Pricing a CPA Offer: Qualification, Caps and Timing

A CPA offer arrives as one number: EUR 110 per depositor, say. What you collect is that number multiplied by the share of your depositors who meet the qualifying conditions, minus the payments reversed later, limited by any monthly cap, and paid a month or two after the player deposited. Two offers with the same headline fee can differ by a third in what they pay. Two with different fees can come out in the opposite order to their headlines. This guide turns a quoted CPA into the fee you actually collect, with the arithmetic shown.

Why the price is never on the page

Eight programs in the program directory list CPA among their commission models: 10bet Partners, 2RBO, ComeOn Connect, SmartPlay Partners, Metal Casino Affiliates, Playattack, Duelbits Partners and 7StarsPartners. Not one of them publishes a CPA price. SmartPlay's site sends affiliates to their account manager for CPA and hybrid deals. 7StarsPartners pays CPA by insertion order or a negotiated plan. Metal's agreement defines a CPA structure without a rate.

That is normal, and it shapes the whole exercise. A CPA is a quote made to your account, usually after the program has seen some of your traffic, and the conditions arrive with the quote rather than on a public page. You cannot compare CPA offers by browsing. You compare them by asking the same set of questions of each, which is what the rest of this guide sets out. If you are still choosing between models, start with revshare vs CPA vs hybrid; this guide assumes a CPA is on the table.

The effective CPA

Three numbers turn a quote into a fee per depositor:

Effective CPA = quoted fee × qualification rate × (1 − reversal rate)

• Qualification rate: the share of your first-time depositors who meet the deal's conditions, such as a minimum deposit, a wagering or activity requirement, a time window and a list of eligible countries. The glossary entry on the qualifying deposit covers the term.
• Reversal rate: the share of paid CPAs later taken back for chargebacks, fraud or duplicate accounts.
• Quoted fee: the headline number, in the currency it is paid in.

Two offers, worked through

Illustrative, but built the way a real comparison goes. A site sends one program 40 first-time depositors a month. Two CPA offers are on the table:

• Offer A: EUR 150, paid when the first deposit is at least EUR 20 and the deposit is wagered once within 30 days.
• Offer B: EUR 110, paid when the first deposit is at least EUR 10. No wagering condition.

From the program's report of first-deposit amounts, 9 of the 40 depositors put in less than EUR 20, and 2 of those put in less than EUR 10. Of the 31 who deposited EUR 20 or more, 5 did not wager the deposit within 30 days. Both offers carry the same reversal rate, 4%.

The EUR 150 offer pays EUR 268.80 a month less than the EUR 110 offer on the same 40 players. The headline gap of EUR 40 runs the other way once qualification is applied. What decides it is the shape of your audience's first deposits, which is a property of your traffic, not of the deal.

The same audience can make the stricter deal the better one. If your readers deposit large amounts and nearly all of them play through the deposit, Offer A's qualification rate climbs towards Offer B's, and at a 90% rate Offer A pays 150 × 0.90 × 0.96 = EUR 129.60 per depositor. A high-stakes audience should hold out for the higher fee; a casual one should hold out for the looser baseline.

Finding your own qualification rate

If the program's report separates first-time depositors from qualified CPAs, divide one by the other for each of the last three months. If it shows first-deposit amounts, sort them against the minimum in the offer, as in the example. If it shows neither, ask the manager for last month's figure in writing before you accept. A new site with no history has to estimate, and the safe estimate is the low one: price the offer at a qualification rate well below what the program suggests, and renegotiate once you have three months of your own numbers.

Monthly caps: what happens to the 41st depositor

A CPA deal can come with a cap, a maximum number of CPAs paid per month. The cap is only half of the term. The other half is what happens to the depositors above it, and there are three possible answers. Suppose a cap of 30 qualified CPAs at EUR 110, and a month with 40 qualified players:

• Unpaid: the ten above the cap earn nothing. EUR 1,100 of qualified traffic is simply given away.
• Paid at revenue share: the ten above the cap move to a revenue-share plan. At an illustrative EUR 250 of net revenue per player over their first year and a 25% share, they pay 10 × 250 × 0.25 = EUR 625, spread over twelve months.
• Rolled forward: the ten count towards next month's cap. Worth the full EUR 1,100 a month later, if next month runs below the cap; worth nothing extra if every month exceeds it.

