CPC Affiliate Programs List

What is CPC (cost per click)

Basically, this is where you earn money every time a visitor to your website clicks on an advertisement. Also known as PPC (pay-per-click) since the advertiser pays for every click on their advert.

This is different from traditional affiliate marketing. That generally requires someone to pay for a product or service in order for you to get a commission. With CPC you merely need your audience to click on the advert to earn your commission.

Consequently, the rates you will earn will be a fraction of what you might have earned from traditional affiliate marketing. The benefit of CPC marketing is that conversion should be easier. It is more likely that someone will click on an advertisement than make a purchase from your site.

Who would use CPC

If your website is primarily informational then it might be difficult for you to promote more traditional affiliate offers. In this scenario, CPC marketing might be the best way to go. Some other candidates might include news websites or celebrity gossip. Similarly, if your website is in a niche that has few you or only low-paying affiliate offers this might be a better option for you. Of course, you may combine them to maximise your revenue.

This tends to be a less popular form of marketing as advertisers will probably prefer to pay for actual sales rather than just for clicks on an ad.

As with all forms of marketing on the internet, the biggest hurdle to earning money is having a sufficiently large amount of traffic. For example, some networks may not let you join their program until you have reached a certain number of monthly site visits. Some programs might not pay out until you have reached a particular threshold, so if you only have it may take you a long time to reach that threshold.

CPC Offers

Cheapflights

For those of you running some form of travel blog, Cheapflights could be a way of generating some extra income. If you attract US traffic you will need to sign up through CJ and you will also need more than 200,000 unique visitors per month. You could earn 45 cents per click on desktop traffic and 25 cents per click for mobile traffic.

If you are pulling in traffic from other parts of the world they also run a program via Webgains but this only pays between 4 and 8 pence per click.

They offer you many banners or widgets to advertise their service.

Momondo

Also in the travel niche is momondo. Offering 45 or 65 cents depending on the origin of the traffic (desktop or mobile). This program would suit travel blogs particularly. Momondo might even accept applications from non-travel related sites. They have been featured in a number of UK newspapers such as The Telegraph, Sun, Times and FT (Financial Times).

Kayak

Probably a site that you have used yourself, Kayak operates in the travel niche. You will be able to earn up to 95 cents per click on things such as car rental, flights and hotels. Their application form has a lowest threshold of 100,000 visitors. This would suggest they are probably looking for sites with significant amounts of traffic.

Bankrate

Offering a wide range of financial products such as mortgages, loans, saving and credit cards. This could prove to be a profitable partnership if you are own a web property in the finance niche. The offers vary from CPC (cost per click) to CPM (cost per mille) to CPA (cost per action).

Cost per mille refers to payments per 1000 clicks/visits – mille is Latin for 1000.

Cost per action refers to actions that a visitor needs to complete for you to earn commission eg. a download or a sign-up.

ContactAbility

If you operate in the insurance niche then contact ability might be worth a look. They offer several different payment models including CPC. They are only interested in US traffic though.

CPC Networks

Here is a list of some of the best CPC networks that you could add to your web property.

Adsterra

Their new chat bar format is reputed to increase CTR by as much as 300%. They have A higher than average CPC rate of around 50 cents.

Bidvertiser

It would appear that this network is easy to join and doesn’t have a requirement for high traffic volumes. they also don’t appear to restrict themselves only to English language sites.

Installation is a doddle with the simple HTML code that needs adding to your site and you can also amend the appearance of the ads that get displayed.

Unfortunately, the payments are not as high as you might hope. Some of the advertisers will pay out commissions for purchases as well as clicks so there is a silver lining to that particular cloud.

Since Bidvertiser is not one of the bigger networks you may find that the ads are not particularly relevant even more so if you are in a smaller niche.

ClickAddilla

If you’re looking for popunder, banner, pre-roll and web-push ads then ClickAdilla might be the network for you. As with many other networks you could target via location or browser type etc.

Interestingly, they are now offering payments to publishers via Bitcoin.

For advertisers, they also offer a 5% referral commission.

I will admit I found that they had a rather large pop-up on their webpage. This blocked roughly a third of the screen and it took a while to spot the way of removing it. I found it a bit annoying to be honest.

Clickadu

For those of you who have yet to build up a large viewership Clickadu might be a solution. They are one of the networks that have no minimum requirement for monthly views.

You will still need to go through an application process that will involve your site being audited by Clickadu.

They serve over 740 million ad impressions every day in the standard formats such as pop-under, video and banner.

Entireweb

Entireweb will pay you up to 20 cents per click. You have the option of sending traffic from emails, forums, social media or website banners to their search engine.

Google Adsense

The “Big Daddy” of ad networks and probably the one most website owners would default to. Offering millions of different advertisers, this is the network that can probably match with almost any niche website.

