CPA Target Bidding Case Study 📚
An Affiliate marketer using Adcash as one of his primary traffic sources recently put together a CPA Target campaign to promote a well-known VPN product. They’ve been kind enough to share their results with us.
Offer Type: |
VPN |
Offer: |
NordVPN (standard design landing page). |
Targeting Region: |
Multiple |
Ad Format: |
Pop, Interstitial, In-Page Push |
OS: |
Desktop & Mobile |
Bid Type: |
CPA Target Bidding (with a $40 CPA goal) |
Website Thematic Targeting |
Arts & Entertainment related websites only |
From April to August 2021, they ran the campaign across 36 different geos with the same CPA Target set across the board (a combination of tier 1, 2, and 3).
The campaign ran across both Desktop, and Mobile split according to 3 top ad formats (Pop, Interstitial, and In-Page Push), with individual campaigns per ad format.
It quickly became apparent that the CPA Target Bidding tool helped deliver conversions below target. For this reason, it was easy to scale up the campaign by increasing daily spendings (which were initially set at 150e/day).
Desktop Vs. Mobile
Desktop took 95% of all conversions, with an Actual CPA vs. Target CPA ratio of 20.5% (Average conversion cost of $8.2 vs. target set at $40). In comparison, Mobile came out to 5% of all conversions, with an Actual CPA vs. Target CPA of 51.4% (Average conversion cost of $20.5 vs. target set at $40).
The top-performing geos were The United States, The United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Sweden in terms of conversions volume.

Additionally, there was no need to blacklist low-performing traffic sources manually. The automated bidding structure was adjusting its bids to account for low converting sources and quickly stopped buying from them.

To improve the overall ROAS further, they made some adjustments to the Operating System and Device targeting. Those with the lowest performance were removed entirely, although the automated bidding was doing it by itself. However, in this case, it was a little quicker to take care of this manually.
After having checked users’ quality with the advertisers, there was room for an affiliate payout increase, so the ROAS improved even further. Overall, the actual CPA ended up being around 80% cheaper than the target, which is pretty unbelievable, even for a Tier 1 geo!
The overall savings from using CPA Target Bidding ran into the tens of thousands. And the best part? As of writing this, the conversions continue to keep streaming in at a higher level than usual. There was a massively visible difference between Target Spending when setting up the campaign vs. the actual budget leaving the advertiser’s account.

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