Read It: http://www.dotmediaweb.com/blog/?p=68 DIGG IT: http://digg.com/business_finance/CPA_Advertising_Sucks
Digg done... Good article and the comments speak well to a nicely written post. keep up the good work. Tim
Why did they not pay you? And how much should you have received? Are you basing your article on just this one experience? The text is too small to read with ease.
Yup i agree with you about affilate programs, I personally cant stand them I get offers from people to try to get me into their programs all the time, bascially they want me to do their marketing for them ! BUT if you do use an affilate program you have to try to make it work for you, so if u choose carfully you can still make them work for you ! Woc
Problem with your case - Still majority make more with CPA than with adsense for example. Also that 105 clicks can be 100% free in terms of SEO, not PPC. Of course it takes time, etc.
If you wants sales from a CPA offer, you really need to sell it. Set up a nice landing page with a good sales pitch. You have to convince your visitor to go with your recommendation. Don't think for a minute that you'll get easy sales by simply slapping on a banner ad or text link somewhere. To be successful with CPA, you need real targeted visitors. So, if you are selling a hair removal kit, find people who are looking for hair removal kits, not beauty or health. You have to get really specific.
All ads suck if you don't place them properly. It sounds like you used CPA ads where CPM ads would have been the smart choice. If you're getting general web traffic and want to monetize it with banners, get CPM ads through a big network or sell direct if you have enough traffic. If you want to make money with CPA, do as steveb suggests in his excellent post above mine.
That is just what I was saying. "Let's turn the internet into a bunch of crap websites to sell junk and make a small commission." It's just ridiculous to think like that and encourage that type of behavior. Instead we as webmasters should be encouraging companies that want to advertise to treat us like real media and not like Amway salesmen. We should be enouraging innovative and rich internet experiences with great content and features and not pushing 'landing pages' to sell crap you don't even own.
I agree. However, the reality is that there are different types of people in this world. There are people who don't care about quality or the experience that their visitors get, as long as they make a quick buck. And then there are people who sincerely want to give their visitors great experience and value. Unfortunately, the people who do not care greatly out-number the people that do.
And that's why 2% of websites make 98% of all online revenue, because the other 98% are either ignored by advertisers who don't know any better, or are crap sites, squeeze pages etc... built to make a few bones a month on a cheap hosting plan. this trend needs to be reversed if we, the web developers, are ever going to make decent cash with online publishing.
The traffic isn't very targeted so no wonder it doesn't convert. Stay away from these second rate traffic sources friend
Please actually read the article. The 'right' way to do CPA advertising and actually make money is to make terrible websites that have no socially positive value. MOST Affiliate programs don't offer a lot of depth in the program and if they do they force the developer to constantly update instead of rolling out the updates on their own. Most affiliate programs offer a few shotty banners and leave the rest to the developer. As I state in the article MOST websites (by website I mean something that is not built specifically for affilate sales like AOM or BANS sites) will not benefit from CPA advertising, and those that could benefit will have to put enormous amounts of work into making the programs convert, taking precious time away from maintaining their actual website. Imagine if Netflix called up Facebook and said 'Hey guys, great website you have there... you should join our affiliate network'. Most likely Mark and his cohorts would laugh and hang the phone up. Why can't you smaller website get the same consideration? Why must you devalue your content, your members and your rich data just becuase the advertising company wants free branding and sales. I used to own a publication that only ran 2.5k copies in distribution and only once per month. Advertisers paid me $350 per 1/8 page that their ad took up. Now I own a website that reaches nearly 100k users a month with over a million page views and advertisers tell me 'there is no value in your site for me, but hey join our affiliate program'. Just like I point out in the article Marketers ARE NOT DUMB! They know there is far more value in advertising on your site than they lead you to believe, they know that the can track conversions, they know they can swap out ads if it isnt working for them. They know they can make content that meshes with your site and entices your users to go with them. THEY LIE TO YOU IF THEY SAY OTHERWISE. They also know that branding is very, very important. They know that users might not click that banner and make a purchase. They know users use school and work computers, they know users use a friends laptop or iphone to surf. They know that when this happens those users have a higher likelihood of returning later and purchasing A PURCHASE THAT CANNOT BE TRACKED THUS YOU GET NO COMMISSION. They know that REPETITION IMPROVES RESPONSE RATE - an idea that is central in marketing. They know the more their brand is seen the more favorable opinion you will have of them. They know all of this and yet they tell websites that are sub 100k~ in the Alexa that it isn't worth it to advertise. That's where the wonderment of the internet comes in. Remember marketers are no idiots; they know that people lie or 'pad' their websites statistics. they know there are some groups of surfers that are more likely to use ad blocking software when surfing so don't be surprised if you hear those excuses. What it boils down to is that somewhere the breaking point on the part of webmasters needs to be reached, and somehow someone needs to find a way to display vital website statistics via a third party for advertising purposes. Otherwise the only way out for most small websites will be to give up control to VC's - and right now that option is quickly disappearing. It's my audience; I am the one footing the bandwidth bill, the server fees, I built it from scratch and I will not devalue it for anyone. If you want to reach my growing audience you're gonna have to treat my site with same respect you would one that is larger or an offline publication.