You are able to control the types of adverts that will appear on your property. Google offers a number of reports to see which adverts are working best. You can then decide if it’s worth moving to a more prominent position on your site.

A nice feature is the search bar. You can place a search bar anywhere on your site and you will get paid for the ads that appear in the search results.

You need to decide how many ads to display and exactly where to display them. There are limitations stipulated by Google as to the total amount of content vs advertising.

Probably the biggest downside with Adsense is the difficulty in actually getting approved to join the network in the first place. This is closely followed by the level of payments that you might receive in comparison with certain other networks. Adsense also has the reputation of being one of the most likely to terminate your account. Often, for what most right-minded people would consider minor issues.

Linqia

An excellent choice for social media influencers. Linqia work with many top brands and try to match said brands to the most appropriate influencer. You could be looking at as much as $2.50 on average.

Media.net

According to Wikipedia, Media.net is the second-largest contextual ad network by revenue.

Should you decide to partner with Media.net you can receive contextual ads that are relevant to your niche.

You have some control over the look and feel of the ads in order to fit in better with the colour palette and topics of your site. Media.net does offer a significant number of advertisers on its network. You may find it hard to get approved unless you have traffic from tier 1 countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). You will almost certainly have to use English as the primary language for the website.

MintClicks

MintClicks will approve your site even if you aren’t drawing that much traffic but it does have a few content restrictions. It will also match up the advertisers to your content using the keywords on your website.

Perform[cb]

Has a number of ways of earning including CPC. Your earnings will vary from merchant to merchant, however. It has won many industry awards. Perform[cb] continues to offer one of the higher ROI’s to advertisers.

PropellerAds

If you have a new website or one that has only a low level of traffic then you can join the PropellerAds network. You are likely to find your commission level to be quite low. If you happen to own a larger site that drives a decent amount of traffic you might be able to drive your commission rate as high as $1.50 per click.

Rakuten

One of the largest affiliate networks and would more usually be used to perform traditional affiliate marketing. They also offer payouts using the CPC model although they are at the lower end of the scale coming in at around 20 cents or less.

Revcontent

They are an option if you receive a lot of visitors per month based on the research I did. One reviewer suggested a million page views per month. Looking at their site I couldn’t find anything specific about a minimum number of visitors. In fact, their application form has options down to 1000 page views.

Reviews on Glassdoor by former staff were a little varied and there are some complaints about non-payment of commission. These days it is easy to complain about any company so it is important to take any review with a pinch of salt.

One thing I did notice was their homepage still had some Latin text in one area. The designer hadn’t updated the information from the page builder they used.

RevenueHits

Links with over 5000 advertisers mean you should be able to find some suitable ads from this network. They guarantee a 100% fill rate with an optimisation engine that shows ads based on the user’s location.

An in-house compliance team makes sure that your SEO and reputation don’t take a hit from unsafe ads.

RevenueHits offers you 24/7 monitoring including impressions, clicks and eCPM. They also offer an API ( applications programmer interface) which would allow you to draw out data from the system to build up your own reports.

Skimlinks

Skimlinks will accept sites with lower volumes of traffic but only from North America, Europe and APAC (Asia Pacific). More than 48000 merchants place adverts through Skimlinks. This means you should be able to find niche relevant advertisers for pretty much any niche.

As with most of the networks you have control over which advertisers appear on your site.

Sovrn //Commerce

Probably a big selling point for this network is their ‘convert’ feature. This directs your links to the highest paying offer at the time whether that is a CPC or a traditional affiliate link with a specific retailer.

As with many of the networks, you’ll find that your commissions are greater where you were dealing with US-based traffic. Should you be providing non-US traffic you’ll find your commission rates drop off significantly.

Taboola

You will need to own a pretty popular site to sign up with Taboola. They are looking for at least a million page views every month. They are used by some of the biggest companies on the web, NY Times for example. Their feed looks natural so users are more likely to click on the adverts. You can earn using both CPC and CPM models.

Vibrant Media

It has some of the highest paying rates in the industry but it is likely you will need half a million page views per month to join.

They have the usual guidelines regarding the content of your site. You can’t have anything to do with gambling, drugs, profanity, hate speech or violence.

Vibrant Media has a number of different ad formats such as video boxes, multi button videos and expandable flash.

Their JavaScript code conforms to the IAB LEAN standard and may be implemented by DFP

Having these different formats makes the advertisements significantly more effective. They may have up to 5 times higher click-through rate (CTR) than adverts served by Adsense.

Verizon Media

Another well-known name but one which requires you to have at least 300,000 monthly visitors in order to join their network. They do offer a decent commission, with their CPC rate averaging around $1.

CPC Affiliate Programs List: Summary

There you have it a number of ideas of programs or networks that you could add to your site(s).

James