What are the Best Mobile Affiliate and CPA Mobile Ad Networks?
Affiliate marketing – where an advertiser pays based on a completed action (CPA) rather than for page views (CPM) or clicks (CPC) and using a network of partners or affiliates to deliver the advertising – is a well established, even mature market online. The affiliate model has been successful wherever there’s a specific conversion event such as a sales lead, form fill or purchase that can be tracked. On mobile and app platforms, the affiliate model has also begun to take-off with the growth of app installs as a new mobile-native conversion event to track, as well as benefiting from offers from mobile content services, mobile dating and a few other categories. Furthermore, with the rapid growth in m-commerce a new generation of CPA events is emerging for apps and mobile sites based on revenue share or app installs in verticals such as retail, travel and finance.
For publishers and media buyers (or ‘affiliates’) CPA programs offer the ability to generate significant revenues with the right traffic. If publishers identify traffic that converts particularly well for a certain type of offer (e.g. dating) then they can generate a much higher eCPM or overall revenue using affiliate advertising than typical cost per click based ads. In addition, smart affiliates or media buyers can make a margin by buying traffic and optimising it to generate arbitrage between its cost and the value generated through the CPA offers. However, achieving this can be challenging on mobile given the large number of parameters (device, operating system etc) that need to be tracked and managed.
Successfully delivering affiliate and CPA-based advertising on mobile and apps is not trivial however, due to device fragmentation, the lack of cookies and other tracking and ad management challenges. As a result, the major online affiliate networks have, in the main, not been successful in transferring their business to mobile. On the contrary a new generation of mobile-focused CPA networks has emerged to act as the platform linking advertisers and merchants with a network of apps, mobile and online publishers and partners. However, the emerging specialist mobile affiliate networks are often not as well known as the big online names and there are new players emerging all the time.
Here in this post we take a look at some of the best mobile affiliate and cost per action or CPA networks around in the market today to help you find a partner whether you’re an advertiser looking to drive new business on a performance basis or a publisher or media buyer seeking new revenue-generating offers.
The full list of the best mobile affiliate and mobile CPA networks: