Contextual advertising has the form of a text link containing a brief description close to the context of the site where it is placed. Being part of the content of the page, such an ad arouses more interest in the user than other types of advertising. This is evidenced by CTR indicators. You can order ad placement in such advertising networks as Google AdWords, Yandex.Direct, Begun:

Special CPA systems, such as, for example, Admitad, Cityads.ru or Ad1.ru, allow to significantly increase the effectiveness of this type of advertising. Such networks not only attract advertisers, but also select relevant resources, assist in the preparation of ads, and so on. All that is required from the advertiser is to conclude an agreement with the network, determine the target action and indicate the price or percentage of profit, replenish the budget, upload banners and wait for the customers to “fall down”.

The work of a webmaster is somewhat more complicated. He must clearly define the target audience when choosing an offer, set up the site as necessary, and master the intricacies of billing. However, there are such craftsmen who are able to set up the purchase of traffic from contextual advertising so that the profit from the affiliate program exceeds the advertising budget ( traffic arbitration). And now about everything in more detail:

Contextual advertising based on the CPA principle

More recently, the phrase "contextual advertising" was most often mentioned in conjunction with "CTR". Now it has been replaced by CPA. What is the reason for such changes? CPA or Cost per Action means " cost per action».

Synonyms of this term can be considered CPL ( cost per lead — cost per lead). The main goal of this type of lead generation is to collect demographic and contact data, while with the classic CPA, actions can be performed by anonymous users. The pay-per-acquisition model is called Cost Per Sale or CPS (price per sale).

How are such two concepts as contextual advertising and CPA related? Everything is extremely simple - by purchasing ads, you pay for clicks (visitors). In Cost Per Action, the advertiser pays only for the actions performed by users on his resource ( registration, click, purchase of goods, ordering a service, subscription to a newsletter), and not for abstract ad impressions.

Who is CPA advertising suitable for?

The main advertisers in this area are online stores, hosting providers, banks, travel agencies, etc. Offline business representatives include construction companies, car repair shops, law firms, etc.

How to optimize the cost of CPA advertising?

For example, the cost of 1 visitor is equal to 1%, in this case the CPA will be equal to 1 ruble/1%=100 rubles. The price of one target action will be 100 rubles. Now it remains to analyze how profitable CPA contextual advertising is for your business.

To do this, follow these steps:

• Calculate your average check;
• Determine the amount of profit from 1 order;
• Compare the size of your CPA with the amount of income from 1 order.

Ways to optimize contextual advertising for CPA

The first thing to do is to identify keywords and ads that eat into your budget without triggering targeted actions. Below is an example analysis:

Ads that are not converting should be disabled or lowered to the minimum bid.
The second step is to look for targeted phrases and ads that bring you sales but are above your target CPA. The example below shows which keyword has a CPA below $100:

The second and third positions need optimization. Reduce the bid for unprofitable key queries, and for those that have a good CPA - on the contrary, increase.

So, to optimize contextual advertising for CPA, you need to:

• Collect statistics for each ad and key query by CPA;
• Find keys and ads that “guzzle money” and do not bring sales and disable them;
• Reduce bids for keywords and ads that generate sales with a low CPA, and increase bids for those that generate sales with a high CPA. This will provide more traffic with a fairly high conversion rate.

CPA traffic arbitrage

To implement an arbitrage strategy in a CPA affiliate, the webmaster tries to attract cheap traffic from sources permitted by the terms of cooperation. If in the future attracted users begin to perform targeted actions, then the payments that the webmaster will receive will allow him not only to cover the costs of attracting traffic, but also make good money on the difference between attracted and sold traffic (CPA arbitrage).

Practice shows that you can monetize any traffic. Some webmasters even use the services of professional designers to prepare advertisements:

Risks in the CPA market

The number of CPA affiliates is growing every day. The cost of entry of such networks into the business has decreased significantly in recent years, which allows you to launch your own network without significant capital investments. Systems attract webmasters with promises of high payouts.

However, the network receives a payment from the advertiser only after he receives the desired actions, but the webmasters require payment for the attracted traffic immediately. Such a scheme often leads to a cash gap and the impossibility of fulfilling the obligations assumed by the network in full. That is why you should trust only trusted networks.

But "pitfalls" can be expected not only from networks, but also from webmasters. Quite often, situations occur when webmasters bring “black” traffic, use proxy servers that assign fake data to users, change the addresses of sites from which users have switched. There may be cookiestuffing and cookiedropping, motivated traffic.

