I finally gave-up spending most of my time with Adsense that started since 2004. I have dozens of blogs promoted Adsense before and I changed all ads to CPA offers, the earnings is simply overwhelming. If I found out this before I think I already made hundreds of thousands in all those losing years with Adsense…
Affiliate programs can be too lucrative if you are doing right…
CPA beats PPC or Adsense hands down. You also have more control over the type of offers you wish to promote and the response rate. All you need is a good network with good offers and you can easily get 10x return compared to Adsense.
I think the key predictor of the success of a particular model - CPA or CPM is the visitor loyalty.
Half of my visitors arrive to my sites after searching for “joke” or “daily joke” or “daily pic”, read the daily issue and leave. They won’t be filling out CPA offers. CPM model, however, works well.
But, a targeted blog with recurring visitors would do pretty well with a content-based, highly targeted CPA model.
There are no absolutes in CPA vs CPC vs CPM. The reason one site does better can be the exact reason another fails… Different users at different times.
Take facebook vs a comparison shopping site. On facebook people are engaged about their daily lives and not looking to leave, certainly not to transact, so the odds of a affiliate commission drop but there is still valuable exposure for advertisers to engage users, get traffic from a broad spectrum and start the buying process.
On the other hand that comparison shopping site will drive great sales but has only a small funnel of traffic and is late in the buying funnel so while the conversions will support a CPA ad, it’s not the end all solution.
Your sites are the same; some have people primed to buy, others have sites more of a prospective base. That’s why you need to test different formats and performance types.
CPA needs more traffic than PPC. Also more targeted sites. But revenue wise CPA are better I think. I’m just trying to get into CPA from PPC. I already have Amazon sites and happy with their earnings.
If you have quality traffic to your site then CPA offers can typically outperform Adsense.
It really depends on your niche - and how you go about adding the CPA offers.
There’s a couple different ways to go about it - obviously if you have a site about auto insurance or some other CPA niche you can place niche specific ads and do very well with them.
However not all niches lend themselves well to CPA directly - so you have to do some demographic targeting.
Think about what kind of demographic your site attracts - who visits it? Add your CPA offers based on that - matching the demographic will go a long way.
You can also see what the Adsense advertiser’s are advertising on your site. If you constantly see them advertising CPA offers then they must be making some ROI off of it so try rotating those in on your own.
It all comes down to testing on a per site basis. Start with adsense to get your baseline eCPM and then start rotating in CPA offers to see if it’s better or worse.
Makes good sense. Using your example “auto insurance” what are some good cpa networks / ad providers.
Jun, care to elaborate?
Do you think CPA is better than AdSense across the board, or just for a particular type of site. My sites, which are mostly content-based entertainment sites, have consistently underperformed in any CPA campaigns.
As a few others have stated they are pretty different models when it comes to making money. One requires the user to interact at multiple steps (a click, a sign up, a purchase), and the other requires a simple click.
My experience has been that most cost per click services tend to be serving the ads blindly (e.g. google adsense I have little control over the ads that appear on my site). With CPA I have the ability to select specific advertisers, usually selling items I know my visitors want, and post links where I want and how I want on my site.
You can make money either way, but I feel CPA rewards those who are willing to work hard, where as CPC rewards those with lots of traffic or a high paying keyword.
Hi all, just joined so pardon my noobness but I speak from experience the tiny bit that I have 
I find what Jun said is correct. I believe that he is right and so are others who say they can make it with adsense. Like real world, what kind of business you have decides what system you can or cannot follow, every business has target market. If you have a site that is visited by internet savvy people (like webmasters, programmers) etc you will get nothing for adsense. I hade 1000 visits or 5000 pageviews a day and i barely made 1$ a month on adsense. So I went for Adbrite (even worse >.<)
Yes adsense is less work but it can be more work if you want to do it right. For example a bad placement might have cost me 30$ a week for 3 years till I read a good tip and tried it. So yes like Jun said, I feel sorry for myself.
CPA is awesome. The payout ranges in double digits. But its even MORE hardwork than adsense if you’re starting out. However if you have niche and good visitor loyalty I can tell you , you can make a real living if you get your partners right. (offer products that complement what your visitors expect from your site).
I also know of some people who have nothing but a single HTML page and work with CPA + advertising. You see all of us trying to make a scratch as publishers realize that the money isn’t enough. Have you thought of it from the advertiser’s perspective? So much traffic, so cheap.
Adsense gives you a good feeling everyday with its trickles of cents and pennies yes. CPA looks disappointing when you see it week after week with zero results.
But I can tell you this. With CPA and JV type of income , just a few conversions will shoot you ahead of every ad network income you can think of. One day you will see you have few CPA leads and you will not bother with any Ad network as publisher. You will instead be on the other side (Advertiser).
I learned through years of mistakes >.< Just like Jun says. No small amount too. I want to share my mistakes, complete with details with everyone. So the industry can improve and small guys can make it, just like WWW was meant to be. Don’t forget this is the same as real world. There is competition, hard work is needed to see the difference and street (erm internetwork?) smarts to beat bigger players. Some of you would know this atleast from publishers perspective, Adbrite pays publishers around 0.01 cents for CPM banners if they can do it.They allow you to set it that low… even 0.00 (auto) But did you know that the minimum bid for the same spot to the advertiser is 10cents. Where does the 9 cents go?
Once I realized I was scrubbing the bottom with Adsense, AdNotsoBright and BLA etc tec, I turned around and became advertiser buying quality traffic for so cheap that sometimes I feel bad myself, but it quickly washes away when the next CPA pays me 50$.
Sorry for my long winded post. My site on this matter is not ready yet so I am Binging your brains here ^^
true but adsense is alot easier and less work
you just paste the code and forget about it while cpa offers require you to work on it on a daily basis
Hi Jun,
Interesting …
I’m always happy to hear when someone finds what will work well for them.
We wish you much success in the years ahead,
boxologist
I am actually not doing any adwords or PPC to my CPA campaigns… My activity is, set-up a landing page, write articles and submit them to top 5 article directories and wait… do the same thing over and over again with different campaigns/products = money.
I still have some sites doing little with Adsense but comparing both, I can say CPA is doing ahead by miles… But of course, as others said, it depends on where you enjoy and what is effective for you… People failed on CPA after having no result within a week… Earning money online needs perseverance and hard work if you want long term and recurring result… There is no quick rich scheme as other people are selling…
yes CPA is best way to earn online as cpa promoter sell via adwords only
I’m sorry for not responding this thread for a while…
I’ve been doing adsense since 2004 and I did never got any breakthrough on it… You need to have a lot of great content and traffic plus great niches to earn while on cpa, a simple landing page with targeted traffic means a lot…
Adsense always underperforms compared to other models. I no longer use adsense, instead I like to sell ad blocks monthly. I make a lot more and I have a “set” amount I make monthly.
CPA is great too. Just have to have the right traffic and niches. Congratulations on your success.
Johnathan
i don’t know what cpa you are doing, but one of my friends put both CB and adsense on his blog and earn much than just one adsense. so i think this is a good method
i think cpa can never take over the ppc model
what’s JV
My problem with CPA in general is that.
Most of the top performers cross my ethical boundaries
It is a never ending grind. I’m much more interested in recurring and passive income although I do get some of this with solid CPA offers.
For me diversification is the key. Aff, sellling products, PPC, CPA, CPM, JV, etc. This way if one thing falls off you still have other monetization streams. 