For any business, no matter what size, this would represent a significant hole in their advertising budget, and as a consequence, many of these organizations are turning to CPA advertising as it is claimed that it is not possible to ‘cheat’ such programs.

Unfortunately, however, this is only half true. Of course, as there is nothing to be financially gained from merely clicking on an advert, then click fraud as it is currently understood will simply not work in association with CPA advertising.

Nevertheless, it is also widely acknowledged in online business circles that there are many ways that people can ‘cheat’ using the CPA advertising business model. It should also be noted, however, that this works both ways, a fact to which many experienced and knowledgeable CPA program affiliates would be more than willing to attest.

It is obvious that when any company chooses to use the CPA advertising program sales of their products or services, then it is going to be almost impossible for less scrupulous affiliates is to cheat the system. Any customers sent to the advertising web site by the affiliate will either buy or not, and if they do not buy, then the advertiser will obviously not pay the affiliate the commission.

The picture becomes considerably less clear, however, when you are looking at CPA advertisers who are paying for leads generated. In this situation, the advertiser is looking for good quality targeted potential customers who they are able to add to their mailing list, so that they can continually mail out special offers, newsletters, and so on.
In this way, they will put their company and sales messages in front of the potential customer on a regular basis, which will significantly increase their chances of generating sales at a later date when the customer is in the market for their type of product or service.

This desire to only attract high-quality targeted potential customers to their mailing list is the reason that they can be very selective about the websites that they are willing to advertise on. It does, however, also mean that anybody who signs up for their mailing list who is knowingly disinterested in the products or services that they offer or is not in a position to take advantage of them is a complete waste of money as far as the advertiser is concerned. So, signing up for an advertiser’s mailing list in these circumstances could be constituted as cheating the advertiser.

Is cheating currently happening?
The unfortunate answer to this question is a categorical ‘yes’, and this is important to you as a potential publisher or affiliate for two reasons. Firstly, the more that advertiser’s feels that they have been cheated, the less they will be willing to pay out for the leads that they are gathering through their site. Secondly, the more such cheating becomes evident, the less flexible and accommodating the advertisers will become, and, as they are forced to spend more and more money on anti-cheating measures, payouts will once again suffer.

It is, for example, extremely likely that the bigger corporations and organizations will become less and less willing to entertain the idea of working with anything but the most prominent publishers and affiliates, those who have long established track records.

However, cheating does exist.
For example, it is not uncommon for less honest or scrupulous affiliates to pay people to signup with higher paying CPA programs, purely to generate the commission.
If, for example, a CPA advertiser is paying the affiliate $15 per lead, it clearly makes financial sense for the affiliate to pay hard-up friends or relatives $5 to sign up with that particular program. In this case, both the affiliate and their friend does very nicely from the arrangement, and the only loser is the CPA advertiser who has just paid $15 for what is effectively a totally worthless lead.

On the other side of the fence, however, many more experienced and knowledgeable affiliates are convinced that the CPA advertisers themselves counter this to a certain extent by indulging in their own form of cheating. This is possible because to a large extent, an affiliate is relying upon the honesty of the CPA advertiser to report how many leads they actually receive from the promotional efforts of that individual.

And, in most cases, there is no way of independently checking the numbers that any CPA advertiser produces. So it is widely suspected that many advertisers only report 80% of the leads that they actually receive to their affiliates, meaning that those affiliates remain permanently unpaid for 20% of the work that they have done.
As highlighted above, this element of ‘cheating and contra-cheating’ within the CPA advertising industry is something that will ultimately directly affect you if you choose to use advertising of this type on your website or blog. In this scenario, it is inevitable that advertisers will have to bear increased costs, and these costs will gradually filter down to affiliates in the form of either lower payouts or stricter payment criteria being enforced.

It is not, therefore, in your best interests to be tempted into trying to cheat the system yourself. Whilst this may make money for you in the very short term, over the longer term it will significantly reduce the earnings potential of any advertising that you carry, and this will inevitably threaten the long-term survival of your business. Attempting to cheat the CPA advertising system represents a classic case of ‘short term gain but long term pain!’

Many of the leading advertising company websites will offer you several choices of advertising models that you can use on websites, blogs, and the search engine results pages that they control. These might include PPC, CPA, and also what is known as CPM advertising, where you will pay per 1000 exposures of your advert, irrespective of any actions that site visitors who see the ads might take.

However, assuming that you choose the CPA option, then it is most likely that your advert will be shown until a pre-specified number of the actions that you require have been recorded. For example, if you set up your campaign to generate 100 sales, then your adverts will stop showing once that target is reached.

Again, as an advertiser, there are quite a few other things that you can use CPA advertising for as well. For example, you can:

• Use CPA adverts to test the effectiveness of your ads before launching a major campaign. After a CPA test run, you can quickly see how many sales have been generated by your campaign, and, although you will not necessarily know exactly how many times your advert has been shown, you will nevertheless be able to establish how long the ad has been running. From this, it will be fairly easy to calculate approximately how many sales you will be able to generate from a more significant campaign if you were to use the same CPA strategy.