However, the main analytical programs stop attempts of deception. Today, the Russian CPA market is estimated at more than 3.5 billion rubles a year:

Advantages and disadvantages

The advantages of the CPA model are transparency and high quality traffic. At the same time, the advertiser can attract the target audience, saving the budget. This gives CPA contextual advertising every chance to become as effective as RTB advertising. However, she also has her “cons”.

First of all, it is the quality of the audience ( even though the model attracts users who perform certain actions, they can bring a conversion only once). For example, if we are talking about a promotion that those who love “freebies” will “lead to”.

It is also worth noting that the CPA does not function well in conditions of price elasticity, taking into account only the implementation of the required actions. This leads to advertisers not increasing their advertising budget when it is worth it, as the quality of traffic increases:

How to set up contextual advertising for arbitrage?

Services such as Google AdWords, Yandex.Direct and Begun are time-tested and offer really high-quality resources for advertising. The webmaster is required to correctly configure the context parameters and, as a result, he will receive a target audience interested in buying the offered goods and services.

An excellent opportunity for advertisers has become work in the CPA network. Now the effectiveness of advertising has become measurable, which allows you to pay sites exclusively for specific actions that users take. Therefore, the benefits of working in CPA for advertisers are obvious. How can an advertiser choose a worthy CPA network so that its effectiveness is maximized?

For example, partners need a certain product or an increase in deductions on an order. To do this, an adequate CPA network will comply with this requirement and will negotiate with the advertiser for the supply of goods and an increase in the royalty rate.

It happens that the advertiser does not have enough leads, and it is necessary to speed up the sale of goods. In this case, the affiliate can organize a campaign at its own expense to increase the amount of deductions for a certain product or connect partners from the top list. This will allow you to sell goods in the shortest possible time. The main condition in such interaction is understanding, respect of the parties for each other, the search for compromise solutions on both sides and the ability to negotiate.

How can an advertiser start in the CPA network?

The first step to start in CPA is to choose the right affiliate program.

To select an affiliate program, you can use two methods: either enter one affiliate program according to the budget option, or register in several projects and gradually weed out affiliate programs that did not pass the selection according to any criteria. This method is suitable for those who can afford it and want to get the biggest effect.

The demand for the first option is much higher, since entering the CPA market does not require a large budget, which is often limited for beginner advertisers.

First of all, when choosing an affiliate CPA network, you need to decide on the thematic direction of the offers sold in it. You need to know that each CPA network focuses on a certain market segment. Having studied the list of affiliate program offers, you can understand in which niche it works.

For example, CPA networks:

• Financial direction - http://www.linkprofit.ru
• Online stores (only not one-pagers) - https://www.admitad.com/
• Physical goods (one-page) - http://m1-shop.ru/
• Mobile
• Gaming https://advertstar.net.

There are special directories of CPA networks where you can get acquainted with their topics - http://cpad.pro/network/.

1. Affiliate must have more than 20 launched offers . It is desirable that they belong to different advertisers.
2. You need to pay attention to the reputation of the CPA network. The more information that characterizes the affiliate program, the better. You should not trust new networks.
3. Pay attention to the required number of advertisers and webmasters. The more webmasters in a particular network, the higher the chances of a quick sale of goods.
4. Assess the level of publicity, which shows the degree of professionalism of networks (how often networks are present at conferences, events for traffic arbitration, for making money on sites, etc.).
5. Read the reviews of advertisers and webmasters so that it does not turn out that the advertiser pays for targeted actions (leads), but orders have not been received or fraud has been poured. Reviews can be found on special sites such as: http://cpainform.ru/networks, http://avf.biz/, http://actualtraffic.ru/partner/.

Examples of effective CPA affiliate programs are: M1-shop.ru, ad1, m-shop, cpagetti, monsterleads, oxcpa. These affiliate programs have a good relationship with the advertiser, they work well with fraudsters, banning them, while regularly returning money to advertisers. The traffic of these affiliate programs is of high quality, in sufficient volumes. The M1-shop.ru program is especially effective in this regard for the advertiser.

It is advisable for novice advertisers to write to several CPA networks in order to get feedback from them. It happens that representatives of some networks do not answer at all. During contact with administrators, you can find out how interesting your offer is to them, clarify questions about the market trend, you can get acquainted with the requirements of networks for an advertiser.

It is imperative to communicate over the phone or on Skype with network managers so that there are points of contact and mutual understanding.

An action is usually a redeemed order; for finance, it is a loan issued. That is, in fact, this is a model with payment for something that, it would seem, accurately guarantees profit.

Today I would like to talk about such a topic of concern to many major players as fraud and deception in CPA networks. Unfortunately, fraud and deception are present in any CPA network, and this is not the fault of network owners.

