Every affiliate marketing campaign starts with an offer. Finding high-converting CPA offers is the first step in launching a campaign. It might also be the most important one. 

Undoubtedly, a good offer is the premise of every successful affiliate marketing campaign. That’s why we decided to delve deeper into the topic of choosing CPA offers with high chances of profitability. So, if you need a good strategy for finding offers, read the article below and learn.

What is a CPA offer?

Let’s start with the basics. CPA means Cost Per Action. Therefore, CPA offers are offers in which the affiliate network pays you every time you manage to complete a certain action. The actions are specified by the affiliate network and usually fit into one of the following options: installation, subscription, purchase or sharing data. Every time an action is completed you score a conversion.

The simplified CPA offer flow looks like this: 

• You choose an offer to promote and run it with a traffic source of choice.
• You pay for impressions or clicks.
• Affiliate network pays you for conversions.
• If the amount of money you get paid for conversions is higher than what you paid for clicks and impressions — hurray, you are making money with affiliate marketing!

Where to run CPA offers?

The simple answer is everywhere. CPA offers are the most popular type of offers so they are available for all ad formats and GEOs. You can make them work with any ad exchange platform, such as, for example Zeropark. 

One thing you need to keep in mind is that every offer has its restrictions and recommended set-up. Even though you can run these offers anywhere, each offer has its recommendations or sometimes limitations. Some will be best for push traffic and some are only meant to be run on mobile devices in a specific country. 

Either way, you should always remember to read the offer specifications before launching a campaign so that your conversions are always accepted. 

What are the best CPA offers to choose as a beginner?

There are a couple of things worth paying attention to when deciding on your first batch of offers. Not every CPA offer is suitable for a beginner, and you need to understand why before you burn through all of your budget running something too difficult. Here is what you need to consider.

Conversion Flow

Conversion flow is the most important aspect of an offer. The two options that should interest you as a beginner are SOI (Single Opt-In) and DOI (Double Opt-In) offers. Both of these conversion flows are simple and easy to convert. That’s why SOI and DOI offers tend to have lower payouts ($0-$2). 

Choosing lower payout offers is recommended for beginner affiliates because these types of offers are simply easier to convert. All they usually require is only some personal data to be shared by the user. Other offer types, such as carrier billing or FTD (first time deposit), will appeal to a much narrower audience. That’s mainly because they require spending money, sometimes rather large sums, which the average internet user might be reluctant to do.

High payout offers might be tempting because of the possible high profits, but because the conversion process is complicated, such offers don’t convert easily. That’s why you will need a much higher budget and much more testing to find a chunk of traffic responsive to that type of offer.

GEO Targeting

The second important aspect is targeting. As a beginner, you should go for offers with Tier 2 and Tier 3 countries targeting for the two following reasons. One, these GEOs are relatively unsaturated compared to Tier 1 GEO. Two, these GEOs are inexpensive compared to Tier 1 GEOs.

Choosing cheaper GEOs gives you a chance to test a lot of traffic for a reasonable price. Tier 1 countries are generally not advised for beginners because they tend to have very high volumes and they’re expensive but also extremely competitive. In general, if you have a good, working high payout offer and a sizable budget, Tier 1 is for you. Otherwise, stick to Tier 2 or 4 and especially Europe, Southeast Asia (SEA) and Latin America (LATAM) regions.

Also, let’s not forget about Tier 4. It is not always distinguished as a separate tier by networks, but when it is, it can be a great choice for low payout SOI offers.

Ad format

Even though you can start and achieve success with any ad format, some are just easier to learn with. 

That’s why the recommended progression is to start with pop traffic as it’s the easiest and cheapest way to learn affiliate marketing and test a chunk of traffic that you can then use with other ad formats. All you need is a landing page (which is usually provided by the affiliate network) and you’re good to go!

The next recommended ad format to start with is push. It’s only slightly more expensive and only requires additional preparation of ad creatives. 

Another advice would be to try domain redirect traffic next. It’s a bit more expensive but allows for more precise keyword targeting and doesn’t require anything but a landing page. 

How to choose CPA offers?

There isn’t one simple way of choosing the best converting profitable offer. Also, note that you should never choose just one offer but split test different options whenever possible. There are three good ways of finding these profitable CPA offers. You can choose either of them or all of them at once. Here they are.

Pick from suggested CPA offers 

Affiliate networks tend to have a tab or a place on their dashboard where they display the best performing offers. In Mobidea, for example, there is an ‘Opportunities’ tab where you can find the historical data on what offers performed best. Running such a report for a recent date (e.g. yesterday) will give you a list of offers with proven performance. 

Another way of getting a list of suggested offers is by asking your affiliate network account manager or support team for a report of their top offers by revenue or conversions. Sometimes you can specify a vertical but not every network is able to do that. 

