Wondering what is pay-per-sale or pay-per-sale marketing?
You’ve heard that it’s a popular pricing model and you want to know more about it.
Folks, you are in the right place.
We’ve got all you need to know about pay-per-sale, pay-per-sale marketing, pay-per-sale advertising and the whole thing.
We will look over what it is, how it works, the benefits for advertisers and publishers and more.
Keep reading to find out!
We have divided this article into the following sections:
- What is pay-per-sale marketing
- How does the pay-per-sale work
- What should advertisers do before offering PPS advertising
- What types of pay-per-sale advertising programs are there
- Benefits of pay-per-sale marketing
- Pay-per-sale best practices for advertisers
- Pay-per-sale best practices for publishers
- Takeaways
Let’s get started!
What is pay-per-sale marketing
Pay-per-sale marketing, also referred to as PPS marketing or cost-per-sale advertising, is a type of marketing pricing model where a business owner will pay a marketing agency or affiliate partner a sum of money for every sale of goods or services generated by the leads sent through the marketing firm.
Pay-per-sale is a digital advertising model where the business owner will pay a commission to the marketing partner based on qualified sales.
Before the publisher sends leads over to the business owner or advertiser, the advertiser outlines the commission paid for each qualified sale and clearly defines what is considered a qualified sale.
This type of advertising model presents the least risk for the advertiser and is the least beneficial for the publisher as they only get paid when there is a sale.
Nonetheless, this is one of the most popular and common types of marketing pricing models.
In fact, the business owner will have no obligation to pay for any traffic or leads generated by the publisher but will only pay for actual sales.
The pay-per-sale is a pricing model that pays you for an actual sale while a pay-per-lead pricing model pays you when a lead is qualified.
How does the pay-per-sale work
The pay-per-sale model, also known as PPS or cost-per-sale, can be quite challenging for publishers if they do not approach it strategically.
Not only must a publisher generate traffic and leads but the targeted audience must convert into an actual sale.
That will require planning, marketing strategy and great execution.
The way the pay-per-sale works is that publishers, website owners or marketing firms will dedicate space on their website for pay-per-sale advertisements.
When someone clicks on the advertisement of the publisher’s website, they will be directed to the products or services of the advertiser or business owner.
Should that lead make a purchase from the advertiser, then the publisher will receive a commission, typically a flat-fee or a percentage of the overall sale.
The business owner will know which publisher is entitled to a commission based on the URL tracking used to identify the publisher.
Each publisher will have its own unique PPS URL tracking so when their ad is clicked on, they’ll be redirected to the advertiser’s website through a unique link.
All sales generated from a user coming through that unique link will mean that the specific publisher should be credited for the sale.
What should advertisers do before offering PPS advertising
Before launching your pay-per-sale marketing campaign, as the advertiser, you should cover your angles to ensure you are on the right track.
You must first define if your product or service is suitable for PPS advertising.
Ensure you remain profitable
If you start a PPS marketing program, are you going to make enough profits to justify paying out a commission for every sale to a publisher?
When you look at your PPS advertising setup, the additional costs you will incur in dealing with additional traffic and pay-per-sale leads sent over to you by the affiliate partner or publisher, your product and service pricing and all these other factors, you should make sure you remain in the money.
If you factor in your added costs for managing a PPS advertising model, your increased overhead costs for managing the partners, the additional inbound pay-per-sale lead activity and the commission to your publishers, and you continue to remain profitable, then the PPS model will be great.
The reason why it’s great is that you are only required to pay for a qualified sale and nothing else.
Optimize your sales funnel
The other element you should consider is that you should have an optimized sales funnel.
This means that you should have a great landing page, easy to understand messaging, simple call-to-action and a smooth sale process.
The easier it is to convert website visitors into customers, the more publishers will love doing business with you.
They will know that you have a great sales funnel converting a high number of visitors into clients and they can make good money with you.
If publishers spend a lot of time and effort advertising for you but get nothing out of it, sooner or later, they may abandon you.
Track your results
To succeed in pay-per-sale marketing requires that you track your results and monitor what is going on.
By tracking your pay-per-sale leads and activity, tracking your non-cash conversion goals and tracking your sales conversion process, you can further optimize your entire sales process.
Getting into PPS marketing requires commitment on your part to ensure that you will be successful but also making your publishers successful as well.
What types of pay-per-sale advertising programs are there
There are a few types of pay-per-sale advertising models both online and partially offline.
You can use a pay-per-sale advertising model by generating inbound telephone calls and in affiliate networks in online advertising.
Pay-per-sale affiliate programs
Pay-per-sale affiliate programs have been around for a long time.