if you have quality sticky targeted traffic the long term revenue on partnership will not suck. your traffic sample quote in the article is small and you make the leap that thousands of dollars are lost because those clicks could have been sold by ppc. the truth is that game related traffic is not necessarily credit card wielding buyers. they are a youtube generation that is conditioned to receive content for free. monetizing your network may not work with cpa and you are in it to make money, so send those clicks to a ppc-- but do not underestimate the value of cpa.
thanks for your input. I'd like to address a few points. 1. from what i can see you own an affiliate marketing company, so naturally you are biased on the topic. 2. I never mention PPC in the article. I like to refer to advertising as CPM, CPC, CPA or CPT 3. I am sorry you feel that 20-30k unique visitors is a 'small' amount of traffic. My home town has 28,000 residents, the average billboard cost $350 per day in the town, radio spots run at $150 for 30 seconds, an ad in the newspaper is $25 per column inch. 4. Video Game Sales and Console sales are set to hit apprx $50 billion in 2011 making it the second largest entertainment industry next only to Movies and Cinema. Not exactly a market that expects 'things for free' -- but thanks for your crass evaluation of the largest growing consumer segment in the world. 5. A simple iphone game made a man millions of dollars and he quit his day job to make more games and setup his own studio. hmmm but then again those gamers never buy anything 0.o 6. YouTube charges an outrageous rate to advertise and the same advertisers who push their affiliate networks purchase ads on youtube either through an advertising firm or directly. Again it's this type of illogical thinking and devaluation of userbases that keeps all of us earning less and forces webmasters to be bottom feeders, hyenas scavenging for whatever we can get. The reverse should be the truth. I will address a lot of this issues later on. I am not saying Affiliate programs can't work, I am saying by and large they are not what webmasters should be going after and companies shouldn't use them as a cop-out. There are numerous programs that can, and do work, but the vast majority are fraught with complications and are admittedly being used to help boost a brand. I am not alone in recognizing the utter lack of respect businesses currently have for websites when it comes to advertising. Numerous venture capitalist who have been in internet funding for the past decade are starting to say the same thing, it would make exiting a lot easier for VC's if the company could generate revenue earlier in its lifecycle. It would also make for better IPO prices. There are large reasons many of this occurs: 1. Ease of entrance into the website marketplace makes it a super-competitive environment where as traditional media is geographically bound and entrance is prohibited by cost. 2. Traditional media has set limits on advertising that is clearly bound and understood before purchase, and even though there is no way to directly measure usage of any of the media, companies have developed a respect for them including advertisement heavy tabloid style publications like the Kansas City Pitch or Dallas Observer (owned by Village Voice Media). On the flip side internet media has vague limits that most advertisers still don't understand, has a connotation of being shady when it comes to facts, even though advertisers can track every single conversion. 3. Traditional media has a history of ad sales and a competent sales staff that can easily sell web based advertising to normal advertising customers. Story time: Dallas Child is a magazine distroed here in the DFW area. My last office job the director purchased a $600 ad on the right hand side of the front page of the website for a new project we were conducting. The $600 ad resulted in exactly 16 phone calls and ran on the site for 5 days. The website has a current Alexa ranking of 1,676,492 which means the site gets 0-10 uniques per day. The same director refused to purchase advertising on forums and websites that were not owned by a publishing firm but had much much higher Alexa ratings and supplied us with screenshots of Google Analytics traffic to validate the estimations. This is a prime example of how society has an ingrained respect for traditional media. Look at your local radio station's website, you might see some crappy buttons on the bottom of the page. Even if the website gets absolutely NO users they charge $150 a month (or more) for these spots and local advertisers, eager to reach the audience and look hip, buy them having no clue that they are getting nothing out of their purchase. Whereas internet radio stations which are more engaging, have a larger cost of delivery for the media, provide a robust selection of music and an overall better experience (sans the tons of free stuff tower radio givesaway) is left to scrape for advertising revenue and donations to support the services offered.