Once you have a list of top performing CPA offers, you can pick 3-5 of them to run with a particular type of traffic and one GEO. By split testing similar offers, you are maximizing your chances of finding a profitable offer. 

Ask for recommendations

Another similar option is to ask for recommendations. This time, however, you wouldn’t be getting long lists of best performers but a personalized advice on what to run and where. 

Affiliate managers usually have very good knowledge of what’s going on and what’s working well. Asking them for recommendations can get you a number of offers with proven success rate that match your niche or area of expertise. 

Make sure to specify what you’re interested in when asking for recommendations. Unless you really just want to try something new that has a good chance of working out. Also, do remember to split test and never run just one campaign hoping it’s gonna be the big one. 

Research CPA offers using spy tools

You can use spy tools to research offers in many different ways. You can do a global or country search and filter results by volume or days running. That way you will be able to find offers that have been around for a long time or are proven to work, judging by the high revenue invested in them by other affiliates.

Another useful research tactic is taking an offer URL from your affiliate network and searching for it in spy tools. That way, you can see the angles people are using while promoting a given offer. 

Additionally, you can see whether the top network offers are also top spy tool offers but do keep in mind that the data isn’t always 100% accurate because of cloaking.

Find well-known offers 

Sometimes you might hear a recommendation in a webinar, video tutorial or a podcast. You might also read about a well performing offer on a forum or in a newsletter. Either way, if the people are saying that the offer is good, it makes sense that you’d want to find it and try it yourself. 

If you have the destination URL of the offer, you can enter it into WhereGoes.com and find out which affiliate network this offer came from. 

If you don’t have any specific information but know the name of the offer or have a vague description, you can use OfferVault to easily look through all the available offers without having to register to any affiliate networks. That option is also good when you have a proven funnel and need more similar offers to test.

Where to find CPA offers? – Examples

CPA offers can be found via affiliate programs and affiliate networks. If you’d like to know more about the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of the two options, you can read our FAQ and see the examples of various promising offers.

Additionally, traffic sources sometimes have their own corners with selection of offers with special deals, such as Zeropark’s Offer Wall in the Deals section. Joining a new affiliate network via this kind of recommendation can give you a good boost Here are the examples of offers available with additional bonuses:

On the other hand, the previously mentioned selection of offers in Mobidea’s ‘Opportunities’ tab looks like this:

How to split test CPA offers? 

It’s rather easy to test and compare offers when they have similar payouts. In that case, you can just look at the ad spend and then look at the conversions and whichever offer has higher spend and lower ROI can be assumed to be the loser. 

But when you have offers with different payouts you might need an additional tool. Of course, when you score a lot of conversions and gather significant data, it becomes clear what offer has a higher chance of success rate. But if you can’t afford to spend a lot of money to find that out there is a different option.

This Bayesian A/B Testing Calculator allows you to enter the number of landing page views (called Trials), conversions (called Successes) and payouts (called Success Value). Once you enter the data, you will receive an estimation of how likely the offers are to turn profitable.

This can be especially helpful when you’re testing a lot of similar offers with the same funnel (creatives, landers, targeting). Even when they have different payouts and different conversion flows they might appear to the same audience. In order not to lose money while searching for the best CPA offer, you should use the calculator and pause the offers with lower chances of success.

Mistakes to avoid when choosing CPA offers

Choosing the right CPA offer isn’t that difficult at all. As long as you follow the general recommendations and do some research you have a good chance of making profits after testing your first batch of offers. However, just to make sure you have the highest chance of success, here are some common mistakes to avoid:

• When choosing offers based on their statistics, don’t focus on EPC or conversion rate. These numbers can easily be skewed by a bad batch of data and they shouldn’t be the deciding factor when picking offers. Volume is usually the most important.
• Don’t pick offers at random. Unless you have a high budget and are hoping to find a goldmine on your own, you shouldn’t make random choices. You have equal chances of finding a good and a bad offer so it’s better not to risk it as a beginner. 
• Never fail to read the offer description. This tip is especially useful for complete beginners. Finding a good offer, or a set of offers, isn’t enough. You also need to drive traffic to it and the worst thing that can happen is mistakenly scoring conversions from traffic that’s outside of the offer requirements. Even though your campaign might look profitable in the tracker, you will not receive a payout for the wrong kind of conversions. 

Conclusions

Offers are the major building blocks of your campaigns and your success as an affiliate marketers depends largely on your choices. 

In general, doing your own research and listening to recommendations is the way to go. Affiliate networks want you to succeed so you should always take their advice into account. Additionally, your success depends on how much effort you put into researching. Testing traffic aside, picking a good batch of offers can either make you very optimistic about your future or discouraged from affiliate marketing for good.

Ask around, access reports, use spy tools, and every other resource you have available to put that effort into preparation so you can run your campaign smoothly and efficiently.

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Magdalena Bober