CPA, stands for Cost per Action, and is a kind of affiliate advertising used by almost all companies throughout the world to generate leads for their products. This type of marketing is done by affiliates who work using their own websites in order to send traffic to the advertiser’s site for the product of the company. CPA is a specific form of marketing involving pay per click and pay per lead ads.

Until June 2008, Google used CPA networking as a major part of their advertising campaign. Ebay now uses this form of marketing and calls it AdContext. CPA is also known as Cost per Acquisition. This actually makes the most sense, because affiliate advertisers using CPA networks are paid based on what the advertiser acquires from his/her customers.

With this type of advertising, there is no returning of funds. As long as action is fully completed by the potential customers, the affiliate is paid for each lead that they provide to the advertiser. This makes it easy and simple for advertisers to work for their company, and for affiliates to work for their advertisers.

There are many CPA networks out there and each has hundreds of affiliates hired from each of these networks. Advertisers generally have affiliate managers who will review the resume of each of the affiliates and they will only hire those who have the best lead generation records, or are the most fitting for an explicit line of marketing.

The basic deal with CPA marketing is to generate traffic to the company’s website, a job that’s outsourced by the company’s advertisers to the affiliates, who in turn are paid a commission based on the quality of lead generation that they were able to provide. Affiliates use various forms of advertising like keywords, banner ads, pay per click ads, article directories, and video ads that will attract more traffic for the site.

Companies that credit cards, debit cards, sell insurance, public bonds or cell phone ring tones often use CPA networks to build their leads. As an affiliate, you should stay in touch with your managers since they are very well informed about the latest information on the COA networks and the newest and best ideas for this kind of marketing.

What you are paid varies on the complexity of what is required and can range from less than a $1 upwards of $50 for each action that an affiliate is able to generate. This may seem like a cheap bargain for the work that needs to be done, but if you have a strong customer profile of 400 or more, this amount can become a hefty amount of pay per month.

CPA marketing definitely has potential. The key is to advertise as many products as you can since you have no way of knowing what product is going to earn you the most commission.