Fancy learning CPA marketing from the experts? If you’re an affiliate marketer or have your own business, CPA marketing can help you grow your business exponentially. So what is CPA marketing? CPA stands for cost per action, or it can also mean cost per acquisition. With certain direct response marketing you only pay when someone clicks on your advert, or for a number of impressions shown to your audience.
This is very useful for marketers because they can control where their adverts show up. Ideally you only want your advert to show up for someone who is specifically targeted by you, according to your own specific criteria. This criteria will of course depend on your unique business, location and style of marketing.
For example, if you own a shoe shop in Greenwich, you might choose to only show your adverts to people who live in that specific town. People who live a long distance away, or even in another country are hardly likely to visit Greenwich just to buy shoes! So you’ll save money on your campaign by targeting those who are more likely to visit your shoe shop.
Learning CPA From The Experts
You might go another step too and target searches for “shoe shop” within your local area. You can do this through Google’s Adwords program or the formerly Bing ads (now Microsoft Advertising). CPA marketing goes beyond this too. Some CPA platforms can allow marketers to target their potential customers by:
- Age
- Sex
- Location
- Interests
- Connections
- Income
- Online browsing activities
- Online buying activities
- and many other data points collected through online actions
Facebook, for example, gathers information on people through their likes, connections, interests, purchases, dislikes and posts. There’s huge amounts of data available through the platform dating back years. All this information can make advertisers jobs much easier. Used intelligently, this information can be harnessed through CPA marketing to find the perfect customers for your particular business or product.
Learning CPA From The Experts – Data Collection
Not only can online marketers control who sees their advertisements, but they can also collect their own data based on who clicks on their adverts and subsequently takes some action. An action could be signing up to an email list or making a purchase. When the marketer collects enough data on these kinds of actions over time, they are in a better position to determine what kinds of people are most likely to make a purchase, or opt-in to their email marketing list.
This is why tracking is such an important part of learning CPA. See also PPC affiliate marketing for beginners.
Many new businesses try CPA marketing on a platform such as Adwords, burn through some money and quit completely! They assume that their marketing efforts have failed. Or that perhaps the strategy doesn’t work. But this is a flawed view. They simply haven’t collected enough data yet or they made a mistake somewhere in their marketing campaign.
Starting Small & Collecting Data
When you start an advertising campaign using one of the many platforms, it’s advisable to start small if you don’t know what you’re doing. Doing so will ensure that your learning curve doesn’t involve massive losses and/or wasted impressions on your adverts to the wrong audience. It is likely to happen that you’ll make some mistakes.
If after a certain time your advertising isn’t generating any sales, you know to quit that particular campaign. This can be difficult in the first instance of learning CPA marketing; but think of it as a marathon rather than a sprint.
A good starting point is to use Google’s Adwords platform and create a specific keyword for your advert. The keyword you use will depend on your own particular business and service/product. Let’s use the previous example of owning a shoe shop in Greenwich.
Shoe Shop Example
Start out with Google’s free keyword planner tool and look for suitable keywords which relate to your shop and what you sell. Target only the country you are selling in, so as not to accidentally include other countries (and wasting money). If your business is global, you can of course ignore this and set location to all locations, removing any specific country.
“Shoe shop greenwich” is a suitable keyword for your store if this meets your criteria. It only gets 110 searches per month, but this is a suitable starting point. Next log in to your Adwords platform and build an advert which targets this specific keyword. Then, your advert should show up when someone targets your specified keyword.
Of course people in Greenwich probably won’t always type Greenwich along with their search. They will likely type in local shoe shop instead, or just “shoe shop”. Google, or their preferred search engine will give them local solutions automatically. But you can specify when creating your adverts to only show them within a certain radius of your shop. You can also create a radius targeting around your physical address, if you have one for your business.
Learning CPA marketing from the experts does take time and you need to experiment with a single platform until you become more familiar. Once you have run a few campaigns you can look at the data which should give you some insight into your perfect target market.
Look at the image below which shows some data on impressions of a campaign I’ve been running. As you can see, the higher age range shows a cheaper cost per lead. Hence, I’ve turned off the more expensive targeting and focused instead on the cheaper lead costs.
The more data you collect, the more you will see where your perfect customer “avatar” resides in terms of their demographics: age, location, marital status, etc.
The Customer Avatar – Your Perfect Customer
The customer avatar is the perfect customer who relates to your service or product the best. They are the people who will buy your products and become a lifetime fan! Defining your customer avatar can save you a huge amount of wasted effort when it comes to CPA because it will help you determine how to target your perfect audience in the best possible way.
Consider who your product/service serves the best. What are their problems, pains and frustrations which your product solves? As you get closer to understanding your perfect customer, you’ll be able to create your “customer avatar” and zone in on:
- Their likes/dislikes
- Where they live in the world
- Whether they are married/single
- Do they have a family/children?
- How old is your typical customer?
- Do they have a pet?
- Do they own their own house?
- What’s their income bracket?
- And so on..
The more information you can gather on your customer avatar, the better able you will be to zone into them with your CPA marketing campaign.
Start Learning CPA Marketing & Build An Online Business
Whether you have your own business already, or want to build an online business from scratch, you can start learning marketing strategies through an online training and education platform and community.
You can start learning CPA marketing from the experts through an online business platform and training resource. Here’s me on a webinar masterminding with other marketers.
Learn how to market products and services through various online marketing strategies, including CPA, and join an online training and mentorship community.
Start learning CPA marketing from the experts. Access online digital training resource through this link.
