• by Assaf Igell , January 15, 2009

In our current economy, advertisers are seeking new ways to make accountable marketing decisions and meet strict CPA goals. With the prices of search engine marketing rapidly increasing up to 30% (Jupiter Research, 2008) advertisers who currently invest the majority of their online ads budget on SEM are going to face a serious challenge meeting their CPA objectives.

To overcome this obstacle, online marketers are likely to consider important cost-effective advertisement alternatives using targeted display ads (CPM), affiliates (CPA), and email marketing channels. However, due to the sheer amount of prospective affiliates, and the tendency of networks to hide information about their publishers, this can be difficult.

As such, advertisers must be cautious when choosing the networks, publishers and affiliates they include in their ad buy and partnership plans. The ability to intelligently plan targeted CPA and CPM campaigns is a vital key to your success.

So how do you find the right CPA and CPM prospects to work with?

Commonly, advertisers use the following basic criteria when searching for targeted publishers and affiliates:

• By keyword: using search engines, find sites that rank well for your keyword and are likely to have a relevant audience for your ads.

• By geography: Select your partners by country, state, or zip codes, resulting in sharply localized ad campaigns.

• By competition and related ads: Knowing where your competitors advertise, what seem to have worked for them and what not helps to design a hyper competitive marketing strategy.

• By industry and related sites: Find sites that relate to your market sector and are likely to have relevant visitors for your offers.

• By demographics: Based on user surveillance systems, find sites who's audience matches your target client demographics.

• By traffic estimates: Based on 3rd party estimates, prefer partners with popular websites based on estimation of their audience volume.

Unfortunately, these methods are restricted by the blind nature of most affiliate and ad networks.

For example, searching Google for the key phrase "iPhone ringtones" to find targeted places for a ringtone ad campaign returns over 18 million sites, for which there is no quick way to know who is a competitor, who is a publisher, what other words they might rank for, do they promote immoral or unethical content, etc.

Most ad planners would have to undertake the arduous task of manually auditing each prospective website to verify it's relevancy and brand compliancy. Once done with this tedious classification, they still wouldn't know anything about each individual publisher, whether it's a CPA publisher, CPM, or maybe both? Which networks they might work with? How can they distinguish and prioritize among targeted publishers? Or what's the best way to contact each site? Take Action.

As paid and organic search costs increase, savvy advertisers need to incorporate multichannel advertising strategies where proven PPC and SEO success is applied to affiliate, displays ad, and email marketing campaigns.

Find easy to integrate multiple advertising channels advertisers are able to get a complete view of targeted publishers/advertisers for keywords in a specific geographic market, and identify effective display ads publishers, affiliates, and email marketing channels. With this knowledge, find the most effective campaigns and apply its success to other online campaigns.

For instance, take your proven PPC campaign and apply the same patterns to your display campaigns. By looking at top-producing keywords in any pay-per-click campaign, then mapping ad-network publishers which attract traffic from those keywords, advertisers can effectively place display ads.

Using these steps, advertisers can further capitalize on their campaign opportunities, translating proven PPC success to new CPA, CPM, and email campaigns, all while maintaining their targeted exposure levels and lowering their cost of advertisement.