Prosper 202 Tracking For The Ultimate CPA Strategy

Author Bio – The following is a guest post by Stephen Carter. Stephen is a software developer turned internet marketer, and the author of the 4-volume series Advanced Tracking With Prosper 202 which can be found at http://Prosper202Guide.com/ This guest post summarizes the topic of Volume #4 – The Ultimate CPA Strategy.

This article will be of interest to anyone who would like to know how to rise above the CPA marketing noise and make 5-10 times the money with their ad campaigns that other CPA marketers are capable of achieving.

The following is based on a proven but little-known strategy that DOES require some work to implement. But as you will see, the effort really does have the potential to pay off.

I begin by pointing out that money making strategies for CPA marketers are rarely complex.

For the most part they amount to nothing more than direct linking to a vendor sales/opt-in page, or setting up an intermediate landing page to better presell the offer before linking through to the vendor.

On the one hand, this kind of simplicity is very appealing to affiliates because they find that setting up campaigns this way is neither mentally taxing nor time-consuming.

The trouble is, it is also fairly tough to create an impressive ROI with this approach. This means that if you want to make a lot of money fast you have to spend a lot fast. That makes scaling your campaigns very difficult.

So what is the solution? What kind of CPA strategy favors high return on investment and scaling?

How To Make 5-10 Times More Than Other CPA Marketers

The secret to being able to pull in the BIG money with CPA marketing is to devise a way to raise your “lifetime lead value” above that of all your competitors. Once you have figured out how to do this you can simply outbid your competitors on paid traffic platforms and scale your campaigns accordingly.

Anyone who attempts to enter a bidding war with you who is not using a similar strategy to amplify their lifetime lead value will quickly discover just how costly it is to mount their assault.

Meanwhile, because your strategy is so robust and scalable, you have been able to spread your ad spend across multiple traffic sources. Having to defend against the competition now becomes just a cost of doing business, not a campaign killer like it is for the other guy.

This is because while he is spending a dollar to make a dollar and change, every dollar you invest into your ad campaigns is bringing you back several dollars in profit.

You manage this because you are using a FUNNEL to capture leads while the other guy is hoping you are clueless and have more money than sense. So he will keep bidding high until you “realize your mistake” and go away. Only you do not. Because you are not the one betting on the wrong strategy.

So How Exactly Does The Ultimate CPA Strategy Work?

Rather than send your lead to the offer, the ultimate CPA strategy requires that you first tease them. You place a squeeze page between them and the offer.

Right away you can see that this approach has the potential to significantly LOWER your front end conversions. So it is NOT expected to work well for low-paying simple form submits where the offer on the other side of your squeeze page does not have the power to potentially change the life of your lead. Not only are they going to have to opt into YOUR list, they are going to have to opt in again on the vendor’s site before you see any money.

This prospect alone is enough to scare off most CPA marketers.

The ones for whom this strategy will make the most sense are those who are interested in promoting CPA offers where the payout for a lead tends to be very high. We are talking about, for example, health supplement, finance, education, and relationship offers. In other words, offers from niches in which the lead has a long-term interest that can be leveraged with a series of quality email promotions that play out in the months that follow them joining your list.

That’s the back end portion of your funnel, which can transition your lead from CPA offers to any kind of offer that you think may interest them, including high ticket items. Depending on your skill as an email marketer, this is where you may make the bulk of your profit.

But it is also possible to do well on the front end of your funnel, even if that means just breaking even with your initial ad spend.

If you build your funnel correctly, and send your lead to an OFFER WALL of related products right after they opt into your list, chances are good that you will recoup your initial investment. Especially if you take the time to OPTIMIZE your funnel.

This is where a good tracking solution proves its worth.

Tracking And Optimizing The Ultimate CPA Funnel

In essence the funnel I have talked about consists of little more than a squeeze page that spits the lead out onto an offer wall. The lead is then aggressively marketed to by way of an auto responder series.

On the whole this approach does not strike one as being all that revolutionary. And really it is not. Except for the fact that it is being used by a small group of CPA marketers to blow up their campaigns and pull in the kind of return that most CPA marketers can only dream about. I first learned of this strategy from Chad Hamzeh who has used it effectively in his own CPA campaigns.

But while the strategy appears to be fairly simple to implement, there are nuances to the approach that I have not attempted to dwell upon here. And there are more moving parts than you might expect at first glance. In fact, in the implementation of the ultimate CPA strategy that I teach I use no less than FOUR page rotation scripts in sequence to split test the different components of the funnel. But you can certainly use fewer.

Either way, you will need to track the performance of your pages if you wish to maximize the effectiveness of each component. This is how you go from a “clever” CPA marketing alternative to the direct linking approach, to a “competition-killing” strategy that has the power to lock in long term profits.

Despite the fact that it is not known for its ability to track funnels, Prosper 202 can be used to track this particular funnel from head to toe.

Not just the front end either. You can also fully track your email marketing promotions with Prosper 202 to accurately determine your “lifetime lead value”.

Use Of The Master Campaign / Slave Campaign Approach

The particulars of the complete tracking solution for the ultimate CPA strategy go well beyond the scope of a short article.

But I will summarize for you the essence of the solution so that you can get a feel for what is involved. The full details for constructing the both the funnel and the Prosper 202 tracking solution required to optimize the funnel are available elsewhere for those who are interested in them.

The trick to pulling off the measurement of “lifetime lead value” (which is rarely accurately tracked) is to set up TWO separate campaigns. One campaign is used to record the ever-accumulating “lifetime” dollar amount due to ongoing sales that originate from a given lead in your funnel. The second campaign is used to record the dollar amount that can be attributed to a given follow up promotion.

Thus, the tracking solution for ultimate CPA strategy involves a “lifetime sales” campaign and a “follow up” campaign that feeds future sales into it. I call this “campaign chaining”, with the slave campaign triggering conversions in the master campaign. The “follow up” campaign also provides the per-message profitability of your email sequence, allowing you to survey and improve the effectiveness of individual messages.

Additionally, a THIRD “opt-in” campaign can be used to track opt-in rates on your squeeze page.

But we are not quite finished yet. A final FOURTH “offer wall” campaign can also be set up to feed the front end sales into the lifetime sales campaign.

So while this kind of tracking is clearly more involved than the SINGLE campaign setup that goes along with simple direct linking or landing page campaigns, it is also potentially a LOT more profitable and has been used by some CPA marketers to earn 5-10 times what their less ambitious competitors are able to manage with the same source of traffic.

So what should you take away from this?

Simply that it IS possible to compete with the biggest CPA marketers, but to do so you have to break away from the idea that the best approach to challenging them is to use simple direct linking or landing page methods of promotion.

CPA marketing, like every other form of marketing, is evolving, and if you want to play in the BIG league your approaches to competing will most likely need to evolve too. The ideas presented here relating to the ultimate CPA strategy represent just one possible approach to playing at that level.

Author Bio – The following is a guest post by Stephen Carter. Stephen is a software developer turned internet marketer, and the author of the 4-volume series Advanced Tracking With Prosper 202 which can be found at http://Prosper202Guide.com/ This guest post summarizes the topic of Volume #4 – The Ultimate CPA Strategy.