A Complete Guide to CPA and CPI Offers: How They Work in Affiliate Marketing

Welcome to the CPAlead guide on everything you need to know about CPA, CPI, and CPC offers. How offers work and why do what they do is what we'll focus on in this guide and help answer many of the questions we receive on a daily basis.

What is an Offer?

Offers simply are web pages that offer the visitor a product or service. It may be a chance to win a gift card, a mobile app to install, a subscription service, and any product you can think of. Think of it as a web page that entrepreneurs create that is just like a website, but it's a website with only one page that entices the visitor to take an action. When the visitor completes the action, they get what is promised within the offer, the advertiser gets an app install, a sale, or a sign up, and the CPAlead publisher (you) get the payout reward. The payout rewards varies from offer to offer and is set primarily by the advertisers. The more difficult and offer is the complete, the higher the payout typically is, but that is not always the case.

Almost all CPA, CPI, and CPC offers want traffic, in other words VISITORS, from ONE country and ONE device type. For instance, if an advertiser is asking for traffic to their offer (web page) from only Android devices in the United States, then that means they will reject all traffic that does not match this criteria. When a rejection happens, this is called a redirect. They will redirect traffic they don't want to an offer you will not earn money from. This is what you need to avoid!

If you are a CPAlead publisher and you live in India, you can still earn from an offer that targets Android devices in the United States, in fact you can earn from ANY CPAlead offer no matter what country and device it targets. From the example above, if you want to earn from this particular offer that requires traffic from Android and only people in the United States, then your task is to only provide it traffic from Android devices in the United States. When the traffic you send to the offer completes it and the advertiser notifies CPAlead that a successful completion has taken place, then CPAlead will reward your account the payout. You can send this offer traffic from other countries and other devices if you want, but you will NOT earn money from any traffic that doesn't match the target country and target device.

What is the Difference Between CPA, CPI, and CPC Offers?

CPI Offers

CPI (Cost Per Install) offers require your visitors to install a mobile app for you to earn money. Once the app is installed, you will be rewarded the payout promised for that offer. CPI offers exist because mobile app developers have a very hard time getting traffic on the Google Play Store or on the Apple App Store. A lot of times new apps will be completely ignored, leaving the app developer's app undiscovered without a single download. This is where you come in as a CPAlead publisher - you can help bring awareness to their app! You can get people to install their app and get rewarded for it. It's a win win situation for you, the CPAlead publishers, and also the mobile app developer. If the mobile app developer receives enough installs, their app may start trending in Google or Apple app store! This is why they pay for installs and it's also why it's become the most popular offer type on CPAlead.

CPA Offers

CPA (Cost Per Action) offers are typically webpages that ask your visitors to insert their information in order to obtain a chance to win a gift card, sign up for a subscription service, or purchase a produce or service. When the required task is completed by your visitor, you will earn the payout in the offer. These offers often seek traffic traffic from only one target country but many times they accept traffic from ALL devices. So for instance, if a CPA offer has a target country of France and all devices are allowed, that means anyone in France from any device can generate a lead for you on this offer if they complete the required action. Again, it doesn't matter where YOU are from, it only matters where your TRAFFIC is from.

CPC Offers

CPC (Cost Per Click) will pay you per click. Unlike CPA and CPI offers, a user only needs to view the website or mobile app before the payout event happens. For CPC offers the payout is typically much lower than CPA and CPI offers because the action is simple - it's just a click! The problem with these types of offers is that they attract fraud. Everyone who understands the very basics of affiliate marketing has thought about making a click bot at least once in their life (come on, admit it!). So to protect our advertisers we typically save these offers for our publishers who use our locker tools and have been proven to only provide quality traffic. If we opened up our CPC offers for anyone to use, we would lose all of our CPC advertiser the same day. Why? You guessed it, click bots! We don't even tell our publishers when they are eligible for CPC offers, one day they'll just appear on their lockers and will continue to show unless we detect unusual traffic. In other words, we save these offers for publishers who have proven to us that they are serious about affiliate marketing, so if you want them, generate some leads on your locker first and maybe you'll see them on your lockers one day too.

Fast Pay Means DAILY Payments

Offers that have the fast pay label are offers that you can cash out once every 24 hours. This means as long as you earn above $1 in your account, you can click Cash Out and get paid by PayPal the same day or the next day. You can do this as many times per month as you want. Any offer that doesn't have the fast pay logo will be available for cash out at the end of the next month. This is because some advertisers only pay us traffic generated this month at the end of next month. With fast pay, these are networks who generally pay us in advance or on a weekly schedule. That is how we're able to reward you daily for some offers, and much later for others. Look for the Fast Pay label if you only want to promote offers that will pay you within 24 hours.

Finding Traffic for an Offer

Before sending traffic to an offer, you need to decide what type of offer interests you the most. In other words, what type of offer do you want to earn money from? What type of offer do you think will be easier for you to get traffic to? Next you need to find an offer that matches your criteria that is available for traffic in the area and device you would like to target. Are you only familiar with Indian culture? Then maybe it's best to find a CPI offer that will require visitors from India to install a mobile app on their Android device. There are plenty of offers to choose from, so please take your time with this step. Once you have decided, then it's time to find the traffic that matches the requirements of your offer.

Social Media by far is the easiest way to get traffic to an offer. Whether it's traffic from a YouTube video, a TikTok or Instagram Post, or even Facebook, there is more than enough traffic out there for all devices and all countries! The best place to start is YouTube or Reddit. Watch videos on how to get traffic to social media posts. Once you master that, watch other videos or browse other subreddits that will teach you how to optimize and enhance your social media posts to get even more traffic. The next most popular method is by buying traffic on Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook Ads, and anywhere else that sells real traffic. As long as you earn more than you pay, then that means you're profitable and can scale up your campaign. There are also plenty of videos on how to use these ad platforms to get traffic to your offers.

There you have it, a comprehensive guide on how to earn from offers on CPAlead. If you have any questions, as always, please submit a support ticket and we'll be happy to answer it. Thank you for reading!