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.