Overpayment on the order can be 30-50%, and in critical cases - even more. Many advertisers are afraid to overpay for fraud, and therefore do not work with CPA networks at all - which, in principle, is also a way out. For example, Detsky Mir stores do not use CPA networks at all.

However, along with bad traffic in this case, the advertiser also refuses good traffic. I propose to figure out what types of fraud are and how to deal with them.

6. Contextual advertising for a brand

It's not exactly a scary and technical method. But, if you do not cut off such webmasters in CPA networks, you will greatly inflate your budget.

The fact is that ordering by brand name, when the user enters the name of the site in the search, is very cheap. This is usually 50-150 rubles per order. At the same time, in the CPA network, you have to pay much more for such an order. Webmasters, using the brand context, outbid the advertiser himself and receive orders for which they are paid dearly.

To stop this, we, for example, have to constantly monitor all advertising in different cities and different requests. So you can determine which is visible only at night, at certain hours or from certain cities.

7. Bonus: Do not trust those who protect you from fraud

This case is the funniest of all and was discovered by us quite recently.

In one, they use the services of a fairly large French agency in this area, which helps track - or, in other words, traffic - orders and maintains turnkey CPA networks. Among other things, this agency claims that it screens out fraud. The entire budget goes through the agency.

It turned out that at the time of the order, this agency did not always call the pixels of the CPA networks. As a result, the order was attributed to the CPA channel and paid for by the advertiser, but did not reach the CPA networks. The differences in the budgets were 20-30%. According to our estimates, more than a million rubles did not reach CPA networks per month.

This is bad because the final webmasters do not receive money, which means that it is less profitable for them to work with a specific advertiser. As a result, the advertiser receives less traffic and orders.

How to deal with it:

CPA should be as transparent as possible.

• If a CPA channel is being led by a turnkey agency, then demand CPA network accounts. If they do not give, then the matter is unclean. In a specific case, they were justified by the fact that they have an agency office. However, in some networks, each advertiser has a separate login, which means that it would be possible to give them at least partial access.
• Check with CPA networks. In a specific case, the agency insisted that the contract was concluded between them and the CPA networks, and information about how much they credit orders and money is confidential. This is especially ridiculous since you need to know exactly how much and for what you are paying. Surprisingly, many CPA network managers tried to evade this action because the agency began to threaten them with legal action for disclosing confidential information.
• Demand transparent contracts, as well as acts of payment. If the agency does not provide such information and evades answering, it is worth considering whether you need such an agency at all.

In conclusion, I will say: there is no need to be afraid of CPA networks, as they can generate a lot of sales and traffic.

However, it is worth approaching this issue wisely - and either do a good examination on your side, or contact only those agencies whose conditions are acceptable, the work scheme is transparent, and the tools can not only automatically transfer information to the CPA network, but also filter out fraud . Good luck with your work.

Sergey Gridchin, ex Digital Marketing Manager, Otto Group Russia

There is a whole list of mistakes that advertisers can make:

2) Do not borrow the best practices of the market. If you look at some offers, they have been working for years without any changes. Why can't you take a carefully crafted offer (like AliExpress) and completely copy their approach? The lack of proactivity slows down not only the company, but also the market, since CPA networks rarely deal with complex queries.

3) Mindlessly copying the best practices without understanding what is behind them. This is the other side of the coin. Not all solutions are universal - it is not a fact that the same approaches will suit your business as others.

4) Sheyvat orders. Some of the orders are not counted during the reconciliation. Or inadvertently overwrite cookies with free marketing channels. This means that over time they will lose all their webmasters. After that, it will be difficult to restore the image of the offer and restart the affiliate program.

- What should you look for when choosing an affiliate network in the first place?

If you look from the point of view of a large business, then the following parameters can be distinguished:

1) Primarily - this is the reputation of the network. It is necessary to study the reviews - there are always people who are satisfied or dissatisfied with cooperation with the CPA network.

2) High-quality and fast work of the account manager of the network. Analysis of the current situation and search for improvements. The manager should be your partner, your companion in the world of CPA marketing, who will select new webmasters for special. projects, will participate in communications, lobby for your position on the grid side.

3) Readiness for technical changes - both on the client side and in their own systems. The introduction of any technical improvements on a regular basis is already a given, and not an exception to the rule. The faster your CPA network, the more likely you are to win the competition.

4) Ability to notify webmasters about changes in the offer - both in bulk and by segments.

5) Automatic checks, fast document flow.

