CPA marketing is the fastest growing niche of advertising strategies. CPA business promotion from A to Z: how it works What is an affiliate program

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In recent years, CPA marketing (from the English Cost Per Action - payment for action) has gained good momentum in the CIS market. This model of online advertising is quite effective and, if used correctly, can bring up to 20% of all traffic on the site. However, it has its own pitfalls. For example, partners who bring low-quality traffic or openly scam. In this article, we will talk about examples of dishonest work of webmasters that we ourselves have encountered, and show how to detect such cases in time. But first, a little materiel.

How CPA Marketing Works

There are three parties involved in the process:

  • Advertiser- a customer, a site whose goods and services need to be advertised.
  • Webmaster— a performer who places ads on banners, social networks, email newsletters, on his own website, etc.
  • CPA network (affiliate network)- an intermediary between the first and second, who accepts orders (offers) from advertisers, selects webmasters and deals with organizational issues: concluding contracts, accounting for work performed, paying remuneration.

So, the customer and the contractor find each other on the site of the partner network and agree on cooperation. The webmaster places on his site or in another channel an affiliate link that contains his tags. When a person follows such a link to the advertiser's website and performs a conversion action (purchase, booking, registration, etc.), the webmaster receives money for this.

What difficulties may arise when working with CPA networks

This is where the “trust but verify” principle comes into play. Naturally, not all partners try to deceive their advertisers, but if you do not control the quality of affiliate traffic, then the likelihood of encountering fraud increases significantly. In addition, by ignoring the activities of unscrupulous webmasters, you not only lose money, but also risk ruining relationships with partners who work honestly. After all, it is their work that scammers appropriate for themselves. Let's see how exactly they do it.

Examples of Advertiser Fraud in CPA Marketing

Context per brand

The webmaster places contextual advertising using the name of the client company in the keywords. When a user clicks on such an ad, he gets to the webmaster's site, where he is marked with affiliate tags and redirected to the advertiser's site. If a person eventually places an order, then the webmaster will receive a reward for it. Why is that bad? Yes, because the online store has to pay for attracting customers who were already going to make a purchase in it without any advertising. In addition, in such cases, keyword bids increase and the advertiser has to spend more on their own campaigns with branded queries.

Clickunder (ClickUnder)

A person goes to some site, for example, to watch TV series online and clicks the mouse in any of its areas. At this point, the advertiser's website opens in a new tab and the user is marked with affiliate cookies. If after a while this user visits the advertiser's website via organic or type-in ​​and makes a conversion, the webmaster will receive money for it.

Opening sites in a frame

This method is very similar to the clickander, with the only difference being that affiliate sites do not open in new tabs, but in 1×1 pixel pages that are invisible to the human eye. This is due to the tag