In affiliate marketing, you live and die by your affiliate links.
If nobody clicks on your links (even if you generate lots of traffic), you won't be able to generate the income you desire.
At the same time, you are at the mercy of the affiliate program you joined. Amazon affiliates took a huge blow years ago when the company announced a decrease in commission rates across all industries.
While there are solutions to most of the issues affiliate marketers face, they don't make earning as affiliates any easier.
This reason is why you need to look for other ways to monetize your affiliate efforts and get the income you deserve.
One way to achieve this is by branching out from the typical affiliate marketing model of website creation. Instead, leverage CPM ad networks to promote your affiliate links to generate more impressions and revenue.
This post uncovers everything you must know about CPM affiliate marketing and how you can leverage it correctly to help increase your commission sales.
Related article: Luxury Affiliate Marketing
What is CPM Affiliate Marketing?
To fully understand this type of affiliate marketing, you must first know what CPM advertising means.
"CPM" stands for "cost per mille." "Mille" means showing the ad one thousand times on a website, also known as "impression."
This revenue model is the pricing method used to charge for display ads. Through an ad network, advertisers will pay a fixed amount to publishers for every thousand times the ad shows on their sites.
To compute the CPM, you must divide the total ad spend (money used on a group of ads) by the total measured ad impressions (the number of times an ad loads on a website's page).
Then multiply the quotient by 1000 to get the amount you'll receive.
For example, if an advertiser runs a banner ad campaign that costs $10,000 and it could generate 100,000 impressions, the CPM publishers would make from every 1,000 impressions of the ad on their website cost $10.
Now that you know what CPM means, it's just as important to tie it back to affiliate marketing.
Publishers promote the products through your website, social media, email marketing, and other tried-and-true tactics in most affiliate revenue models.
But for CPM, you serve as the advertiser of the affiliate product you're promoting using ad networks.
To be clear, you're piggybacking off other people's websites to generate lots of views for your ad placement.
That means you pay for the CPM of the ad you'll run on the ad network!
How to Make Money from CPM Affiliate Marketing
We've already established that CPM in affiliate marketing, while highly profitable, is very uncommon. It flips the conventions by turning publishers into advertisers.
They spend money to launch a campaign on a CPM ad network. Their goal is to generate as many views as possible with their budget. Then they pay the publishers who showed your ad per 1,000 impressions.
In this case, how do affiliate marketers make money in return?
CPM affiliate marketers do so primarily by running CPA (cost per action) campaigns on CPM ad networks.
CPA is another pricing model that pays publishers if people perform the desired action by advertisers. Examples include signing up for a free trial, downloading a product by entering their personal information, or straight up purchasing an item.
Let's go back to the CPM example above where advertisers pay $10 per 1,000 impressions. The advertisers can run the CPM campaign for a CPA offer that pays $2 per action, assuming that the conversion rate is 5%.
That means they can earn from 50 out of 1,000 website visitors (1,000 x 0.05) who view your ad will perform the desired action. In this case, the advertisers can earn $100 (50 x 2) for every "mille."
This is just a rough example of how affiliate marketers can earn from CPM should they promote CPA offers. But the idea is they must join and promote offers from CPA networks by becoming advertisers in CPM affiliate networks.
The higher the payout from CPA networks and the lower the CPM campaign cost, the greater the revenue you can get!
Still with me? Let's proceed.
Why You Should Launch a CPM Campaign as an Affiliate
As an affiliate marketer, you should always be on the lookout for ways to grow your income and find more revenue streams. CPM affiliate marketing is one of the ways you can do this.
It eschews the usual way affiliate marketers make money online.
Normally, they create a website or blog and optimize it through SEO and content to generate targeted traffic organically.
This way, they can get more eyeballs to the products they're selling from the affiliate programs they joined.
The problem with this approach, as effective as it is, is that everybody else is doing it. You have to generate a much better marketing strategy than what the best brands with deeper pockets are doing.