6) Flexible conditions in the contract, the ability to make changes. The network's fear of being responsible for its product raises questions - will everything go according to plan if the relationship turns into a formal contract?

7) The presence of their traffic sources or a new audience. Perhaps a marketing department that will work for the client.

It depends on the specifics of the business. For example, companies focused on the b2b sector always create their own networks. Due to the long cycle of the transaction, it makes no sense to cooperate with conventional CPA networks, there are no people who are ready to invest in long sales even for a huge commission.

If we talk about b2c, then each business decides for itself whether such a large-scale and very expensive project fits into the current economy of the company. If it is possible to increase the staff, create an affiliate program from scratch and maintain it, then why not? In the long run, the business will benefit from this, because absolutely all processes will be under control. In the short term, cooperation with CPA networks looks more logical, since creating a copy of the affiliate program will take more than a year. For example, OZON made such a program and has been with it for a long time.

The risks of your affiliate program can be compared to the process of building a marketing department. You can work with agencies, or you can assemble a team within the company. Both methods have pros and cons and can be talked about forever. Each company has its own specifics.

This greatly depends on the type of business. Most often, certain limits are calculated for CPO (Cost Per Order), CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) taking into account the client's LTV, average check and margin. And from there, the commission for the CPA channel.

In our case, the process looked more complicated. Since in 15-30% of cases we pay several webmasters for one completed order, and the total commission must be within the specified limits. If a company has attribution between all channels of attraction, then the process of calculating the rate changes dramatically and depends on the underlying algorithm.

There is an opinion that it is worth giving cut rates for attracting old customers, and increased rates for new ones. But we know that the webmaster does not have access to statistics, which means that it will be difficult for him to filter new buyers from old ones. Is it fair? And what solutions to this problem do you see from the advertiser?

Everything sounds logical for the clothing segment. Business needs new customers, and for this it pays a large commission. The old ones are easy enough to bring back with a variety of low-cost marketing tools and shareware channels.

It is fair if the webmaster has access to statistics specifically through his channel, but this is not always possible due to the confidentiality of the data and the risk of data leakage / lack of a signed NDA. Personally, I am for complete transparency, the webmaster should be able to see the status of the client for each given order in any interface.

Business, for its part, must explain what a new client is. Indeed, for someone new - this is one who has not used the service for a year. And for someone - someone who has not yet filled out a bank questionnaire or has never made purchases in a store.

Consider the case where a well-known company wants to pay a commission for a new audience that has never bought from them. In this case, the business must understand that the new audience is finite, which means that over time the cost of a lead will grow proportionally, because it is becoming more and more difficult to look for new customers. It is logical to increase the remuneration rate for a new client in proportion to the scale of the business, or constantly improve your product.

- In the article on Medium you talk about multi-channel attribution. Why do you think many advertisers still do not work with it and what is its future?

All in good time, advertisers will start working soon. After all, CPA has no other way, either a separate commission, or a total decrease in the volume of the entire affiliate market due to the lack of a new audience. There are too many cashback webmasters who close the transaction chain of labels.

Attribution is difficult to implement, calculate and justify. The main risk is bone growth. So far I have not met large companies with a working flawless attribution across all traffic acquisition channels. Naturally, she has a future, the commission should be distributed exactly according to merit. But without a couple of mathematicians, such a problem cannot be solved))

Based on what do you build hypotheses regarding the site and traffic? how long does it take to test and confirm/refute this hypothesis?

I have a goal to achieve maximum coverage of our audience and the frequency of their contact with our site. If the platform sends traffic from the sources specified in the rules, then this is enough to work with it. There are no hypotheses here, either traffic converts or not.

Hypotheses are built when we cooperate on special projects. Here, of course, the partner is checked. There are classic tools like Similarweb that show approximate audience volumes. Preference is given to sites that develop themselves and do not hesitate to attract a new audience for a fee. Who are ready to modify the resource for us so that we can stand out.

Ideas constantly come to mind. A simple example: let's take the search query "BAON Promo Codes". On all resources from the search results, links lead to the main site Baon.ru. And the webmaster does not earn money on this, since BAON is not connected to CPA networks. All traffic counts as referral. It is logical to offer this webmaster to change the links to affiliate links from the offer of an online clothing store with a BAON brand section. In this situation, both sides are in the black. We have relevant organic traffic and sales, the webmaster has a commission.

Have you had problems with ad blockers while working in affiliate networks, and how did you solve them?

