How to Make Money with CPA Networks and Facebook Ads: $30 000 in 3 Months

What CPA Marketing Is

CPA networks and Facebook ads are some of the tools for driving traffic to CPA offers. CPA marketing represents a business model when an advertiser pays affiliate partners (aka publishers) for the specific actions performed (these include purchases, subscriptions, downloads, registration, entering some data, and so on).  

CPA marketing allows making some money with minimum or even no investments and no need in a website. However, if you already have a blog/website, it might help you in getting the approval from CPA networks. Anyway, don’t consider CPA marketing as the mine for a quick buck, take it as a business.

CPA Networks

CPA networks are global platforms that combine multiple offers in various verticals.

Advantages of CPA networks over single brand offers:  

• Entrance to the global market (offers targeting various GEOs, an opportunity to reach top advertisers from established brands).
• Traffic monetization (mostly related to website and blog owners with free traffic).
• One-stop-shop (global networks cover multiple industries, therefore, you’re more secure in case of economic ups and downs related to a particular vertical).

CPA networks can be divided into two major categories:

• First, general platforms that provide numerous offers in various verticals; these networks are also known as multi-segment networks (for example, Admitad platform, where you may find offers for e-commerce, travel, finance, and many other verticals). Typically, this kind of network provides scheduled payouts (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly) in various currencies; webmasters are also equipped with numerous innovative instruments and tools.  
• Second, there are field-oriented networks with a focus on a specific vertical (for example, CrakRevenue is specialized in adult and dating offers). Con: this type of network might be more fragile in case of an economic crisis when some market verticals face difficulties (ex., travel vertical in 2020). Due to the current situation some multi-segment networks, such as Peerfly, have also suspended activity temporarily.

Ok, CPA networks are marketplaces for CPA offers. CPA offers, in their turn, can be divided following the type of action required, such as cost per action, cost per sale, cost per install, etc.

How to get approved with a CPA network: You may get a reference from one of the marketers who work for a while with the network to make things run smoother. In any case, just do not fake or exaggerate, be honest – they like it.

How to Make Money With a CPA Network

• You register, and then you’ll be contacted by a dedicated manager who will consult you through your campaigns. Moreover, the majority of established networks provide a wide selection of instruments and tools, including analytical and statistical reports to optimize your campaigns.
• Next, you look for the right offer. The choice is interrelated with the traffic source you select. Well, getting traffic is pretty easy; converting it is the key to success. The goal is to convert the traffic. You can drive traffic via native ads, e-mail, push notifications, YouTube, forums, social media, etc. Select a traffic source you’re going to work with, then think about what vertical will perform well with the chosen traffic source. For instance, Facebook does well with lead generation and gaming offers. Beginners might try mobile apps installs because they are easy to convert usually.

Practical tip: always do some research before selecting a specific offer (Is it presented on several networks? How many affiliates are working with the offer?). Make a split-test for several offers; testing only one product you might go for a losing product, which is very difficult to sell. Moreover, always keep in mind that some CPA offers have restrictions on traffic sources.

How to Get Higher Payouts from CPA Networks 

All of us have had a situation when we consider our work underpaid. Yep, marketers aren’t an exception. Clearly, we check offers and payouts but having reached good results we expect to win promotion, at least in terms of payment. Sooner or later we pretend to get higher rates. Not to get stressed, give a look at other CPA networks for the same offer, and compare payouts. Then you contact your affiliate manager and mention having higher rates on the other network. If you drive high-quality traffic that converts well, they are likely to increase the rates.  

Yeah, CPA marketing isn’t a piece of the pie but do not complicate and tangle the things.

Top 5 CPA Networks to Make Money Online

• MaxBounty. Established in 2004, MaxBounty currently is one of the most well-known and reputable CPA networks in the industry. There are more than 2 000 offers (including some popular international brands) in various categories. Additionally, MaxBounty is known for its impeccable customer support.
• ClickDealer. One of the leading networks with on-time payments and various payout options. ClickDealer provides an impressive array of offers and advanced analytical instruments for webmasters and marketers.
• CPAlead. Founded in 2006, CPAlead has more than 700 000 publishers from all over the world. The network is known for its CPA offers, PPC offers, content lockers, banner ads, pop-unders, etc. This is one of the best networks to start making money with CPA offers. You might also like their in-house marketplace.
• CrakRevenue. This is a premium performance CPA network with a focus on dating, adult, and webcam offers.
• Admitad.  One of the most recognizable brands in online marketing. Established in 2009, Admitad is currently one of the leaders in the affiliate marketing industry. A wide selection of offers, top-notch customer support, and custom-made in-house marketing tools.  

