What Does EPC Mean In Affiliate Marketing

Earnings Per Click or EPC is the be-all and end-all campaign performance metric to all affiliate marketers. EPC is the average revenue you generate for each click you drive to a merchant. The more the EPC is, the higher your earning potentials are.

For example, if you earned an affiliate commission of $500 by driving 100 clicks to a merchant’s website, the EPC would be $500/100 = $5.00.

Among all those crazy affiliate marketing terms, EPC is one of the most commonly used terms. Why is EPC so in-vogue an acronym? Watch John Crestani, one of the top affiliate marketing gurus on YouTube, explain why understanding EPC is important for you to assess the profitability of your campaign:

Neglecting EPC? That’s A Costly Mistake!

If you are into affiliate marketing and you haven’t yet taken EPC seriously, you are leaving your money on the table.

Calculating how much you can earn per click you drive to a merchant’s website is essential for working out your potential affiliate earnings. Knowing the EPC would help you understand how much you are possibly going to earn, which links and pages are the most effective, and which ones need some work.

Successful affiliate marketers take a heuristic approach while measuring EPCs of the affiliate programs before they sign up for any of the programs. This helps them understand how much they should spend per click to rake in sizable profits for their campaign.

You Can Calculate Your Estimated Profit Per Click

But for that, you need to calculate your spending per click too.

Why should you calculate your spending per click?

Well, as an affiliate marketer, you might be spending a lot of money on advertising on Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and so on. For every click you are sending to a merchant website, you have already spent some money.

Well, not exactly for every click, but if you break an entire campaign down to a single click, you will be able to work out the exact amount of money you spent for driving each click, right?

What you get is a metric that is totally under your control. You decide how much you are going to spend per click. You can control how much you are going to spend on Facebook advertising and how much you are going to spend on the pre-sale page, or the landing page.

So when you know the EPC for a certain affiliate program, and you compare it with your spending per click, you can work out your estimated profit per click – how much you are netting per click sans your campaign costs.

This can help you identify affiliate programs with high EPCs, such as Sandals Affiliate Program or Weebly Affiliate Program, and opt-out of programs that have relatively lower EPCs. To put it differently, you can fine-tune your efforts and act smart before joining any of the thousands of affiliate programs.

EPC Is Not Affiliate Commission

EPC is not to be confused with an affiliate commission. It’s a formula that you can use to calculate the bulk value of your click-throughs. While it is widely used with CPC or PPC (Pay-Per-Click) affiliate schemes in which affiliates get paid only when a visitor clicks on an affiliate link placed on their website, you can calculate the value of your clicks within any type of affiliate payment model, and not just PPC or CPC affiliate payment model.

EPC is a formula which you can use to find out the mean average value for each click you achieve, and not just the value of a single click on its own.

It enables you to analyze data on multiple clicks, and you can calculate your total earnings for every 100 clicks.

More than a payment structure in CPC affiliate programs, it’s an essential analytics tool for affiliate marketers, as it provides them an insight into their affiliate campaigns.

Of course, not all of your visitors clicking through an affiliate link placed on your website would end up buying something, or signing up for a webinar, or maybe filling out an email capture form. A majority of the clicks would NOT evolve into sign-ups or sales. In addition to that, different kinds of purchases or sign-ups can result in different amounts of affiliate commissions, but if you can work the average earning per click, you will know where you are going with your campaign.

In other words, EPC gives you a bigger picture of your marketing endeavors and your promotions.

EPC In Affiliate Marketing

EPC in affiliate marketing allows you to watch your earnings just by taking a cursory glance across the whole board instead of flicking through the numbers in a huge table and adding up all the numbers to see the final figure.

Top merchants provide EPC information upfront, and on their affiliate page, to enable marketers to have an idea of how much they can earn per click after signing up with them as a partner.

EPC is especially important for affiliate marketers that drive huge amounts of traffic to the merchant websites and marketers that use a wide array of platforms to promote different products and services. This is because EPC allows them to compare earnings via social media advertisements, promotional emails, and pre-sales pages, quick and easy.

Use EPC Strategically To Boost Your Campaign

Calculating the EPC for each of the individual affiliate links and promotions makes it easy to understand how your efforts are getting tangible results. You can use EPC in a variety of ways to boost your campaign. Here are a few ideas.

• Work out your EPC to find out which advertising platforms and websites you use are producing the highest yield.
• Compare the performance of different links.
• Compare historical data with recent data to find out whether your campaigns are improving or not.
• Find out whether you earn more with lower-cost purchases or sign-ups or higher cost purchases or sign-ups that are typically not easy to achieve.
• Assess whether paid advertising is worth your penny by finding out how much you earned per click compared to how much you spent per click.
• Eliminate problems such as invalid or broken links, high bounce rates, and poor content.
• Perform A/B testing on two versions of your affiliate website to find out which one is more profitable.

Final Thoughts

Running an affiliate business translates into spending money, time and effort for looking for and comparing affiliate offers. Therefore, you need to find out where you need to spend your money and time. Getting lost in metrics and numbers is quite easy, and if you are not analyzing the right data, you are probably losing your money. Focusing on EPC in affiliate marketing might seem a quick fix, but it’s a proven effective way to make sure that you are not frittering away your money.

For more tips, follow these top affiliate marketing gurus on YouTube and learn from proven marketers.