Big Names Advertise Using CPA Although I have suggested that CPA advertising gives almost all of the advantages to the advertiser rather than the publisher, there is one fact about CPA advertising that is often ignored by many blog and website owners who are considering what type of advertising program to use on their site.
This is the fact that whilst PPC advertising can and is used by businesses of any size, and that it tends to be especially popular with smaller businesses, many CPA advertisers are very definitely at the other end of the financial scale. Basically, in certain industries, all of the big name advertisers use CPA as their main method of advertising their products and services, simply because CPA offers far better value to them than PPC advertising. In fact, up to 40% of the organizations and corporations who use the services of CPA network and websites represent the largest corporations in their respective businesses, with widely known, well respected brand name products and services.
Although this may initially seem to be an irrelevant fact – it doesn’t matter who is paying you as long as you get paid, right? – the significance and importance of this should not, in fact, be underestimated. If you are a website publisher or have your own blog and you are looking for ways to monetize your site, then you must understand something of the psychology of your site visitors. When they view your site, the advertisers that they see represented there will give them an impression of the quality of your site and, by extension, your business and reputation.
Carrying adverts from a well known and widely respected company will almost seem like an endorsement of your site by them. Even if you did not actually physically choose the advertiser who appears on your site (in some cases, the CPA network may choose which ads should appear on which sites) this does not necessarily lessen the positive impact of the subliminal association that is immediately created in the mind of any site visitor who sees that advertisement on your web page. 16 Imagine, for example, that a website that you are planning to feature advertising on is focused on vacations and travel – you want to feature advertising from car rental companies, hotel groups and the like.
When you attract visitors to this site, which do you think would give that visitor the best ‘first impression’ of your site – ads from Joe’s Car Rental or from Hertz? The answer, I would guess, is going to be obvious to anyone, and this is something that you should not ignore. Using CPA advertising from large well known companies can immediately enhance the perceived quality of your site. Not only that but visitors to your site are almost certainly going to be more willing to do business with these corporations than they are with companies of whom they have never even heard before. You will see a couple of examples of this below. Big Names Such As¼? I have previously suggested that CPA advertising is especially popular in certain businesses or industries. In particular, CPA is widely used by many organizations who operate service based businesses, rather than by companies who sell tangible products online. This is because most of the leading service based organizations already know from their research that customers are not going to buy their services on a whim or a hunch because the services that they offer are not the kind of things that people buy in this way.
So, these businesses are generally far more interested in collecting committed, targeted leads from their advertising efforts. This can perhaps be better appreciated by looking at a list of the types of businesses who would find CPA advertising most effective:
• Credit card companies
• Insurance companies
• Banks and financial institutions
• Mortgage and personal loan companies
• Hotel chains 17
• Travel organizations
• Online dating services
• Further education institutions (colleges, universities etc)
• Media organizations
• Rental companies
• Online operators (eBay, search engines, etc)
• Real estate brokerage companies And so on.
Effectively, the one common denominator between all of these businesses is that they do not realistically expect anybody to commit to buying their services immediately, unless of course a visitor is specifically looking for that particular type of service right at this moment. For example, no-one is likely to commit to a university education on a whim, any more than they are likely to take out a mortgage loan or rent a car if they have absolutely no need of such a product or service.
These markets are, however, incredibly competitive, and these large well-known organizations appreciate that, if they can get somebody to join their mailing list or have some other way of encouraging people to complete an online form, they have a very significant head start on their competition when and if that particular individual decides that they do need the product or service that is being advertised at some point in the future. Another consideration for many of these types of businesses is that PPC advertising is incredibly expensive for them.
For example, credit card companies can find themselves paying anywhere between $4 and $10 per click when using AdSense, and at these levels running a PPC campaign can become extremely expensive very, very quickly. Using CPA, however, all of these service-based organizations know that they will only pay for something that has real intrinsic value within the framework of how they conduct their business. Simply put, therefore, CPA represents far greater value for money than PPC advertising does for companies of this nature.