With CPM affiliate marketing, you are treading into unknown territory that not even the most seasoned affiliate marketers do. This results in fewer competitors, which means more money for you to take from the proverbial pie.
At the same time, this method perfectly complements your earnings from the affiliate niche site you currently have.
Instead of funding your niche site with new content and backlinks, you can go another way by launching a CPA ad as an advertiser on a CPM network.
This is also beneficial because you don't become dependent on your niche site for your income. By diversifying your revenue streams, you solidify your income by allowing you to earn consistently in the face of Google algorithm updates.
At the same time, you can't launch a campaign on a CPM ad network if you don't have the funds to bid for it.
As a high-level technique, you need to pay to play. So, if you don't have the capital to launch campaigns yet, it's best to focus on low-hanging fruit techniques to grow your affiliate business, at least for now.
How to Do CPM Affiliate Marketing
Doing affiliate marketing on a CPM platform requires lots of time and research. To help make things easier for you, below is a quick rundown of the steps you must complete to launch your CPM campaign as an advertiser promoting your CPA offer:
Join CPA Ad Network
You need to join the best affiliate programs for CPA to promote your CPM campaign.
There are many programs to choose from, but it's best to join as many as possible to help you determine which has the best current offers.
Among the different offers from CPA networks, sweepstakes are one of the best due to their high conversion rates.
Most sweepstakes allow people a chance to win free stuff, which gives them even more reason to complete the desired action. This, in turn, qualifies you to make money off your campaign.
Aside from sweepstakes, free trial software is another offer you can promote. The only issue here is that they don't pay as much as others.
Sign Up to CPM Network as Advertiser
Next, you need to sign up for an ad network that enables you to launch a campaign promoting your offer. We'll talk more about the different CPM ad networks you can join.
One thing you need to know from these networks is you can run more than just display ads for your campaigns.
You can run your ads in the form of pop-ups, interstitials (pop-up that shows up after the page loads or before the user leaves the page), or push notifications.
This is important since banner blindness is a real thing. You want to maximize the opportunity to literally make an impression on website visitors and convert them.
Create Lander
First, the CPA offer must have a landing page. Most offers have a page where people can complete the desired action so you can make money.
If they don't have a landing page, you'll have to create it yourself using your tool of choice designed for affiliates like Landerize.
Track Your Affiliate Link
Once you've created the page, you must log into your affiliate tracker like Post Affiliate Pro. It helps you determine where the conversions and opt-ins came from.
The data collected by the software will come in handy once you're ready to optimize your campaign later on to improve its performance.
From your affiliate tracker, you must determine your campaign flow. Then, you must enter the link of the lander you created from your landing page creator to make it appear on websites once your campaign goes live.
Once done, you should have a link containing all the parameters you'll need to help you collect the necessary data for your software to process later on. Then enter the link on your CPM platform.
Design Your Creatives
The graphics you'll be creating here will be used for your campaign ads.
The best way to start designing your visual content is to spy on your competitors' actions.
The goal here is to draw ideas from the existing ads similar to yours and develop a much better one.
The fact that these ads are already running means that they are generating money to a degree for advertisers. So, getting inspiration from tested ads gives you a leg up against the competition.
Tools like Anstrex are perfect because they allow you to search for ads in multiple formats.
The tools should also feature copy ideas to help you compose your message alongside the images you'll use in your campaign.
Once you've found the inspiration from your competitor ads, you can design your images using Canva. As simple as the stock photos available from the tool's free plan and resizing them there should suffice.
Setting Everything Up
Before launching your campaign, you must decide which countries you want to target and how much you're willing to bid for CPM.
You have the option to determine the bid price yourself. But you can also allow the ad network to decide the best bid depending on the location and devices (desktop and mobile) on where you want the ads to show. The amount the platforms usually choose will yield the highest conversions per impression.
Next, you must set how much you're willing to spend for the ad campaign and how long you want it to run.
