Bloggers vs advertisers: why do influencers want to get paid for posting, while advertisers want to pay for targeted actions?

In 2020, the distribution of marketing budgets for influencer marketing changed — more and more companies chose the CPA format (cost-per-action, pay-per-action) as a payment model. An AdIndex study showed that the level of trust among brands has increased, and the percentage of unjustified expectations, on the contrary, has decreased. However, bloggers are accepting an alternative form of payment with reluctance. The team behind the influencer platform Manifest (mnfst) conducted a study in which we identified influencers’ main fears of CPA, and shared our experience in dealing with them.

But first, a small educational program about CPA…

CPA is an affiliate marketing format. The brand advertiser trusts a third-party (partner) to promote their product/service and pays them not for the promotion, but for the result of this campaign, i.e. actions.

Actions include sales, leads, orders, app installs, site clicks, and even likes or comments. It depends on the brand’s objectives.

Paying for actions allows advertisers to be sure that the marketing budget will be distributed correctly, and also allows them to calculate the return on investment (ROI) in advance. Businesses definitely experience benefits with this model, but they still aren’t quick to completely abandon pay-per-views (CPM), as bloggers aren’t yet ready to completely switch to the cost-per-action model, and some even refuse to work under this scheme.

Why are influencers afraid of the CPA model?

Influencers still prefer to pay according to the CPM model, i.e. for advertising space, when the brand simply pays for posting information in the blogger’s account.

We surveyed various categories of influencers, regardless of whether they were registered in the mnfst app or not, and found that the main stop factors before participating in cost-per-action campaigns for bloggers are:

• Poor awareness of the CPA payment format principles;
• Risks of not recouping the time and effort spent on advertising integration;
• Fear of being fooled: the advertiser cannot report the actual number of targeted actions.

At the same time, fear of non-repayment is more typical for influencers with 100k+ subscribers who are not connected to the Manifest platform (mnfst). This is due to bloggers’ negative experiences: they have placed ads with payment for actions in a story or post but didn’t generate enough actions to recoup this placement. As a result, the influencer didn’t earn anything, while creating coverage and involvement for the brand.

In addition, bloggers, as a rule, learn about the effectiveness of their advertising from advertisers and don’t have the opportunity to check the correctness of the results, which in turn leads to distrust on the part of the influencer and reluctance to re-integrate.

To make this process more transparent, the Manifest platform has integrated the ability for influencers to track the number of clicks on their referral link, as well as the number of further actions performed and future payment amounts.

At the same time, while mega influencers refuse CPA campaigns because of the order of payments, then nano and middle influencers, on the contrary, consider payments to be the main stimulating factor. The audience of nano and micro-influencers is more loyal, so the probability of a larger target response increases, and this, in turn, allows bloggers to earn more.

The survey also showed that for influencers who have not tried to participate in cost-per-action campaigns, the main stop factor is a lack of understanding of the payment process and the order of placement of this kind of content.

The worldwide sector of influencer marketing is relatively young: it’s constantly transforming. New cooperation options and payment methods are emerging. Influencers sometimes simply don’t have time to track all the innovations or delve into them. Understanding this problem, we decided to start educating influencers by integrating an internal digest in the app. In the “Tips” section, we explain how to use the app, what makes up the cost of a post, how to properly mark accounts in campaigns and, of course, what a CPA is, how it works, and how to participate.

Results

The popularity of CPA campaigns will undoubtedly grow in the near future, both from advertisers and bloggers. Whether the cost-per-actions model will ever become the prevailing form of payment for advertising campaigns via bloggers is difficult to predict, but we can make it as popular as the CPM format. To do this, the entire influencer marketing sector needs to:

• Tell bloggers about CPA (train them);
• Increase the transparency of reports and cross-checks;
• Trust their expertise, giving them the freedom to create without exhausting layout approvals;
• Offer a hybrid model with a low CPM and additional payments for the CPA, so that bloggers can get some kind of fixed payment and not worry that they won’t recoup their time and resource costs.