CPA (Cost per Action) Ad Marketing | Secrets to Get High ROI

Alright, I know what you're thinking. Holy cow, Jamal, I can finally see your legs. I know. And in every other video it was business up top. And let's just say it was, you know, it wasn't as much business down bottom, you know what I'm saying? But speaking of business, successful marketers know that cost per action or CPA campaigns are the best way to directly link campaign performance with business success. That's because with CPA you don't pay based on impressions or even clicks. You pay for how many people actually act. And that's a huge advantage when it comes to tracking ROI for your online business. What's up? It's Jamal from HubSpot. In this video, I'm going to show you the various techniques that make up CPA marketing and how ad platforms like Google, Facebook and Pinterest all offer CPA marketing tools that let you take control of your budgets and make sure your dollars are delivering results. I'm not talking like those delivery companies that are like, hey, we'll get it to you, I don't know, sometime within this week. No, I'm talking like to the hour, to the minute, that kind of precision. Check out HubSpot's free influencer marketing guide to get a grip on the latest trends in influencer and affiliate marketing. And be sure to subscribe to this YouTube channel and ring the notification bell so you never miss a new video. Tracking user actions is a key tool in the modern e commerce ecosystem. It has been responsible for huge growth in campaign performance. If you already know all about ad pixels, go ahead and jump forward about 30 seconds or so. If not, this is key to understanding how to make CPAs work for you in the days before the Internet. I'm talking like dinosaur times. The best an ad could hope for was to make an impression that the customer would act on later. And advertisers would pay up front based on the estimated number of impressions a show with X ratings or a magazine with Y distribution could deliver. Companies would also hire spokespeople to represent their brand in the hope that a celebrity's association with their product would lead to increased sales. But much like the ads themselves, there was no guarantee that the spokesperson would resonate until after the check was cashed. And oh, those checks were cashed. All that has changed due to CPA marketing. Thanks to pixel tracking technology, advertisers can see when a user has clicked an ad or promotion. They can also see if the click resulted in a conversion, like signing up for a newsletter, watching a video or downloading an offer or making a sweet, sweet sale. You know what I'm saying? Big sale, two for one. Wait, what? So what's the best way to make CPA work for you? Let's look at some of the most popular methods. Affiliate marketing is an extremely popular strategy because it combines the performance tracking of CPA marketing with the influence of a trusted spokesperson. With affiliate marketing, the advertiser partners with a publisher who promotes the advertiser's product or service, usually as part of the publisher's content. A good example might be a popular travel blogger who writes an article about a vacation destination and includes a special discount on a hotel. The hotel then pays the blogger for every booking that comes either directly from the reader clicking the link or any booking that occurs within 30 days of when the customer visited the blogger site. There are giant, enormous, maybe even ginormous affiliate networks dedicated to pairing advertisers with publishers. And you can find a link to an entire video dedicated to affiliate advertising in the description below. Similar to affiliate marketing is native advertising. Native advertising used to be called advertorial in the days of print publishing. Try to write that down. You know what I'm saying? You can't. It's a made up word. What it means is content created to look and act like editorial, but written specifically to market a product or service or offered by an advertiser who pays for the article or video. Native advertising is especially popular with big media companies like buzzfeed, whose staff of writers and editors will work with an advertiser to create content that helps sell the product while still giving readers the experience they expected from the publisher. Like a promotion buzzfeed did with Google Play AU buzzfeed writers created a series of listicle and quiz articles about pop culture faves like Star wars and Game of Thrones and and included a link to Google Play where readers could watch the shows. Google Play paid BuzzFeed every time a reader downloaded a show on its Play Store after seeing one of its sponsored posts. Of course, Google also has its own global advertising platform found on companies search pages. For that reason, Google Ads is a leader in the CPA game and they're playing for keeps, you know what I'm saying? Advertisers purchase ads that run along with relevant search results and pay Google every time a results page ad leads to a desired action. These ads are auctioned to advertisers via bidding system that takes into account not just the highest bidder but also the quality of the offer. This is called the ad ranking and it's determined by multiplying the dollar bid times the Quality Score. The quality score is determined through Google's analysis of your site's relevance to keywords. Click through rate and overall user experience and how well it matches with the ad that you're running. This can mean that you can actually spend less on ads and get better performance if your landing page is optimized to give users an ideal experience and after they click on the ad. To learn more on that topic, check out the link to our free guide to optimizing landing pages for lead generation in the Description Another thing Google lets you do is optimize your ads for conversion value. So if you have higher value actions, like a more expensive product, Google will optimize your ad to deliver the most of that particular result. Now you're directly correlating ad spend to revenue received. Factor in the margin on each side and be sure to consider the costs of making and managing managing the ads. And now you can predict the actual profit making potential of your CPA ads. It's like having the Magic Conch Shell to predict the