CPA Media Buying With Attribution You Can Defend

A CPA is a price only when the denominator is fixed. On buys I have taken over, an agreed sixty euro CPA settled at a true one hundred and forty-eight euros once duplicates, conversions the advertiser would have had anyway, and returns inside thirty days were taken out. So the first fortnight of any campaign I run goes on the counting, not the buying. Building the buy: I go direct to publishers and to a small number of networks, never to an inventory list. Each partner is agreed individually: the audience, the placement, the creative rotation, the daily conversion cap and the payout, negotiated per geography and per action. Caps matter more than rate. An uncapped CPA deal with a partner running arbitrage is a way of buying back your own retargeting at a markup. Tracking: Server-to-server postbacks against a click ID, fired from your order system or CRM, never a thank-you page pixel. Probabilistic and fingerprint-based attribution is out: if a partner can only be measured that way, they are not bought. Deduplication is agreed in writing before launch, covering which channel wins a shared path, over what window, and how a conversion appearing in both paid search and a partner postback resolves. On Everflow, Affise or TUNE I configure this myself. On your own stack I write the spec and test it with your engineers against synthetic conversions before a euro is spent. Terms: Every insertion order carries a return and cancellation window, a stated rejection reason set, a per-partner daily cap, and a clause making undisclosed sub-sources unpayable. A partner unwilling to disclose sub-source is unwilling for a reason. What I buy: Contextual placements on publishers whose audience has the problem your product solves. Comparison and review inventory where the commercial relationship is disclosed. Newsletter placements to lists whose acquisition I can trace. Content partnerships where the publisher's own editorial standards do the quality control for me. What I refuse to buy: Extension and toolbar inventory. Incentivised traffic, pop and push. Sites built for affiliate traffic and nothing else. Email drops to lists that cannot be traced to their point of collection. And retargeting bought on a CPA basis, which is paying a third party for demand you already own. Regulated payment structures: For prescription-bound products I do not build payment per patient, per prescription or per enrolment where that payment could be read as an inducement for the referral of reimbursable care. The buy is priced on media or on non-clinical actions instead. For legal services in jurisdictions barring fee sharing with non-lawyers, payment is per qualified consultation, never per signed matter and never a share of fee, and I will decline a campaign structured the other way even where your own counsel is relaxed about it. In recruiting, payment is per completed application with candidate data flowing to your applicant tracking system rather than sitting with the publisher. Not included: Media spend, which you pay publishers directly wherever the relationship allows, so nothing is buried in a blended rate. Creative production and landing pages. Any promise about your own conversion rate: a CPA buy exposes an unconvincing product page, it does not repair one. Who should not buy this: Advertisers who need the buy to grow every month. Good CPA inventory is finite by design, and at some point the honest answer is that the market is bought out at your price. Also anyone who wants me paid on a percentage of spend. I take a fee, which is the only structure in which advising you to spend less costs me nothing.