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Launching CPA Campaigns
Since CPA pricing models have been gaining traction lately, I’ve decided to dedicate a section to CPA campaigns. These campaigns optimize themselves in real time - if a specific placement isn’t converting for your targeting, the system will automatically stop directing traffic there. In contrast, with CPM or CPC campaigns, you’d have to manually blacklist underperforming placements.Another advantage of CPA campaigns is how they handle fluctuations in performance. For instance, if you leave a CPM or CPC campaign running overnight and your offers stop converting, you’d still be paying for traffic. However, with CPA campaigns, the traffic source will reduce the traffic if conversions drop, and eventually, the campaign will stop receiving traffic in the end. This makes CPA a cost-effective pricing model, not just for testing but also for running campaigns efficiently.
To make CPA campaigns work properly, it’s crucial to configure your postback correctly. I’ve already covered that in this guide.
As you already know, there are 5 different ad formats available on PropellerAds:
And the CPA Goal pricing model is available for all of them!
At first, a CPA campaign might not deliver the best results since it needs to buy traffic from all placements, starting with no historical data. This can lead to a high eCPA initially, but over time, the CPA algorithm should optimize performance, gradually lowering the cost per conversion.
If your CPA campaign suddenly stops receiving traffic, it likely means your CPA bid is too low. In that case, you’ll need to change your approach and raise your CPA bid. For instance, if you initially set your CPA bid at 70% of your offer, you might want to bump it up to 80% to stay competitive. Additionally, by blacklisting non-converting placements or those with an high eCPA is a smart move for your next CPA campaign since there’s no reason to keep buying traffic from those sources!
Launching an optimized version of your CPA campaign
After gathering enough data from your initial CPA campaign, you may want to launch an optimized (v2) version of your campaign, especially if the first campaign stops receiving traffic.Before you duplicate the existing campaign (v1), you’d want to make sure sources that haven’t performed (or have high eCPA) are excluded (blacklisted) from your campaign.
You can just blacklist them by editing the first version (v1) of your CPA campaign and just duplicate that campaign. So, the new version (v2) will start with a (black) list of zones that didn’t perform.
Find your first campaign (v1), and click on the campaign name to open the statistics page, like this:
You should see something like this (your data will be different):
Look for the zones that have high CPA (last column) or that have spent a lot (you decide how much or read this) but got no conversions. Exclude those zones from your campaign by clicking on the checkbox in the first column (on the left side).
Once you go over your report, and exclude those zones, you are ready to duplicate v1 campaign.
Just click on the Duplicate button near the campaign name:
And then you’ll see a duplicate campaign form like this:
Give your new campaign a new name, and scroll down to Targeting part of the form:
Make sure there are excluded zones in the list. Once you are happy with that, click on the Save and Start button.
Your next version of the campaign (v2) will probably get less traffic from the start (compared to v1 version), but conversion rate should be higher from the start (since you are not buying traffic from non-converting zones this time) and the CPA should be lower.
You can repeat this multiple times (v2 to v3, etc).
TIP: Nick wrote about campaign optimization in his Intermediate Course. You can read it and find some great suggestions here.
My Take on PropellerAds Contest (
Secret Sauce included!) #PA23
#Contest Entry
- $300 Profit/Day Achieved! 
3000$ Profit⁉ a contest for myself
