Should I Promote CPL or CPA Offers?

This is a great question, but unfortunately it does not have a definitive answer. In order to better understand why the question even is, well, a question you need to first know the definition of both a cpa offer and a cpl offer. A CPA offer just means “cost per action” and this is the way an advertiser (or company) defines how they pay you for promoting their product or service as an affiliate. CPA offers typically require the customer to complete some kind of “action” that normally involves purchasing something online. A CPA offer simply means “cost per lead” and is again the way an advertiser (or company) defines how they pay affiliates. CPL offers normally don’t require that a purchase be made in order for an affiliate to earn a commission. CPL offers gather information about the customer like name, phone #, email, address which that company will then use to attempt to sell it’s products or services to the customer.

Both CPA and CPL offers can make money in affiliate marketing but you have to completely understand the scope of marketing both types of products before just jumping out there and placing ads. Remember that someone going to a CPA offer has to actually PURCHASE something in order for you to earn a commission. Typically extremely targeted traffic converts best on these offers. By this I simply mean that someone who is actively “looking for” the product or service is probably a better prospect than someone who’s not actively looking for it. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about.

Let’s say your promoting product X and it cost the user $9.95
You have various options when “marketing” the product. Here are 2 viable options and scenarios.

1. Let’s say you choose to do pay per click marketing and make sure that when someone searches for “product X” they find your ad. This means the traffic coming to your site was “actively looking for” product X.
2. Let’s say your friend decides to promote product X at the same time, however, your friend does not want to do pay per click marketing. Instead your friend does CPM advertising which basically means they places ads on websites “relevant to” product X. So now someone is on a website (randomly) and reading about some information (relevant to product x) and they see an ad off to the side saying “click here to get product X” so they click it. This type of person was not actively looking for product X, but they were reading information about something relevant to product X.

Option 1 is great for a CPA offer simply because the person had “intent” when looking for the offer. Option 2 is great for CPL offers because since nothing is actually purchased it’s much easier to convert them into a commissionable action. Understanding how to bring in the right customers who are in the right mindset is very important if you want to have a successful affiliate marketing campaign. There are hundreds if not thousands of places you can advertise, however, it won’t do you much good if you’re not promoting products and services to the right people at the right time.

Basically you can do really well with either type of offer. I personally have generated more revenue from CPA offers than CPL offers over the last five or so years. With the explosion of media such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter I fully expect to be able to double or triple my CPL revenue because these platforms offer such amazing targeting and reach. I personally would suggest using CPL offers and Email Submits on the social media networks as I feel those would convert the best on the social platforms. The affiliate marketing industry is changing literally every single day. It’s very important to your success that you stay engaged and educated so you can stay on top of your game.

Tags: Anthony Morrison, anthony morrison blog, anthony morrison book, anthony morrison video

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.