A CPA Network’s Dirty Little Secret

CPA networks make a lot more money than you think.  They make a lot more money than they would like affiliates to also think.

I didn’t realize this until I starting digging deeper with my affiliate managers when running campaigns years ago.

I once had an affiliate manager want me to run a campaign so bad that he offered to upload “overages” to my affiliate account ever night.

Huh? Overages?

I asked him what “overages” were and he told me that it was all the extra leads that the affiliate CPA network misses when the pixel doesn’t fire correctly on the thank you page.

I asked him how many leads that would be and he told me around the 8%-15% range.

I was like… “What?!”

The network statistics miss anywhere from 8%-15% of all the leads that are being registered for CPA offers?

Here is the sad reality.

No matter what, a pixel will never fire 100% correctly.  There are a number of reasons why this may occur and it would take too long to describe it in this blog post.

I am just warning you that you will NEVER get paid for the 100% of the leads you really generate for a network.

I have verified that the “overages” are in fact a sad reality of life as a CPA marketer by having my own Direct Track platform.

Direct Track powers almost 80% of all the CPA networks online today.  I have my own Direct Track platform so that I can work directly with a number of advertisers instead of having to go through a CPA network.

In every single case, with every single advertiser, the lead count in Direct Track was always less than the lead count recorded in the advertisers tracking stats.

Their stats are the most accurate because it can only count leads when an actual lead is created.  CPA network software programs don’t count when leads are created, they count when a pixel is fired.  There is a huge difference between the two.

On average, my advertisers report 10% more leads than I see on my Direct Track platform.  And this is not limited to Direct Track as I have seen this across a number of other CPA networks who don’t even use Direct Track.

Just to give you an example of the impact that this may have on any CPA campaign you are running, here is an example with numbers.

300 leads x $3 payout = $900 affiliate commissions

If you paid $500 in traffic to generate the $900 in CPA commissions, than you have a gross margin of around 44%.

But if the network missed 15% of your leads, this means you really had generated 345 leads.

345 leads x $3 payout = $1035

Your real gross margin is around 52% and your pure profit jumps over 25%.

If you are ever doing a ridiculous amount of volume with a CPA network, it almost makes sense to buy your own tracking platform and work directly with the advertiser so that you are ensured all the commissions and overages from your efforts.

Some CPA networks are nice enough to spread out overages at the end of the month to their affiliates who were running that campaign. But in most cases, they keep these extra profits for themselves.

This is a CPA network’s dirty little secret.

Feel free to leave your comments with your thoughts.

Cheers

Gauher Chaudhry


Get Paid To Build A Money Making Email List

How would you like to actually get paid for building an email list in almost any niche?

It has been almost a year now that I first launched my CPA Hot Spot member site and one of the goodies inside was Super Affiliate Jonathan Van Clute’s special “Prepop” report that detailed how he managed to get over 60,000 subscribers and make about $65,000 doing it.

All in less than six (6) weeks.

You could only access this report if you referred two people to CPA Hot Spot, but I will provide you with a link where you can download this report for free.

Prepop is short form for “prepopulate”, which means the ability to automatically place data into a form, whether it be a name, email address, city, or any other data you have collected and want to prepopulate.

So how does it work?

It works by first creating a landing page that asks for information from a prospect that gets entered into a listserver (i.e. Aweber.com).  You then carry that same data over and prepopulate a form after the prospect has clicked the submit button and joined your list.

They are redirected to a second page (that you specify within your listserver) with their information already prepopulated into an offer (i.e. email submit CPA offer or short form offer).

They then only have to click the submit button for you to get paid on the CPA offer.

Jonathan did a lot of testing to determine what works and here is essentially what you need:

1. A Squeeze page
2. Related CPA offer to promote that allows prepops
3. Listserver such as Aweber.com or GetResponse.com
4. Cheap Traffic

Squeeze Page

The first thing you will need is a squeeze page to capture the prospect’s email address and any other information that you want for your mailing list.  The squeeze page is what is responsible for building your list, so it needs to be geared towards the niche that you want to target.

Jonathan did a lot of testing when it came to squeeze pages and he told me that the best converting landing page was the famous Eben Pagan “Double Your Dating” landing page.

Note: This above page is protected by copyright laws and is only shown here for educational purposes.

This page has absolutely no graphics and just a killer headline and key bullet points.

You can easily change any of these to suit the niche that you are building a list in.

You can clearly see here that Eben is a great copywriter and use a killer headline of “You’re About To Learn The Secrets That Most Men Will Never Know About Women.”

This headline can be customized to fit almost any niche that you want to build a list in.  For example, if you wanted to build a list on the subject of gardening, your headline could be “You’re About To Learn The Secrets That Most Shopoholics Will Never Know About Getting Great Deals On Electronics.”

The best way to get a prospect to give you there email address is to offer them an incentive such as a free report.

CPA Offer To Promote

The next thing you need to do is join a CPA network that allows you to prepopulate their CPA offers.  This is not hard to do as you can just ask your current affiliate manager for their list of email offers that allow prepop.

Your affiliate manager should supply to you the code to add to your affiliate link in order to include the email address of the prospect.

For example, it may look something like:

<email token>

where &em = the email address that you want to pass and <email token> = the prospect’s email address that is prepopulated.

Listserver

There are many places where you can get list hosting, but you want to make sure that it is with a list hosting service that can pass values such as email addresses to the “Thank You” page once a prospect submits their email address to join your list.

Aweber.com and GetResponse.com are two services that are affordable and can pass values onto a “Thank You” page.

This is really important.

You need to use a list hosting service that can pass values such as the email address so that you can prepopulate the offer on the next page.

Aweber.com allows you to pass the email address using the {!email} token.

You can then grab you affiliate link and add the email token to it.

For Aweber, it may look like this:

http://www.affiliate.com/YUAYY/&em={!email}

You would then set this as the confirmation page where you would have Aweber redirect your new list subscriber to after they submit their email address.

This would send the prospect right to the CPA offer with their email address already prepopulated in the email address field.

For example:

Cheap Traffic

You next need to have the ability to drive traffic to your newly created squeeze page that not only is cheap but also very targeted to your market.

One of the cheapest forms of online paid traffic where you can have your squeeze page seen by tens of thousands of people every day is Pay Per View (PPV) traffic.  You an get full impressions of your landing page for as little as $0.002 per view.

This is a quick nutshell is how you do prepop and make money building a list.

I highly suggest engaging your new list subscribers immediately with an autoresponder message and start developing a relationship so that you can continue to promote related items in the future and make even more money.

You can download Jonathan’s entire “Prepop” report that goes into much more detail for free right here:

http://tooltrainer.com/pppreport.html

Please post your comments if this was useful.

Cheers

Gauher Chaudhry