Yes, they did. Problems were solved only on their side. Some plugins completely removed Google Tag Manager from the site, as well as all the scripts contained in it. We switched to an alternative container and secured ourselves against this particular case. We also tracked all errors in JS scripts, by which it was possible to determine the scale of the problem on the site. All other options with direct blocking of domains with scripts can be bypassed only when interacting with a partner. We did not set ourselves such a task. Resources that make money on media advertising, which we were not, suffer more from blockers.

Cross-device and cross-browser tracking, tracking in mobile applications: have you implemented such types of tracking, and if so, what problems did you encounter and how did the integration affect the results of your affiliate program?

Collecting data across devices, browsers, and many other parameters is a trivial task. But these data must be somehow processed, combined with each other and draw conclusions. This is a complex attribution model that is hard to create. This thought is constantly present in my head. Rather, this is the next stage in the development of the affiliate program, and maybe the entire online marketing. Such a large data stream must be analyzed automatically, which means that calculations must be done according to a certain algorithm. You can't figure it out without a couple of mathematicians. So far, I do not see a reasonable economic justification for this project.

You have experience of working with more than 15,000 webmasters who have connected during the life of the offer. Share your experience on how to moderate a large flow of applications for connection? Which sites can be connected automatically, and which sites must be selected exclusively manually?

We check only for compliance with corporate standards. We have internal requirements for partners and their resources. There is nothing special about them. Everything else is confirmed, since without a connection we cannot analyze the quality of the traffic. We have post-moderation. We accept some risk and can disable the publisher at any time.

Now there is a trend towards the emergence of a mass of new webmasters working through channels in Telegram and YouTube. Share your impressions of this traffic in the clothing and footwear segment: have you worked with such webmasters, do these channels have your target audience, how do you assess the quality of traffic?

We have an adult audience, somehow it did not work out, but we really wanted to. I constantly come across videos of AliExpress webmasters with names like “top 10 cool devices from China” and the like. With affiliate links in the video description. Webmasters clearly understood how to monetize YouTube videos on offers from electronics. In clothing, this is more difficult, but most likely it is possible if the assortment contains world bestsellers, which can serve as a motivator for the target audience to go to the site.

Cookies, brand context - these types of traffic that excite advertisers can be tracked automatically, everything is clear with them. More difficult is the issue of risks for loyalty and brand. Which formats are "most dangerous" of all? Where is it more likely to catch the negative of the audience? Which channels should be paid special attention in terms of the company's image?

The most dangerous is remarketing, teaser networks and sites with pirated movies. It is not clear which ad or commercial will display your ad next to it.

The negative is usually clearly expressed, and you can work with it. Worst of all, if a person has an unpleasant association with your brand or logo, and he is silent about it. Sooner or later, such mistakes will affect sales.

What channel of attracting traffic to CPA in your practice turned out to be the most unexpected in terms of volume/quality and pleasantly/unpleasantly surprised you?

I was surprised by the webmaster who turned to my antifraud colleagues with an offer to sell competitors' traffic. This is both unexpected and unpleasant right away, because such a web will immediately be sold to the largest player and disguise the source of traffic.

Let's talk about scalability. Should an online store expect "explosive growth" when connecting to an affiliate network? What can an advertiser do for their part to not only stimulate rapid growth through CPA, but also manage it?

If we exclude cashbackers and promotional codes from the discussion, then there will be no explosive growth. The webmaster needs a lot of time to start working with you. You are a dark horse for him. If your brand is not known to anyone, and your products and services are the same as everyone else, then what do you expect? You need a very strong argument for the webmaster to switch to you and start driving traffic.

Most advertisers would like to pay not for advertising, but for actual results. This is much more profitable than spending money on promotion, not knowing whether it will bring profit. And this is quite real, it is on such conditions that CPA networks work.

CPA network is an intermediary who advertises a product and receives payment for each purchase, registration, application or any other targeted action. CPA networks are also called affiliate programs or affiliate programs.

CPA is short for Cost Per Action. In translation - payment for action.

There are three parties involved in this business:

CPA networks are designed to make it easier for advertisers and webmasters to find each other. When there were no networks, you had to search manually. It took a lot of time. Now it is much easier to find partners, because their data is already in the CPA network. In addition, such sites offer a lot of opportunities for comfortable collaboration: they monitor the quality of advertising sites and materials, protect advertisers from cheating, and allow you to analyze statistics.

The work of CPA networks is built as follows. The network is engaged in attracting webmasters and advertisers. Checks the sites that webmasters offer as advertising platforms, implements tools for work and analytics. Some networks also create ad content at the request of the advertiser.

