Recently someone asked me why affiliate mobile marketing programs tend to use the CPA model. Here was my answer:
Many affiliate programs involve hundreds or even thousands of wapmasters whose off-deck, non-premium sites content is not closely vetted and controlled. Advertisers ads are often displayed in misleading contexts or plastered all over the page in order to increase click through rate … for example the ads may be changed to look like internal links on the site. When the visitor clicks on a link but arrives on the advertiser’s site, it’s not what they were expecting and so they leave again. Therefore the conversion rates on the advertisers site tend to be lower. If the advertiser had to pay per 1000 views or even per click, they would be paying a lot of money for rather poor quality traffic. By paying only for conversions (the CPA model), the advertiser is passing this risk back onto the afiiliate who is therefore incentivised to place ads in a more honest way and deliver good quality traffic to the advertisers site in order to maximise their revenue.