Facebook Ads

Brian Carter, an expert in Facebook marketing and advertising and the author of “The Like Economy” has demonstrated that even investing a mere $1/day in Facebook Ads you can reach a huge audience. For example, spending $1 for 30 days consecutively Brian has reached 120 000 people (let’s say, 4 000 people daily). Below you’ll see a graph that represents the cost ‘to reach 1 000 people using popular advertising channels’. This proves that the minimal budget used wisely for Facebook Ads can be pretty beneficial. Facebook Ads are far cheaper than the majority of advertising options, both online and offline.  

eMarketer states that 96% of marketers believe that Facebook Ads are the ‘most effective paid advertising channel on the social network.’ Contrary to YouTube, Facebook integrates ads seamlessly in the newsfeed instead of interrupting users’ online activity. Additionally, ads are usually relevant to users’ interests. Facebook campaigns can be used as a single traffic source or in combination with other traffic channels.

However, the cost of ads is increasing and people are getting immune to online ads, particularly social media ads. As more marketers jump into the market, it becomes more and more competitive, so grabbing an offer and publishing its ad on Facebook with no proper research and testing is unlikely to generate a positive ROI (return on income).

You customize your campaign in terms of audience, placements, schedule, and budget.

Tips to Make your Facebook Campaign Efficient and Profitable

• After you’ve chosen a traffic source, go for an offer. Start with mainstream verticals (apps, games, contents, etc.)
• Study the targeted audience – try to draw a profile of a typical user. This rule is fundamental for all your campaigns. You don’t want to waste your budget on non-relevant audiences (GEOs, demographics, interest); on the contrary, you need every single buck to bring in returns.
• Keep in mind how much time you have: you promote an offer with only 3 days left or you build up communities and pages for future campaigns as a long-term strategy?
• Tell people what you want them to do. In other words, don’t overestimate the human ability to read between lines and make your call to action as transparent and clear as possible (for example, “click here to download this free e-book”). If you don’t clarify, you miss out subscribers, likes, sales, and whatever you’re looking for.
• Important: make sure that your landing page is compliant with Facebook Ads Guidelines; otherwise you risk getting a long-term ban for your ad account. Typically, Facebook doesn’t support affiliate links that is why prelanders and a landing page give the edge over direct linking to an offer.
• Always test everything. See here: if you have 2 000 impressions to two ads, but one of them gets 35 clicks and another one has 5 clicks, so you know which ad works better in this particular case.
• Ok, there are still cloaking and farming. Not recommended for beginners in digital marketing, but experienced webmasters apply both techniques while promoting CPA offers in adult and gambling verticals.

The Story of Ads Inc.

A very curious story was published by BuzzFeed. The hero and the accused party is Ads Inc., the company that succeeded to get round Facebook moderation and restrictions. Ads Inc. conducted an advertising campaign, alluring readers by catchy titles about celebrities to false websites of local businesses and offering to make a trial order.

For that readers had to provide their bank cards’ data to pay the first order while automatically they were subscribed to new, more expensive products. Several days after the first shipment, frauds withdrew money from the victims’ accounts.

The results of the investigation showed that people received the worst possible sawdust in capsules. After one-two weeks more and more money was withdrawn from the accounts. Even worse, the subscription couldn’t be canceled by phone, and banks refused to return funds for the subscription. The only solution was to reissue the card. On average, people lost around $100.  

Not to get banned by Facebook, Ads Inc. paid to real Facebook users ($15-30 per month) to use their accounts for placing ads. Since 2016 the company has spent around $50 million on ads and earned 50-100% profit from a single ad post. According to the FTC, in the last ten years these swindlers reft away more than $1.3 billion. BuzzFeed journalists checked more than 100 ads launched via rented accounts and received the list of 1 700 Facebook pages, which were used to display fraud ads since 2016. The number of accounts was so large that Ads Inc. began selling some excess accounts to other marketers for $800.  

How to Make Almost 30k on Facebook Ads

Offer: Erogan

CPA Network: LeadBit

Traffic source: Facebook ads (target)

Period: August 1, 2019 – November 11, 2019

GEO: Italy, Czech Republic, Romania

Expenses: $19 600

Income: $49 046

Profit: $29 446

ROI: 150%

For the campaign marketers used several pre-landings (took the pre-landings from the offer and modified them a bit) and a landing page.  Many creatives were tested; the combination of the following creatives and rough pre-landings demonstrated the best results.

The strategy included: 1 CBO campaign, 3-5 adsets, 1 ad in each adset. Auto-setting was adjusted to disable expensive adsets to control the cost of the lead. Additionally, the campaign budget was set to increase by 20-30% once a day.

Marketers used accounts provided with Aezakmi browser: accounts didn’t live long, but they managed to spend $300-500 from a single account, in some cases up to $800-1 000. The average approval rate from Leadbit for three GEOs was around 55%.  

Even though Facebook doesn’t like adult ads and makes it very complicated to work with, webmasters were pretty successful in this campaign.

Conclusion

CPA model is distributed in Internet marketing due to its simplicity. Tracking leads is usually easy, so there are no difficulties in calculating CPA in online marketing.

Affiliate marketing on Facebook is a great tool to attract traffic, but it should be wisely used and adhere more to the "white" methods. By the way, the Facebook audience is noticeably more solvent than in other social media, so it suits for such product groups as self-care, beauty and health, or accessories.