and Lead Completion Flow are your most important variables.
Without the right mix, no campaign will succeed.
Landing Pages should have only one call to action and without it, the campaign will likely suffer.

Lead Completion Flow -- aka the user experience from landing page to confirmation page -- should be as simple as possible. As with the landing page, there should only be one action per page.

Payout should be as high as the advertiser is able to pay. Remember that you are competing in a marketplace for remnant inventory and its hypercompetitive. If you do not start a campaign with your best foot forward, your campaign may never start. In general, the payout should amount to 3 months value of the customer to the advertiser.

Creative is critical. Test different messaging, designs, look/feel. Be relentless as this is the one variable that you have the most flexibility in changing.

Google's share of US searches creeped upwards to 47% of all searches in December 2006. According to comScore, the breakout of searches is as follows:
* Google - 3.2 billion
* Yahoo - 1.9 billion
* MSN - 713 million
* Ask network - 363 million
* Time Warner 335 million

Despite the dominance of Google, the door remains open for someone to innovate and gain marketshare. Wikisari, for example, wants to enables users to vote on the quality of the results (Digg style).

On the M&A Front, AOL has offered to buy TradeDoubler for approximately $900 million in cash. I've heard great things about TradeDoubler but I wonder if there are any real synergies between AOL and TradeDoubler. Is AOL hedging its bet?

One of the biggest opportunities in online media is to find a better way to monetize social networking inventory. The amount of social networking inventory available is staggering and every small incremental increase in RPM for publishers amounts to huge revenue increases for the top players.

Whoever creates a data-targeted AdSense will clean up.

AdGridWork.com looks incredibly useful for startups that need more attention before they need extra dollars.