Best CPA Network

So you are having success with a CPA offer, now what? I received this question via my contact form so i decided to answer it.
Here are a few questions that go thru my mind when i have success with a CPA offer:

1. Am I reaching all of the audience i can (Meaning advertising on other advertising networks, sites etc)
2. A. Should I create a landing page If i am sending it directly to the offer page (will it increase conversions?)
B. Can i improve My landing page/site?
3. Should I bid more to capture more clicks? or Should i bid less and see if my conversions hold? (I usually test both)
4. If I am not already setup to promote via Natural Search Engine rankings, is the offer going to last and make it worth it to target natural rankings?
5. Is there a similar offer that i can promote the same ways?
6. Can i target another audience with this offer?
7. Try different Ad copy to see if i can get better click thru ratio.
8. Have I researched enough Keywords?

So there are a few questions and thoughts to get you going and moving on to making more with CPA offers.

I need a computer to count how many times I see a user post in a forum or send me an email saying. Affiliate marketing isn’t real i sent 10,000 visitors to the offer or site and didn’t get one lead. Usually the main reason it doesn’t convert is the traffic is untargetted or the traffic isn’t really traffic.

First there are programs/sites all over the net that will popup, under, intersestial for a split second your ad/landing page in a window then 98% of the time the user just closes it or it gets closed by a program. But the programs call these visitors when they aren’t. These are those get 10000 visitors for 5 bucks etc… I have tried one or two of these I won’t lie but the traffic is JUST TRASH!

Secondly I find people are taking the wrong traffic and pushing it to the wrong offer. Example one guy emailed me that his stuff wasn’t converting and he was pushing a ton of traffic to the offers. They were mortgage offers. Well the traffic he was pushing was myspace, screensaver type traffic. I told him there is his problem you can’t expect that traffic to convert for mortgage and debt, maybe other screensaver or zwinky or ringtone offers but not mortgage and debt. Don’t get me wrong that traffic may get a convert or 2 for mortgage and debt Just not a 1:2 or 1:4 return.

Some Tips:

1. Target your Traffic to Your offer (common sense you would think).

2. Get Cheap traffic don’t just rely on PPC look to CPM, direct advertising.

3. Track Your results by using your CPA networks Subid.

4. Before you buy traffic form a source search around google, forums and blogs to see what other people say about the traffic seller. (read no 5)

5. Just because a traffic source didn’t work for one person, doesnt mean it won’t work for you.  

6. When you have targetted traffic and it is working well. Play with your bids, and your ad copy to increase your return.

Remember clicks don’t equal sales.

You can read everywhere that people suggest you track you campaigns and statistics, even on this blog. Meaning not relying on Google, Yahoo, Msn or other networks to rely on them to send you just the country or target traffic you are paying for.  There are many programs out there that you can pay for that will track the IP’s of your visitors and be able to tag to a certain campaign, or you can have one built. I personally had one built for me as the ones out there worked but I couldn’t get the information I wanted or get it in the way I wanted it. Yes this cost me a decent penny to get this tracking program built, but it has paid for itself already several times over.
Take this example. I am running a campaign on yahoo search marketing and I was checking my program stats and noticed that I was seeing a lot of traffic from foreign countries and my whole account is set to US only.  So I dig thru my stats for Aug 1 thru 13 and find that anywhere from 10 to 25% is from foreign countries.  So I log into my Yahoo search marketing account and contact them letting them know what I am seeing and attach a report for just one of the days and state that I am seeing this on all days Aug 1 thru 13. A day later I get an email stating it has been escalated to their click fraud department and I should get an email in a few days. Two days later I get this email:

Our investigation concluded that your account experienced one or more occurrences of the following situations:

?        Unusual end user activity or behavior
?        System issues

As a result, we have issued an adjustment to your account in the amount of $X,XXX.XX. This adjustment should post to your account within three to four business days. You can view your billing history through the Reports section of your account by selecting the Billing Transaction Detail Report.

To protect the integrity of our systems, we unfortunately cannot provide you with the specific details associated with the identified pattern of behavior. We want to assure you that we are always working to improve the quality of the traffic delivered to advertisers and as such we are taking the appropriate steps to help prevent these types of activity from occurring again in the future. Our sophisticated Click Protection System runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is designed to prevent advertisers from being charged for certain clicks. However, there may be instances, such as this one, where we make additional adjustments to your account.

As you can see they don’t come out and say we agree with you that you received foreign traffic, they did offer me a nice credit. With that said I was making a profit on the campaign even with this amount of foreign traffic being sent. So the credit is just icing on the cake, but this is something that is deserved by me as I am paying for US traffic not foreign traffic. This is just one example of why you need to track your campaigns by a third party software that tracks IP addresses etc. to monitor it for foreign traffic or even click fraud that you are billed for.  One other instance you can read about is from PepperJam Search and their $10,000 “Goodwill Credit” .