An overflow clause is worth knowing before a seasonal peak, not after. A major football tournament or a strong search month can push a capped deal over its limit in exactly the month you were counting on.

Timing: when a CPA is actually paid

A CPA is not paid when the player deposits. It is paid after the player qualifies, after the month in which the CPA is booked closes, and after the program's payment run. Take a player who deposits on 25 March under Offer A's 30-day wagering window. The player completes the wagering on 20 April. If the program books the CPA in the month it qualifies, it lands on the April statement. A program that pays by the 15th working day of the following month, as 10bet Partners does, pays it about three weeks into May. Eight weeks pass between the deposit and the money.

Two questions settle the timing. Is the CPA booked in the month of the deposit or the month it qualifies? And is there a hold on new affiliates' earnings? The first decides which statement a late-month depositor appears on; the second can push the first payments of a new deal back a full quarter. On these timings, the first CPA payment of a new deal can land in the third month after the first qualifying deposit, so budget the months before it as cost.

Reversals and clawbacks

A CPA paid can be taken back. The usual causes are a chargeback on the deposit, an account later flagged for fraud or bonus abuse, and a duplicate account belonging to a player who already exists in the operator's system. The term that matters is the window: how long after payment can a CPA be reversed? Thirty days and twelve months are very different risks. A reversal deducted from a later statement can also push that statement under the payout threshold, which delays everything else in it.

If you are offered a CPA with no stated reversal window, assume it is open-ended and ask for one. Then price it in: a 4% reversal rate costs the same as a 4% cut in the fee.

The questions that make two CPA quotes comparable

• The fee, and the currency it is paid in.
• The minimum first deposit.
• Any wagering, turnover or activity condition, and its time window.
• The countries whose players qualify.
• The monthly cap, and what happens to depositors above it.
• Whether the CPA is booked in the month of the deposit or the month it qualifies.
• The reversal window, and the grounds for a reversal.
• Any hold on a new affiliate's earnings.
• Whether the deal can later switch to hybrid or revenue share, and for which players: new ones only, or the existing book as well.

With answers to all nine, compute the effective CPA for each offer on your own last three months of depositors. The commission calculator then sets that effective figure against a revenue-share alternative over twelve months.

Common questions

Is CPA better for a new site?

It pays sooner and it is immune to negative carryover, which suits a site that needs cash and has few players. The catch is that revenue share is often where a new account starts: Playattack's terms make revenue share the plan absent any other agreement, and Cloudbet Affiliates sets new accounts to its 25% default. Ask anyway, and ask what volume or quality would bring a CPA offer.

Should I negotiate the fee or the baseline?

Whichever moves your effective CPA more. In the worked example, dropping Offer A's wagering condition lifts its qualification rate from 65% to 77.5% (31 of 40), worth EUR 18 per depositor at the same fee: 150 × 0.125 × 0.96. Getting the same EUR 18 from the fee alone would take a rise of about EUR 29, to EUR 179, because every euro of fee is itself cut by the 65% qualification rate. A manager can often move a condition more easily than a price, because a condition does not show up on a rate card.

Does a hybrid avoid all of this?

No. A hybrid's CPA part carries the same qualification, cap, timing and reversal terms, on a smaller fee. The questions above apply to it unchanged.

What we would do this week

1. Pull last month's first-time depositors for your largest program and find the share that would qualify under the minimum deposit the program uses, or would use, for CPA.
2. For any CPA offer you hold, compute the effective CPA with your own qualification rate and a reversal rate from your last three statements.
3. Send the nine questions above to the manager of any program that has quoted a CPA without them, in a single written message.
4. If a deal has a cap, check last year's busiest month and work out what the overflow clause would have cost you.