They offer a pay-per-sale or cost-per-sale as a type of pricing model among other models.
In the affiliate program setup, an advertiser can work directly with a publisher or the advertiser can work with affiliate networks that act as a middleman between publishers and advertisers.
Pay-per-sale telemarketing
Another type of pay-per-sale advertising program is the pay-per-sale telemarketing program.
In this kind of program, the advertiser will typically close the sale via inbound telephone calls as opposed to directly through its online channel.
To track the pay-per-sale lead to a publisher, a cookie-based rotating system of telephone numbers are used to generate unique telephone numbers for the online visitor.
Each telephone number generated can be traced back to a keyword search term or advertisement that generated the phone call.
Benefits of pay-per-sale marketing
There are many benefits to pay-per-sale marketing.
Benefits for advertisers
An important pay-per-sale marketing benefit for advertisers is that they are able to launch themselves in PPS advertising without too much investment, effort or difficulty.
They’ll need to define the type of advertisements they authorize their publishers to make and invest into the technology that will allow them to track the inbound pay-per-sale leads through the publisher’s unique URL.
With that done, advertisers are good to go.
Another important benefit is that pay-per-sale affiliate programs help business owners improve their productivity and sales funnel.
With publishers sending pay-per-sale leads over, advertisers must do their homework to make sure that their website, marketing funnel and sales funnel is optimized to close a deal.
With proper metrics and data that advertisers can extract from their PPS marketing campaigns, they’ll have a much better idea on business areas that will need improvement.
Benefits for publishers
The publishers have an incentive to work with pay-per-sale affiliate programs as all they need to do is to reach out to their audience, do their advertisements and send traffic over to the advertiser.
The publisher does not have to worry about making the product, selling the product, handling customer support and so on.
Another benefit for publishers is that in most cases, they already have an audience and know that audience pretty well.
They know what interests them, the type of content they like reading and they type of products that may be suitable for them.
By getting into the pay-per-sale advertising model, they can promote products and services that will truly benefit their audience.
The publishers are in a great position to generate highly relevant and qualified leads for the advertiser.
This makes it a win-win situation for both the advertiser and the publisher.
Pay-per-sale best practices for advertisers
To make good money and succeed in the pay-per-sale advertising, there are fortunately some best practices you can employ to make it happen.
To maximize your sales coming from pay-per-sale generated leads, you can consider automating your lead generation program.
This will help your sales team spend more time on actually selling than managing the leads.
The second thing you should do is to ensure you have the right lead nurturing strategies in place to ensure a qualified lead can be quickly converted into a client.
Lead nurturing should represent an important part of your overall marketing strategies to warm up your leads to eventually making a sale.
You should also optimize your website design and navigation to maximize conversion.
Developing a great landing page and an easy conversion process online can help you make tons of new sales depending on the nature of your products and services.
You can even use direct response marketing strategies to quickly convert the lead into a customer.
Pay-per-sale best practices for publishers
Fortunately for publishers, there are countless of pay-per-sale affiliate programs out there to choose from.
You can sign up for the pay-per-sale affiliate marketing programs that will give you the best chances of earning a sale based on the interest and characteristics of your audience.
You’ll need to select the right affiliate program.
If you are going to promote a product or a service to your audience, you want to give them value and not cheat them for a few bucks.
You probably have an audience because they trust you.
At no point in time do you want to compromise the trust you’ve earned with your audience.
If you sell a product that is not good or of low quality, you may tarnish your own reputation, so make sure you select the right product to promote.
Finding the right affiliate marketing program offering quality products and services is crucial for your long-term success.
The other best practice is to segment your audience in such a way that you tailor your content and pay-per-sale advertising to them.
Succeeding in a PPS model is not just sending random traffic over to the advertiser.
You want to send traffic that has a high potential for a conversion into sales.
If you segment your audience well, target them with the right message so they take your call-to-action.
If that happens, you know that you’ve just sent a highly relevant and qualified lead over to the advertiser.
If the advertiser does its job well, you can be getting a sale commission soon after that.
Takeaways
In this article, we’ve talked about the pay-per-sale marketing model.
This is a popular advertising model in the context of affiliate marketing programs.
A business owner or advertiser will work with a publisher or marketing firm to have them generate leads for their products and services.
Once the leads are converted into a customer, the business owner will pay the publisher a commission, typically a flat-fee or a percentage of the actual sale.
There are many benefits to engaging in pay-per-sale marketing both for advertisers and publishers.
It’s sort of a win-win situation for the advertiser and the publisher.
The publisher takes the role of the advertiser’s marketing operations while the advertiser can focus its time and attention to actually converting the leads into sales.
We hope that this article helped you better understand the pay-per-sale advertising model.
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