How to choose high paying CPA offers (1)
Imagine a world without STM forum, without Amy's step-by-step lessons, and without all those super detailed tips from experienced forum's moderators and affiliates that've been there, done that.
What would you do in a world, where you had to make a decision solely, having nobody to ask and give you an advice? You'd take a risk!
I invite you to start taking a risk, and learn how to choose the offers by yourself.
How to get that eye of an eagle, that can detect a potential winner among thousands and thousands of listed offers?
Or simply - how to choose CPA offers to promote? 
Our article is based on example of... Mobidea of course! But I am sure this will work with any other network.
By the end of this article, you’ll be able to effectively choose the affiliate marketing offers or segments that best suit your traffic and understand how to play with CPA offers that convert.
[Disclaimer: This post was originally published on mobidea Academy. All the missing information can be found in the full version.]
Getting Started
Let’s start with some basic tips to simplify things for you.
It doesn’t matter if you’re buying traffic of just getting it from social media.
No matter what you’re trying to do, you’ll definitely gonna need to:
- Know your audience – knowing your target audience is the key to success.
- Understand the needs and the trends of the market – try to do a little research before you set a CPA campaign. If you see that a vertical or a niche is overcrowded with offers, maybe you should consider trying a different approach and explore new affiliate marketing verticals
- Play fair with your users – being honest with your users by showing them exactly what the offer is promoting will surely engage them and ultimately maximize your revenues!
Remember: be loyal to your audience, have good prelanders/banners/landing pages, pick the best traffic source for CPA offers, choose smart and appealing words, and we’re pretty sure you’ll like the results in the end.
1. Don’t Pick an Offer Taking Only the Payout Into Account
When we talk about choosing CPA offers that convert, it can be tempting to go for the ones with the highest payouts.
Let’s imagine you’re checking offers on your Mobidea account. You’ve applied the filters and then decide to check offers considering the highest payout.
The highest paying CPA offers are better, right? Well, not necessarily!
Turns out that you need to consider several aspects when it comes to the CPA model, such as the billing flow! Top payout offers are generally related to the credit card submission. This means it’s harder for them to actually get subscriptions since users are more reluctant to insert their credit card details.
Those who subscribe to this kind of offers have to pay more for the acquisition. Since we’re referring to reluctant users, here’s another thing you need to take into consideration – the conversion rate.
Let’s say you get two offers: one with a Payout of $10 and another with a Payout of $2.
If the first one had a worse Conversion Ratio – 1/1000 compared to the other 1/100, for example – after sending 5000 clicks, you’d end up with a $50 revenue. On the other hand, if you’d chosen the one with a lower Payout but a higher Conversion Ratio, you’d end up with $100, twice the revenue, by comparison.
This can also happen when you use the Smartlink and go for segments which typically showcase higher Payouts but harder Conversion Ratios instead of the ones with lower Payouts that can turn out to be more profitable.
2. EPC Isn’t Everything
EPC stands for Earnings per Click and it shows you the revenue you get for each 100 clicks. It’s the average amount of money you can get per every 100 clicks on your link (at least on Mobidea).
With Earnings Per Click (EPC), you’re considering Payout and Conversion Ratio, which provides you a more complete metric.
It ain’t perfect, though. Because the values you see are an average of ALL the traffic Mobidea receives to those offers or segments.
Let’s pretend there’s a scenario containing two different offers: one of them showcases an amazing EPC, the other an average EPC that won’t get anyone excited.
The first one is mainly being used by a hyper-experienced group of Affiliates, with really wicked Pre-Landers, high-quality traffic sources, and a lot of know-how on that specific type of offer, so of course EPC is huge! But for you it would mean highly-experienced competitors, struggle, and failure in efforts to get to the same EPC level.
Heartbreaking.
So what's with the second offer?
This one’s being used by the same group playing with the first one. In fact, a lot of other affiliates are using it as well. Some do it better, some worse, not getting quality traffic and probably failing to get the promotion right.
That’ll make the overall EPC drop and this offer, which was as great as the first one, will look far less appealing. However, it may have an easier flow for you to get that first sweet revenue that warms your heart and fills your bank account!
