CPA, which stands for Cost per Action, is basically a form of affiliate advertisement that is used by almost all companies throughout the world in order to generate leads for their products. This marketing is done by affiliates who work through their own websites in order to send traffic to the advertiser‟s website for the product of the company.

CPA deals with specific forms of marketing which involve pay per click and pay per lead ads. Although Google used CPA networking as a major part of their advertising campaign till June 2008, eBay has now taken up this form of marketing and calls it AdContext. CPA is also known as Cost per Acquisition. This makes more sense literally, since affiliate advertisers under CPA networks are paid based on what the advertiser acquires from his or her customers.

There is no returning of funds in this sort of advertisement. As long as the entire action is completed by potential customers, affiliates get paid per lead that they provide to the advertiser. This makes it easier and simpler for advertisers to work for their company, as well as for affiliates to work for their advertisers.

Since there are many CPA networks out there and hundreds of affiliates are hired from these networks, advertisers usually have affiliate managers who go through the resume of each of these affiliates and hire only those who have the best lead generation records, or are the most appropriate for a specific line of marketing. The basic deal with CPA marketing is to generate traffic to the company‟s website. This job is outsourced by the advertisers of these companies to the affiliates, who in turn get paid in commission depending on the quality of lead generation that they can provide. Affiliates then use various forms of advertising such as banner ads, keywords, article directories, pay per click ads and video ads to attract more traffic for the website. Companies that sell insurance, credit and/or debit cards, public bonds or even ring tones of cell phones, use CPA networks to build their leads. Affiliates should stay in touch with their managers since the latter are well informed about the latest information regarding the COA networks and the newest ideas for this sort of marketing. Although getting paid $30 for each action that an affiliate is able to generate from potential customers may seem like a cheap bargain for the work that they go through, if they have a handsome customer profile of about 400 to 500, then this amount can multiply into a hefty pay packet per month.