An advertiser who is looking for ways to promote a product finds a network and enters into an agreement. It also provides advertising materials, selects the target action and advertising parameters. Then the advertiser places an offer (advertising offer). The webmaster, in turn, attracts customers to those advertisers whose offers suit him.

If you do not have the time and desire to prepare advertising, you can shift this task to the shoulders of the webmaster. But then don't be surprised if you see that the ad contains shock content.

The webmaster will do everything to draw attention to advertising. But the responsibility for advertising the product will lie with you. Therefore, you should immediately specify the details and indicate that the use of the image of famous personalities, political materials or 18+ materials in advertising is unacceptable for you. Because it can be criminal.

Offer for CPA networks

I think it’s worth telling in more detail what an offer is in CPA networks. You can read about the usual meaning of the offer in the article “”.

Here is what a standard offer looks like:

Traffic restrictions (for example, traffic only from certain regions)

Source restrictions (example - prohibition of display on some sites)

The most popular topics of products and services that are popular with webmasters and bring a lot of profit: beauty, real estate, “miracle products”, online games, health, technology, clothing and accessories, finance, adult products.

Income from offers is different. If the offer does not bring profit to the webmaster, he may refuse to promote it.

In the product description, indicate the facts and figures - the number of sales, audience coverage, bonuses, awards, participation in competitions.

Describe in detail how and how much the webmaster will earn on the offer. Specify the bid and target action for which you will pay.

Tell us about the target audience of the product. Be sure to indicate: geography, gender, age, average purchase check. The rest is optional, but the more you describe the portrait of the target audience, the easier it will be for the webmaster to set up targeting parameters.

List the benefits of the product that will make it stand out from the competition. If there are special offers, promotions, discounts, bonuses, free shipping - indicate this in the offer. Here you can also mention the high performance that you have achieved with the help of these benefits.

The webmaster receives income when he brings clients to the advertiser. Therefore, it is in his interests to make promotion qualitatively and conscientiously. To increase the effectiveness of advertising, webmasters are constantly testing new platforms and promotion methods, looking for interesting features for creating native content. Experienced specialists find an individual approach to each offer.

There are few professionals who would be able to set up ads on different sites and control the results using analytics services. But they are the ones that generate most of the traffic of all CPA networks.

How webmasters work

The algorithm of work at first glance is very simple.

1. First, the webmaster selects offers that should bring profit in the long run.

   Then he posts content on the sites and begins to promote - to catch up with traffic.

Inside this simple algorithm lies many nuances of the webmaster's work. About them, perhaps, it is necessary to write a separate article.




We mentioned above that webmasters use different platforms and tools in their work. Now let's highlight those that bring more traffic and make up the main income of the webmaster.

Own site. The best choice for those who want to have a stable income and a constant flow of customers. After creating the site, fill it with content. It can be just useful content for the theme of the site or information about the advertiser's product/service. Next, we place the ad itself and optimize the pages. It remains only to determine the target queries and start in the search engines.

Social media. It is also a good option to attract a loyal audience. But advertising in different social networks gives a different response. For example, one of the popular sites now is. In this social network, people often make purchases, and advertising does not cause strong negative.

Traffic arbitration. Perhaps the most profitable way of earning a webmaster, but also the most difficult. In short, traffic arbitrage is buying traffic from one source and reselling it to another. The one who earns the most from arbitration is the one who is constantly looking for new sources of traffic and analyzes the work of the old ones.

In practice, arbitrage looks like this: you buy space on advertising sites, take content from the advertiser, for which you will be paid later, and place it.

Pros and cons of CPA networks for advertisers

Although many are attracted to the pay-per-customer model, this promotion method has its drawbacks. But, of course, there are more advantages. Let's take a look at both.

You pay only for the real result, do not waste money on failed advertising.

You set the price for each lead yourself, which means you can easily control the budget expenditure.

You choose the action for which you are willing to pay. From going to the site to buying a product.

Each lead is checked by site moderators. They protect advertisers from fraud by webmasters.

Webmasters are only interested in brands and large stores/companies that have a lot of their own traffic. It is difficult for small businesses to squeeze into the CPA network.

There is competition among advertisers in networks. In order for webmasters to pay attention to your offer, make it interesting for them. Webmasters choose offers that will bring more profit. Therefore, it is often necessary to increase the amount of payments for each lead.

Despite moderator checks, some webmasters try to deceive advertisers. In some networks, checks are more stringent, in others less. Therefore, it is likely that some of the traffic will still be empty.

To start working with the network, you need to conclude an official paper contract. For some, this is an extra hassle, but for someone, on the contrary, an advantage.