With a Smartlink it's even worse - because you’re getting the overall average EPC of Mainstream traffic (for instance) where you have mixed traffic from Tier 1 and Tier 3 countries.
In the end, what should you consider to measure the performance of your campaigns? What you have to consider is the Return on Investment (ROI) of your campaigns. ROI. Doesn’t matter if they’re Single Offers or Smartlinks.
ROI is the way to go!
3. Consider the Cost of Traffic
Even though this point can be more important for Media Buyers, it’s always good to know more before deciding which CPA offers to promote.
In order to truly evaluate your performance, you should consider not only what you’re getting from Mobidea but also how much you’re paying to get that money – meaning, your traffic. The faster you get valuable data the better and, if you can get it cheaper, that’s just perfect.
As we’ve told you before, higher payouts may turn into a tougher conversion ratio. You should maybe consider going with offers that provide half the payout and a lower EPC, but get you more and faster conversions. For those offers, you’ll probably even get more volume with fewer costs than if you start aiming for the stars in the middle of the day.
4. Don’t Choose Based on Vertical/Category
Mobidea allows you to explore 2000+ CPA offers from all over this green earth.
You should never forget that you can promote Adult or Mainstream. The latter has some cool sub-categories you can go for, such as Nutrition, Sweepstakes, Gaming, Gambling, Finance, Health & Fitness, etc.
Remember how crucial is the relevance of your audience?
Imagine you’re promoting adult content all the time because you really want those sweet CPA offers that convert. Yes, it used to pay better and have better EPCs, no doubt about it.
Even so, did you ever stop to think that you could maybe get more conversions and fewer problems on social media if you were to bet it all on these vital verticals?
Knowing your crowd is EVERYTHING!
You’ve gotta understand what’s working better when setting a campaign, because you wanna avoid losing visits/conversions.
5. Pay Attention to Restrictions
Always keep an eye out for restrictions.
These restless prohibitions and guidelines can really cost you a whole lotta cash. They can even get you blocked, preventing you from getting those terrific Top Offers.
Sometimes, a restriction pops up because of the name of the offer. This won’t bring about any sort of penalties.
For example, in case it’s only for 3G, traffic coming from Wi-Fi will be redirected to another offer – if you’ve got the Safety Fallback enabled – or to nowhere, leading to a loss of potential conversions. Other offers can be more related to the type of promotion you’re doing, not allowing Pops nor Native, or even not letting you get Incent Traffic, for instance.
Even so, since we’re all running in the same direction – we wanna add value to the industry – Mobidea doesn’t wanna scam you. This is why you can find all the restrictions on the page containing info about the offer. Make sure to read ALL restrictions thoroughly so you don’t risk all you have!
6. Select Based on a Partner
With time (and if you’re lucky) you’ll start to know your audience more and more. You’ll get to understand who provides what and what they want.
If a partner has some insights about a type of offer, vertical or even GEO, they’ll probably provide some more awesome offers in the near future. This can be something to take into account when choosing a new offer and you can definitely ask your Account Manager about it.
Of course we’re never free from flops. Even so, knowledge comes from experience and experience comes from positive and negative aspects, but mainly from doing. Something.
Here is why you need the support team of your affiliate network and account managers. Be connected! Get in touch with them, because these people are fully dedicated to you and they wanna see you thrive and succeed in the game. When you share info with us, telling us exactly how you’re working, and which traffic sources and tools you’re using, you can be sure we’re gonna provide a concrete analysis and get back to you with an advice!
We can tell you about an offer that’s doing really well – one that you probably didn’t even notice, lost in the haystack where all the other ones float around.
We can tell you which offers or segments are showcasing the best results for the traffic source you’re using.
We can even let you know if any segment is getting new Operator rules or has a scheduled maintenance that can screw up your plans.
Will we do ALL of the work for you?
Hell no!
Even so, just like Liam Neeson, we’ve got a very particular set of skills; skills acquired over a very long career; skills that will help and guide you to do more and better!
Hope you enjoyed reading this, and if you are hungry for more knowledge, don't forget to check our Mobidea Academy!
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