future. Oh, Magic Conch shell. Will everyone like this video and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel? Yes, the conch has spoken. There's one more type of CPA marketing to discuss, and that's social media. All the major social media platforms offer their own version of CPA ads that are easy for anyone to use. For this reason alone, CPA ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and so on are some of the most commonly used and commonly misused by marketers around the world. Let's look at some of the best ways to optimize CPA ads on social media, starting with Facebook. Similar to Google Ads, Facebook and its sister app Instagram use a combination of bid, price and ad score to determine how much you end up paying per action. This is determined using the Ad Relevance Diagnostic, which gives you scores in three categories quality ranking, Engagement rate ranking, and conversion rate ranking. Quality Ranking is similar to Google's Quality Score in that it ranks the content of your ad, your landing page, and so on. Your boy is getting first place, you know what I'm saying? Not that it's competition, but I'm way ahead of everybody else. However, because Facebook offers a wider variety of ad formats like photo ads, video ads, and carousel ads, improving your quality ranking has more to do with optimizing these visual elements and less to do with things like keyword analysis, where Google is still the king or queen or whatever they identify as. Engagement Rate Ranking looks at the different ways users respond to your ads on the platform, tracking likes, comments, shares, and all that. And finally, Conversion Rate Ranking assesses your ad against other ads with the same optimization goals to predict how well it will ultimately convert. If this all sounds kind of complicated at first, like some witches mumbo jumbo, don't let it intimidate you. Mastering what goes into ad analytics is what separates good digital marketers from great digital marketers. So if you want to put in the effort to understand this stuff More clearly, try HubSpot Academy's free 90 minute Facebook ads training course. I promise you can master the stuff in under two hours. It's not that hard. And in case you don't have the time to spare this week, here are three quick tips to improve your quality ranking on Facebook right now. 1. Follow me no, make sure your ads are properly sized for all possible placements. 2. Include calls to action in your ad art and copy. And three Try repurposing existing ads that are performing well. You don't have to have some genius creative moment every time you make a new Facebook ad. Just update the color, maybe animate the graphics, switch out the text and you're more than halfway there. You know, it's like the problem of Theseus's ship. If you swap out one part of the ad, is it still the same ad over time? Or have you made something completely new? This is more than just a shortcut. All of the optimization tools that these platforms use take time to work. Keeping things consistent gives the algorithms the time they need to build a solid data set from which it can derive the absolute best way to serve your ads. Pinterest, for example, recommends you only modify an ad once or twice a week and give each change three to five days before you evaluate it. This is actually a good policy for all the CPA ads you use on any platform. Inexperienced CPA advertisers can be tempted to watch analytics too closely and make changes prematurely. An algorithm needs time to algorithm, just like I need time for my morning coffee sponsored by HubSpot. I don't drink coffee now. Pinterest is all about inspiration, so let's get inspired by a few of the best Pinterest CPA ads practices we've seen. In this ad, the visual matches the landing page, which is important so users know they've landed in the right place. Pinterest is a largely photo driven medium, so targeting a graphics based ad to a keyword that is mainly photos will help it stand out, or vice versa. You can run a photo first ad in A motivational quotes topic. Just make sure your ad still makes sense in the context of whatever keyword you're bidding on. Otherwise the wrong users will end up seeing your ad. And I don't even think I need to say it. I think we've all ended up on the wrong side of a weird ad, you know what I'm saying? And we're just like, how did I get here? It's not your fault. It was their fault for not targeting the right keyword. You're blameless and I love you. Finally, you want to consider the look back window for your ads. This is how many days pass between when our users see your ads and when they take an action. Pinterest lets you select between 30 days, which is good for big ticket items like furniture, seven days which is optimized for smaller consumer beauty and fashion based goods, and one day for any quick hit promotions that you might want to run. I'd love to see a 32nd base trial where it's like, hey, do you want this product? And you're fumbling for your credit card and they're like, it's gone too late. And that product probably would have changed your life. But you know, someone should do that. Maybe I'll give it a try. Choosing the best look back window for your product is another way to make sure your CPA metrics are as accurate as possible. LinkedIn only offers one look back 30 days, probably because most products and services advertised on the site are B2B and therefore have a naturally longer sales cycle. But there are other features that only LinkedIn can offer, like targeting by job title or company size data specific to the platform. No matter where you decide to run cost per action ads, they can be incredibly effective, but only if you make the most of the tools that today's platforms can offer. Who knows, who can even imagine who would even have the gall to cognate what technology will enable marketers to do with their ad dollars in the future. That's why, and you know, this is just my opinion, why you should subscribe to this channel to stay up to date on the latest digital trends in digital marketing. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some CPA ads to go look at. But first I'm gonna take a load off, you know what I'm saying? Cause we got this nice, nice new comfy couch in the office. I'll see you next time. OG spongebob fans will get the reference.