In every online business, you need to know what metric to measure to know whether your marketing campaigns are bringing great results or not. In affiliate marketing, you need to measure EPC.
So what is EPC in affiliate marketing?
In this article, I’m going to teach you what EPC is in affiliate marketing, how to calculate it, and how to improve it to increase ROI for your business.
Let’s get started.
What is EPC?
EPC stands for Earnings Per Click and is a measure of the amount of money you make from every successful click on a link you promote.
It’s one of the vital measures of campaign success in affiliate marketing. When you evaluate EPC against CPC, you get valuable insights that can help you to know how to tailor your online marketing campaigns.
What is EPC in Affiliate Marketing?
Now that you know what EPC stands for, what does it mean in affiliate marketing?
Essentially, EPC is a popular metric in affiliate marketing that can help you evaluate the overall performance of your campaigns.
When you join an affiliate marketing program as an affiliate, you get a special link that you use to promote products of another company or brand.
When your readers click the link they will be redirected to your affiliate partner’s website where they can purchase the products you promote.
Now EPC is the measure of the average amount of money you earn from a single click on your affiliate links.
EPC vs Affiliate Commission
EPC and affiliate commission are two different things. Affiliate commission is the total amount you earn from a successful sale made from a product you promote through an affiliate link.
On the other hand, EPC is a measure of the average amount you earn from every single click on a link you promote. This way, you can know what links are generating good ROI for your business and which ones aren’t.
EPC vs PPC
Both EPC and PPC are significant metrics that can help to determine whether your campaigns are profitable in affiliate marketing but the two are different.
As mentioned above, EPC is a metric that shows the amount generated from a specific amount of clicks sent to an affiliate offer. On the other hand, PPC is an internet marketing technique where business owners pay a fee for each click made on their ads.
What Is A Good EPC Rate?
A good EPC is greater than the CPC you’re getting from your campaigns. Practically, a good EPC should be 2X your current Cost Per Click.
How to Evaluate EPC
Now that you know what EPC is in affiliate marketing, it’s also important to know how to calculate it. Calculating EPC can help you get a clear picture of the performance of your traffic and the products you promote.
To calculate EPC, you divide the commission you generated by the total clicks redirected to the products sold.
EPC= Total commission earned/ Total number of clicks.
Here is an example of how to calculate EPC:
Assuming your affiliate links received 100 clicks and out of the clicks, you generated $1000, then your EPC will be $1000/100 which equals $10.
Why Should You Calculate EPC in Affiliate Marketing?
There are many elements to keep track of to know the performance of your affiliate business concerning the traffic you generate. But why is earnings per click a valuable metric?
It’s simple. As seen above, EPC is the average of total commission divided by the total number of clicks sent to the affiliate offers. It can help you know whether the amount you invest in the clicks you send is generating good ROI.
This means that you can know how much you’re making any time, any day so you don’t have to wait for a long period to know the performance of your traffic and affiliate products you promote.
This way, you can tell whether you should continue investing in the type of advertising you’re using or not.
How to Improve EPC in Affiliate Marketing and Make More Money
Having known what EPC in affiliate marketing is, how to calculate it, and its significance, it’s also important that you learn how to move the needle so that your affiliate marketing campaigns can bring great results.
The good news is that boosting your EPC isn’t hard. It involves evaluating your traffic, affiliate links, and the products you promote.
Here are a few practical tips to boost your affiliate marketing EPC.
Step 1: Choose High-Converting Affiliate Offers
Know what your target customers want first. For this, I recommend using the best product research tools for Amazon, eBay, or AliExpress.
Generally, if your products are good, customers will never mind investing their money in you.
Another thing you have to find out what your target customers want otherwise, you can’t give them eggs when they want oranges.
If you’re getting a low EPC in your affiliate marketing campaigns, there could be several factors you need to investigate.
For instance, you could be promoting products that aren’t in demand, are too costly, or aren’t adding any value to your target audience.
Step 2: Evaluate Your Affiliate Link Placement
Your affiliate link placement can make or break your EPC. As a rule, you should ensure your links are visible and naturally placed.
For instance, if you’re including affiliate links on a blog post that aims to promote certain products, you could place the links in the sidebar, landing page, footer, or other places where customers can see them right away.
You can also experiment with different link placements until you get the best places to include your links. It’s also a good idea to use a powerful link tracking service such as ClickMagick or ClickMeter to know which links are performing better.
These are powerful link-tracking platforms that can help you track and improve your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Choose the Best Advertising Channel
Where you advertise your affiliate offers can also determine whether you will get a great EPC or not. Note that, different advertising channels have different audiences.
Some of the best paid advertisement platforms include:
- Facebook ads
- Instagram ads
- Google ads
- Twitter ads
- LinkedIn ads
- Bing ads
- And more.
You can use one or a couple of advertising platforms to see which one generates great results.
Step 4: Minimize Your Ad Cost
Evaluate the amount of money you generate when you promote your offers on a certain platform vis-a-vis the amount you spend in advertisement to see whether you should reduce your ad spending or stop using the platform.
Step 5: Stay Updated
Different affiliate offers sell better in different seasons. For instance, some offers sell well during Christmas while others sell well during summer. You know what to sell, when, and where.
Step 6: Evaluate the Quality of Traffic
The higher the quality of traffic you send to your affiliate offers the better the EPC you will get in your marketing campaigns.
To determine the quality of traffic, consider the following:
- Country of origin. The country you’re generating traffic from can also make or break your EPC in affiliate marketing. Traffic from Tier-1 countries has high conversion rate than traffic from low-tier countries. You should target traffic from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other English-speaking countries.
- Source of traffic. What platforms or channels are you driving traffic from? Traffic from different channels converts differently. For instance, traffic generated through email marketing has a high conversion rate than that generated from social media.
You can use a traffic monitoring tool like Kissmetrics or Google Analytics to know the platform that’s driving traffic to your affiliate offers as well as the country of origin of the traffic.
Step 7: Calculate EPC For Each Affiliate Link
Evaluating your EPC per link can help you determine what’s the best link placement, what advertising platform to use, etc. This can help you make better marketing decisions.
Step 8: Track And Tweak
Once you calculate your EPC, track the performance of your efforts to determine which is working and which is not and adjust or adapt.
Final Thoughts
EPC is an important metric that any affiliate marketer should know how to calculate and improve. It can help you determine the performance of your campaigns so you can make better decisions when launching affiliate marketing strategies.