What does EPC Mean in Affiliate Marketing? (With Working Calculator) [2024]

If you’re an affiliate marketer, EPC is one of the most important metrics you need to know in order to determine if your affiliate campaigns are profitable or not.

It’s a very powerful tool for measuring overall performance and determining how well your traffic is converting into sales for a particular offer.

At an even more granular level, you can track the overall performance of a specific affiliate link placement.

In brief, EPC shows the potential earning power from affiliate links, based on the number of visits and sales that occur in relation to those links.

What Does EPC Stand For in Affiliate Marketing?

EPC stands for Earnings Per Click and shows how much money you are earning for each click your affiliate link receives.

Essentially, EPC measures the average amount of revenue generated from a single click.

This is an important metric that gives you a real-time view of your affiliate marketing earnings.

Understanding what EPC means is necessary for all affiliate marketers — even those who are promoting just one or two products. 

How to Calculate EPC

Are you wondering why it’s important to calculate EPC?

Knowing your EPC will help you get a better understanding of how your traffic and affiliate offers are performing together.

The simplest way to calculate your EPC is to take the total amount of commission you’ve made and divide it by the total number of clicks you’ve sent to an offer.

commission / # of clicks = EPC

To illustrate how this works here is an example:

You have earned $25,000 in commissions from your affiliates over the past month.

You’ve also received 2,500 clicks on your offers.

Thus, your EPC is $0.10 or 10 cents per click. 

By calculating the EPC of an offer, you can view the bigger picture regarding your traffic.

It gives you a great overview of the health of your business.

Try Our EPC Calculator

Below is a working EPC calculator so you can quickly figure out the earnings per click of any affiliate campaign without having to do the actual math👇

Why is Earnings Per Click an Important Metric?

As an affiliate marketer, there are a lot of different data points that you can analyze to determine how well your traffic is converting.

So why is EPC so important for affiliate marketers? It’s because EPC is a metric that you can track at any time and any day.

You don’t have to wait until the end of the month or even the end of the week to see how well you’re doing. You can also view it over longer periods of time, like a month or a year.

So EPC is the perfect metric to use to help you analyze how well your traffic is converting for a particular offer.

How to Improve the EPC of Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

Improving your affiliate EPC is simple. It’s just really a matter of auditing your offers, traffic, and links. 

So what are some of the best ways to improve your EPC?

1. Is it the right offer?

The first broad question you need to answer is whether the affiliate offer you’re promoting is exactly what your target audience wants to purchase.

If it is, then you’re probably already on your way to generating more affiliate revenue.

However, if a product isn’t converting well, it can be because of a number of different factors. The only way to know for sure is to dive deep and do some research.

Your offer isn’t converting well?

Here are some reasons why your EPC may be lower than expected:

• No demand for the offer
• Too expensive
• Complicated to explain
• Not enough value for people to purchase

Or perhaps your audience just doesn’t find the offer appealing. These are all possibilities.

2. Quality of Traffic

Have you ever heard the phrase, “The output can only be as good as the input”? A more blunt version of this adage is “garbage in/garbage out”.

For affiliate marketers, the input is the traffic you send to an offer, and the output is the sales.

If that traffic isn’t high-quality then it’s going to translate into a lower EPC.

Country of Origin

Traffic from Tier 1 countries will always convert better than traffic from lower-tier countries.

Here’s a list of Tier 1 traffic countries (with regard to affiliate marketing):

If you’re sending traffic from low-tier countries, it may mean you won’t be able to achieve the EPC that you want.

Traffic Source

The actual source of your traffic factors very highly to the level of traffic quality.

The difference in EPCs from different social media platforms, email marketing efforts, and organic search can vary from offer to offer.

A simple way to improve your EPC is to track what traffic sources are converting well for you and then try to increase the traffic volume of those sources.

Additionally, try to incorporate new traffic sources into existing affiliate campaigns and identify any potential clear-cut winners.

Product/Audience Fit

The traffic you send to an affiliate offer needs to be niche relevant and targeted. It should also be sent to an offer that your audience will find useful.

If you have an offer that is applicable to your audience but isn’t really exactly relevant to them then you don’t have a good product/audience fit.

If this is the case, you should simply change the offer you’re promoting to them and try to get a better match.

Dialing in product/audience fit is the quickest way to increase your EPC.

3. Affiliate Link Placement

Where you place your affiliate links can have just as much (if not more) impact on your earnings than any other factor.

It’s crucial that your affiliate links are placed in the most effective places.

For example, if you are writing a blog post to promote an offer your affiliate links could appear in various places within the post itself, in a sidebar, footer, or even as an exit-intent popup.

Traditionally, it is best practice to place your affiliate link “above the fold” whether it be in an advertisement, landing page, or blog post.

Taking the time to test the various placements and types of links can go a long way to increasing your earnings per click.

Historical EPC for Affiliate Programs

Some affiliate programs will provide you will the historical program EPC. This number can give you a good idea of what you should expect when promoting the program. 

However, just because a program has a high historical EPC, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have the same results.

As stated above, there are many factors that come into play when it comes to converting traffic into sales.  

As an offer generates more sales volume, often the EPC will decrease, so watch out for programs that have an overly high EPC for your industry.

Lack of sales may be skewing the data.

What is a good EPC?

A good EPC number can vary wildly depending on the niche and offer type.

Once you are involved with a specific niche for a period of time, you will start to understand what is considered a good EPC.

It will probably take you a few months to see what a good EPC is for any given niche or offer.

During this learning period, you should be continually testing and analyzing all of the available data from your affiliate campaigns.

In Conclusion

If you are an affiliate marketer and you’re not tracking EPC, then you’re missing out on a lot of information that will allow you to make better decisions regarding your affiliate marketing strategy.

Have any tips for using EPC to help increase affiliate earnings? Feel free to leave them in the comments below 👇