• Effectively allocate and spend a restricted advertising budget. The very nature of the CPA model means that this particular form of advertising is very effective in budgetary terms. If you’re working on a limited budget, you will know from the outset that the only time you will pay for your adverts is when a site visitor takes the action that you specifically require of them.

• Boost sales performance. If you have been advertising using other methods, and enjoying little success, then CPA advertising represents an almost risk-free alternative that you might want to try in order to boost your sales figures.

• Use CPA advertising to test a new affiliate program. Since most affiliate programs are essentially CPA advertising campaigns ‘dressed up’ in a different guise, you can use CPA to test the effectiveness of any affiliate program that you plan to launch for your business without worrying about any longer term commitments to people who might choose to affiliate with you.

From a website or blog publisher’s point of view, CPA works in pretty much exactly the same way as AdSense or any other leading PPC arrangement. You would simply join an advertising website that offered a CPA option, choose the type of adverts that you want to show on your site, and finally copy a few lines of code from the site and paste them onto your web pages where you want the advertising to appear. You should then start seeing targeted advertising appear on your site almost immediately, and all you need do is drive as many visitors to your own web pages as possible, in the hope that they will see the ads and click through on them.

Now, if you are using AdSense or another PPC advertising program, then this would be the point at which you would have generated a payment to be added to your account. Using CPA, however, the visitor that you have just sent to the advertiser’s website still has one more step to take before you can expect to get paid.

This demonstrates what is widely perceived as the main disadvantage of using CPA advertising. However, it should be noted that CPA programs will generally pay you a great deal more than you could ever hope to earn for one click using a PPC program, and this vastly increased payout per success does go quite some way to offsetting what many perceive to be the disadvantages of using CPA advertising.

With the more common PPC advertising format, the advertiser will pay every time his ad is opened and viewed, but using CPA advertising means that it does not matter how many people click through from an advert to a website and then choose not to buy.If a website visitor does not undertake the task that the advertiser has chosen to pay for, then the website owner who drove that visitor to the advertiser site does not get paid, pure and simple.

For The Advertiser
The primary benefit for an advertiser using CPA should therefore be immediately obvious. That is, they get what they pay for.
It is therefore equally obvious why an advertiser is likely to prefer to use CPA advertising as opposed to PPC programs like AdSense and AdWords. By using CPA, he passes the entire risk to the website owner, whilst at the same time making it a far simpler matter to quantify the effectiveness of his advertising efforts by reference to easily identifiable ROI figures.
In the most common CPA scenario, the advertiser will pay a revenue share percentage to the blog or website publisher when he or she drives a visitor to the advertiser website who then, in turn, performs the task that is required of them. And, although the task that the advertiser requires a site visitor to perform is entirely up to them, the most common situation is where the advertiser will pay the website or blog publisher for any sales or 7 customer leads that are generated for the advertiser’s business through the publisher site or blog.

For The Publisher
For a website or blog publisher, however, CPA is not as attractive as using AdSense, for example. And, once again, the reasons for this should be relatively obvious. Firstly, it should be evident that the financial risk that is being carried by the publisher is considerably higher when he chooses to use CPA advertising as opposed to using PPC. If a CPA advertising campaign (over which he has little or no control, remember) is a failure, and therefore does not generate any response from the visitors that are sent to the advertiser’s website, he or she will receive no payment, irrespective of how much time and effort they might have put into promoting their site in an effort to generate visitors for an advertiser.

It can also be difficult for a publisher to effectively track the number of actions that their efforts on behalf of the advertising have actually generated, and they may be reliant on the advertiser’s own figures when they try to calculate how successful they have been. For these reasons, it is not difficult to see why website and blog publishers have been relatively slow to encompass the CPA advertising model with the same enthusiasm with which they adopted AdSense, for example. The bottom line, of course, for any blogger or website owner publishing any form of third-party advertising is how much money they make from it, and, so far at least, the results from CPA advertising do seem to lag a little behind those from the leading PPC programs.

Furthermore, it is also true that placing any form of third-party advertising on your website or blog that needs a site visitor to take any form of action carries the risk that the ad itself is not well designed or written, and that visitors do not therefore do what both you and the advertiser want them to do. This is true of either PPC or CPA advertising, and for this reason some publishers will be perfectly happy to try out CPA advertising as a viable alternative to PPC. CPA is still a relatively undeveloped online advertising model, and it is probably fair to suggest that Google will have a large part to play in how the business model and therefore CPA markets develop.

Without any doubt, given the size of their advertising network, when Google eventually launch their own CPA advertising model, then the chances are that the market will change almost overnight.It is also worth noting that eBay, who are primarily in the business of contacting people and bringing them together, are now also actively promoting their own affiliate program which is based on the CPA model.To have such a well-known brand name starting to utilize CPA advertising to promote the services of one of the world’s top ten websites can obviously do little to harm the popularity that CPA offers as a way of monetizing websites and blogs.