How to choose a CPA network


There are so many different affiliate programs on the market that your eyes run wide. It is really difficult to choose, especially if you are going to promote through CPA for the first time. You can really evaluate the quality of traffic in a particular network when the first results appear. But what if they don't live up to expectations? Then you have to look for a new network. And while you are looking for something that suits you, you will merge the budget.

How do you know which network is right for you?

Pay attention to the following points:

Year of creation. The competition in the CPA marketing market is strong, so many people do not stay here and stop working during the first year. Use networks that have been on the market for a long time.

Number of partners. This is one of the indicators of success. If many webmasters cooperate with the service, then they trust it.

Subject. Choose an affiliate program that suits you according to the theme of the offer. Especially if the niche is highly specialized. Now there are networks that work only with financial topics, with mobile games, online stores, etc.

Reviews. It’s good if there are a lot of reviews about the CPA network on the Internet. But be careful: bad reviews should also be, at least a few. If they are not at all, most likely, laudatory reviews are wound up.

Posted offers. Please note that the affiliate program must have launched offers from different advertisers - at least 30.

reputation and transparency. The site should contain specific figures and facts about the work of partners: the number of webmasters and advertisers, posted offers, collaborating with a nonsense affiliate program. Networks with a good reputation are not afraid to expose statistics: conversion, earnings of webmasters, number of transitions.

Traffic control. The CPA network should monitor and control the joint work of webmasters and advertisers. It is desirable that the affiliate program has a quality control department. This will ensure secure cooperation, protection from black traffic and deception.

Overview of popular CPA networks

Now let's take a look at a few affiliate networks and determine which ones are best for advertisers.

An authoritative affiliate program that has been operating in Russia, the CIS countries, Europe and India since 2010. The network brings together thousands of webmasters and advertisers around the world. The total sales in 2018 amounted to 3.4 billion. The CPA network is diversified - it deals with offers of various topics. Now more than 1600 advertisers cooperate with the affiliate program.

Features of Admitad:

Tools. The site has a lot of goodies for advertisers: creating coupons and promotional codes, XML feed, anti-fraud services, bonus program, epicstars, referral links. They will help you optimize your work and get the maximum benefit. The Admitad development team is constantly optimizing the work of tools and looking for new interesting solutions.

Types of traffic. Admitad works with a wide variety of traffic types: contextual and advertising, e-mail newsletters, social network advertising, adult traffic, mobile traffic, youtube channels and many other types.

Technical support. The network has responsive technical support, which is ready to provide a personal manager to those who cannot figure out the system on their own. In addition, in the "Help" section there are detailed instructions and answers to all questions that advertisers have.

Quality. Admitad cooperates with major brands and experienced webmasters, so it has a good reputation. Transparency is an important principle in network operation. Therefore, users are provided with any statistics. And for quality control, the service uses its own monitoring developments.

The network has been operating since 2010 and is famous for its innovative tools for webmasters and advertisers. At first, the company was engaged only in the promotion of online games, but a year later it expanded its scope of activity and now you can post offers of various topics here. Cityads is successfully operating in Russia, Eastern Europe and South America. More than 1300 advertisers trust the service.

Features of Cityads:

Tools. The affiliate offers to use the following tools: widgets, coupon uploading, e-mail retargeting, financial API, real-time statistics, recommendation system based on Big Data technology, product uploading, travel form.

Types of traffic. Cityads offers different types of traffic. For each ad space, you can fine-tune your targeting by operational data (purchases, finances), geography, demographics, and interests.

Technical support. A personal account manager will help you solve any problem, select the most beneficial options for cooperation for you. Also on the site there is an opportunity to order the preparation of promotional materials.

Quality. Cityads protects clients from fraud and cheating. The statistics data is as transparent as possible, the conversion can be monitored in real time.

Another market leader - Actionpay started its activity in 2010. The company's offices are located all over the world - in Russia, Kazakhstan, USA, Brazil, Hungary, Ireland, India, Ukraine. The service sector is diverse: from online stores to real estate and cars. Now Actionpay has 1552 offers from advertisers.

Features of actionpay:

Tools. The site features the following tools: deep link, banners, widgets, promotions, directories, APRT. The affiliate also offers detailed targeting settings.

Types of traffic. Actionpay offers three ad formats. Advertising on the Internet: traffic comes from myTarget, Vkontakte, MobiAds, Cashback, e-mail newsletters and other sources. TV advertising: commercials, sponsorship, news stories, special projects. Outdoor advertising: billboards, digital billboards, city formats, navigation, stops, public transport.

