What Is EPC In Affiliate Marketing? – Understanding Earnings Per Click

Last Updated on 24th April 2024

What is EPC in affiliate marketing? It’s actually one of the most important metrics you need to know about.

If you’re looking to get started with affiliate marketing and you’ve heard terms like EPC.

Knowing the EPC for a particular product can help you decide if it will be worth your time and money to promote the product.

Once you know the EPC for the products, you can also use the metric to further optimize your campaigns to make more money.

Here’s everything you need to know about the EPC metric.

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What Is EPC In Affiliate Marketing – The Earnings Per Click Metric

So, let’s get to it, what is EPC in affiliate marketing, and why does it matter?

EPC stands for Earnings Per Click and is basically a measure of how much a single click is worth to the affiliate. It tells you how much money you can make every time someone clicks your affiliate links.

The EPC is the most important metric in an affiliate campaign. This is because the EPC will tell you the average earnings potential for a particular product.

The EPC metric is important to know for both the product merchant and the affiliate. So, regardless if you’re running your own affiliate program, or you’re an affiliate promoting the product, you will want to know the EPC.

How is EPC Calculated?

The earnings per click metric is a very easy one to figure out.

The EPC is calculated by dividing the total amounts of commission earned by the number of clicks generated through your affiliate links.

So, let’s suppose you’re running a paid ad campaign for an affiliate product and you generate a total of $500 in affiliate commissions. All your commissions were generated through 100 clicks of your affiliate link.

To calculate your EPC, you simply divide the money you earned ($500) by the number of clicks your affiliate link received (100), which equals 5. So, in this case, your EPC is $5.

If the product you promoting pays you a commission only when a sale is generated, but the affiliate program states that the EPC is $5 per click, then you can gauge how many clicks you will need to generate on average before you make a sale.

Good affiliate programs, especially if they are hosted on a large affiliate network like Commission Junction, ShareASale, or ClickBank, for example, will have already worked out the EPC for you.

In this case, an average EPC has been used, which is based on the average of the affiliate partners that are promoting the product.

This is very helpful in determining if the affiliate program will be worth your time.

If the product you want to promote does not list the EPC, reach out to the affiliate managers to ask them for the details.

What is EPC for?

So, now we understand what EPC is, and how it is calculated, you probably already have an idea of what it’s for.

So, just to be clear, the EPC can help you decide which affiliate products to promote, and how much you can expect to earn promoting them. If you are running paid ads, then knowing the earnings per click will help you set up your ad campaigns wisely and ensure you’re not paying too much for a click (CPC).

While earnings per click is an important metric, unfortunately, it’s not the end-all, be-all because, after all, the EPC is an average taken from the performance of multiple affiliates.

One affiliate may have been receiving an EPC of $6.50, while another only $2 per click. That’s why it’s important to not just follow this metric blindly.

If you’re not sure why some affiliates are able to earn higher earnings per click than others, see the section below on how to increase your earnings per click.

What is a “Good” Earnings Per Click?

There’s not a particular amount or even a ballpark figure that indicates if the EPC is good or not. A lot of new affiliate marketers ask this question, but it’s actually irrelevant.

Basically, good earnings per click (EPC) is anything that is more than your cost per click (CPC). So, if your earnings per click are more than you spend out to generate the click, then you’ll be profitable.

If you’re not spending money on paid ads to generate your traffic, then the EPC figure is still useful as it can give you an indication as to how well the product is converting. It will also help you to gauge how much money you are spending on content production.

How to Increase Earnings Per Click

To increase your earnings per click (EPC) is basically to improve your conversion rate. Fortunately, there are many ways to do that.

Here are a few ways you can increase your earnings per click without spending more on ads.

Increase EPC With Exit Intent Popups

Most websites and landing pages out there have a bounce rate of between 26% to 70%. That’s crazy-high, and a lot of money is left on the table.

One effective way to counter this is to use an exit-intent popup to try to capture the visitor in some way before they leave your site for good. There are several ways you can deploy this on your site or landing page.

One option is to offer a free lead magnet to entice the fleeing visitor to give you their email address. You can now follow up with them through email marketing campaigns and promote your affiliate products.

A second option is to offer the visitor a low-ticket affiliate offer that has a good conversion rate. If the visitor takes up the offer, you will make money on the front end, and the product owner will continue to follow up with them through email.

Many affiliate programs also offer affiliates a percentage of the sale on upsell products, so if you choose this second option, you also stand to make more money further down the line if the customer buys more products.

A third option here is to offer a product at a heavily discounted rate – an irresistible offer, so to speak.

Regardless of which option you choose, the popup tool I recommend you use is ThriveLeads. I’ve been using it for several years, and it is directly responsible for making me quite a lot of money.

ThriveLeads is very easy to use and is compatible with WordPress. It is not a free plugin, but it is very affordable and highly worth it in my opinion. You can sign up to use ThriveLeads here.

If you choose to go with either option one or two, then I recommend you use an affiliate bridge page funnel so you can also capture the customers’ email addresses right before you pitch the product offering.

If you’re just getting started, then you’ll likely be conscious of your budget. Fortunately, you can build an affiliate bridge page funnel completely free using GrooveFunnels. All you need to do is click here to sign up for a free GrooveFunnels account to get started.

Increase EPC With Page-Specific Popups

Like exit-intent popups, page-specific popups are also highly effective in generating more sales.

The way this option differs from using exit-intent popups as above is the popup is tailor-made for a specific page.

In this way, the popup closely matched the topic of the page and pitches an offer related to the content the visitor has engaged with.

Typically, you can set the popup to trigger after a period of time (for example, after 20 seconds), or once the visitor has scrolled a certain way down the page (for example, once they scroll through 50% of the content).

Again, ThriveLeads is my tool of choice for creating popups.

Increase EPC With Sticky Bars

Another great way to put an offer square in front of your site visitors is to use a sticky bar, also known as a ‘ribbon’ at either the top or bottom of your site.

The sticky bar appears as soon as your page loads and will remain in full view of the site visitor unless they choose to close the bar.

The good thing about using the sticky bar is that the visitor does not have to close it in order to view your content like they would with a popup.

Since the sticky bar does not obstruct the visitor’s view, most people don’t close it but continue to read your content while the bar is touting your offer. Inevitably, the visitor’s eyes will be drawn to the bar, and if your offer is enticing enough, then they may take action on it.

You can use the sticky bar to either promote an affiliate product directly or to collect email addresses in exchange for an attractive lead magnet.

ThriveLeads also gives you the option to use sticky bars as well as popups and other effective conversion-focused features. You can try ThriveLeads here. They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee to give you time to test out their tools.

Final Thoughts On EPC

As you can see, EPC is an important metric for affiliates to understand.

To recap, the EPC (earnings per click) metric is one way to measure the performance of your affiliate marketing campaigns. It measures the total commissions earned by clicking on your affiliate link divided by the number of clicks it received.

Be sure to check the EPC of the product before you start promoting, and use one or all of the above methods to help increase your earnings per click.