The Best CPM Ad Networks
If you feel that CPM will help add more value to your affiliate marketing, choosing from the different ad networks is next.
Each network is different from the other, so it's important to discuss all of them. This way, you know which networks to join and how much ad revenue you can earn from each (depending on your niche and traffic, of course!).
More importantly, you want to join ad networks that bloggers and publishers love. This way, your campaign can receive more impressions and conversions than other networks.
Let's do this!
Google Ad Manager
We can't talk about display ads and not bring up Google in some shape or form. There's no question that Google Adsense remains the most popular ad network for publishers. But, for advertisers, Google Ad Manager is the place to be.
You can set up your ad business to grow your revenue by promoting them to the most relevant publisher sites via Google Adsense.
Epsilon (formerly Conversant CPM Program)
From the same people behind the popular affiliate network called Commission Junction (CJ for short), Epsilon is more than just a solid eCPM advertising network. With industry-leading data at your fingertips, Epsilon takes demand-side platform (DSS) to a different level.
It provides you with information regarding your target audience's online and offline behavior to help you determine which sites your offers will be shown.
Propeller Ads
Another great CPM ad network, Propeller Ads offers ad types perfect for CPA offers (interstitials, pop-down, and push notifications). Other options to help your campaign reach its goals include filtering through prospects that meet your User Activity targeting conditions, fraud protection from malicious activities to not obfuscate data, and more.
Media.net
Media.net gives you access to a pool of premium publishers that can display your CPA offers through its Programmatic Platform with Server-Side enablement. This allows publishers to bid for your campaign in real-time to get the best prices.
VDX.tv (formerly Exponential)
VDX.tv leverages its ability to display your offers in video format on any screen, whether streaming or not, using its Omnichannel Engagement. How it's also able to guarantee that your video offers will be featured on platforms where your target audience is watching.
HillTopAds
HilltopAds prides itself on its audience targeting capabilities. You can launch ad offers according to country/city, device, browser, time, ISP, and more on websites with verified traffic at competitive rates. This ensures that you have complete control over your ad's performance.
Criteo
With 685 million daily active users, Criteo helps you reach out to your audience effectively. You can also use the platform's AI Engine to help you understand user activity based on over 120+ shopper intent signals. These will help you uncover the best publishers in which your offer should be featured.
Best Tips to Maximize Your CPM Affiliate Marketing
Select One Variable Only for Your Campaign
Some platforms allow you to run CPM, CPA, and CPC campaigns and show your ads multiple times on different countries and devices.
Running your ad this way makes it much more difficult to identify variables that have a massive impact on the results. This makes tweaking your campaign to improve performance next to impossible.
So, your goal is to run a campaign with just one variable to test.
Aside from running just CPM for your ad campaign, you should also choose your ads to show just once in a single country and device.
Seasons Matter
You need to know the best times when to promote your affiliate program via CPM. For example, running a campaign for a Christmas-theme product other than before or during the holidays won't get high conversions.
Even for products that seem evergreen, the CPM campaigns you run for them can perform much better if you know when to launch them.
Promoting fitness items may serve you well year-long, as people will want to lose weight and feel better about themselves. But running the campaign in January when people are starting their "New Year's Resolutions" makes the most sense.
Utilize Demand-Side Platforms
By joining CPM ad networks, you allow the platform to decide which websites will show your sites.
This is advantageous if you want to automate the process and focus on scaling its performance. But if you're going to get granular from the start, you should consider using demand-side platforms.
These allow you to place your ads on publishers that meet your requirements during real-time bidding (RTB). Having more control over which publishers to showcase your ads to can generate higher conversions.
Conclusion
Using CPM ad networks to generate commissions from the best affiliate program is a rather unorthodox and unusual method. This is why you should highly consider getting on board with this digital marketing technique as early as now.
By diversifying your affiliate channels where you generate revenue, you fail-proof your income and fortify your online business.
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