Technical support. Little is said about the support service on the site. But to communicate with the moderators for different countries, different mail and phone numbers are indicated. If you have any problems, you can write or call support.

Quality. Payment to webmasters is transferred only for actions confirmed by the advertiser. The company's certificates are the guarantor of quality. The affiliate network is certified by the Target.Mail.Ru agency, and is also a certified partner of Google Adwords.

Ad1

The Ad1 affiliate program aggregator has existed since 2011. The company has more than 2,500 advertisers and 3,500 successful advertising campaigns behind it. The network receives traffic from 149 countries. Now Ad1 works with offers of various topics: education, shopping, finance, mail order, games, dating, cryptocurrency, subscriptions and some other types.




AD1 Features:

Tools. Ad1 tools include promotions, domain parking, agent cabinets, API, integrations, news showcase, TDS streams, adding sites, creating streams. The network regularly holds contests among partners and raffles large prizes.

Types of traffic. There are not as many traffic sources in the network as in the previous CPA network. The most popular ones are teaser, targeted and contextual advertising, websites, doorways, ClickUnder and PopUnder, e-mail newsletters, social networks.

Technical support. The network is considered one of the most comfortable for beginners. The affiliate allocates a personal manager to those who need help setting up offers and working with service tools. You can communicate with the manager not only via mail, but also via Skype or Telegram.

Quality. The network prohibits partners from using low-quality traffic. The rules state that any cheating, automatic transitions to the advertiser's website, as well as the use of false information in product advertising are prohibited.

The network with an unusual name has established itself as a reliable partner for online stores. On the site, you can find offers of stores of various topics: clothing and accessories, household and health products, cars, sports equipment, appliances, etc. To register on the site, an online store must generate at least 200 sales per day.

Features of “Where is the elephant?”:

Tools. XML feeds, promo codes and promotions, domain parking, deep links, 5 different SubIDs, XML API, trafficback, traffic conversion alerts, directlinks - these are the tools presented on the site. The affiliate tries to facilitate the workflow and make it as convenient as possible for its customers.

Types of traffic. In addition to standard sources, there are also: brokerage traffic, video content, toolbar, affiliate stores, discount and coupon aggregators.

Technical support. Unfortunately, the site does not say anything about user support and the provision of a personal manager. The "Support" section contains a phone number and mail for those who have work issues.

Quality. The affiliate program has rather strict rules for registering advertisers and webmasters. "Where is the elephant?" monitors the quality of traffic and does not allow sites with low rates to enter the system.

These are not all existing affiliate programs. In fact, there are many more - dozens and even hundreds. Consider them all, of course, will not work. But now you know what criteria you should pay attention to when choosing a CPA network.

Useful tricks in working with CPA networks

If you are new to CPA marketing, it will be difficult at first to understand what is what. Everywhere has its own peculiarities and schemes of work. It takes time to figure it out on your own. You can shorten it and prevent possible errors, for this, let's look at a few useful life hacks.

Focus on competitors. The easiest way to learn from someone else's example. Therefore, go to any affiliate program and analyze the actions of your competitors. See how they make offers, how much they pay webmasters, what tools they use. This will help you figure out which direction to go.

Update promo materials. You can't always use the same banner. They need to be changed periodically. So try to prepare a few banners. Webmasters need up-to-date materials for their work. In addition, when the banner changes, the update appears in the affiliate feed. This helps to attract the attention of webmasters.

Track traffic statistics from each webmaster. Separate channel labels by webmasters to see the statistics of each. So you can understand which of them attracts more traffic and increase their payouts, and disable inactive ones.

Organize the work of the call center. When the webmaster starts work, there will be a stream of applications and calls. Most likely, you will not cope with it without outside help. Therefore, you need to hire a call center, and these are additional costs, be prepared for them.

Control traffic. Despite the strict rules of CPA networks, some masters manage to cheat. Therefore, you need to regularly check traffic and check orders. Webmasters who drive low-quality traffic should be turned off. And reconciliations are done in order to check where the orders came from. For each matched lead, you pay the webmaster.

Notify webmasters about promotions. If your store has a promotion, discount or bonus program, don't forget to design a banner and publish it in the affiliate program. Such offers always attract webmasters, because they increase sales and their earnings.

We have analyzed what CPA networks are, their types and how they work. Now you know the basic nuances of promoting products through affiliate programs. This is a difficult job that requires a lot of effort, attention and investment. If you want to try it, but don't have time to do it, contact an advertising agency. Specialists will help create offers, attract webmasters, and track statistics in a timely manner. Work alone or involve a team of specialists - the choice is yours.

Good luck! Leave your questions in the comments.