EPC or Earnings Per Click is a contentious metric in performance marketing.
Some affiliates rely on it, others give it little attention. Some networks like MaxBounty display it next to each campaign in their dashboard, others provide no network EPC data. Either way, personal opinion undoubtedly plays a role in its importance.
Regardless, EPC continues to be a popular topic in affiliate marketing. “What is EPC?” and “How do I use EPC?” are two of the most common questions we get asked by beginner affiliates.
This guide is going to answer those questions, examine how to use this metric when selecting MaxBounty campaigns, and look at some scenarios where EPC data can also be misleading.
Let’s eliminate any uncertainty about this three letter acronym once and for all.
What is EPC (Earnings Per Click)?
Earnings per click (commonly referred to as just EPC) is the average amount of money earned for each campaign link click. That number is determined by a simple formula: earnings divided by clicks = EPC.
The ‘earnings’ that are being divided is the amount you’ve earned for the cumulative leads generated. Your EPC is always going to be zero if you haven’t generated any leads.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you’ve been promoting a campaign that pays out $20 for each lead. Let’s also say the you’ve generated 10 leads earning you a total of $200. If your affiliate link was clicked 250 times, your EPC would be $0.80 (200 ÷ 250 = 0.80).
So on average, for every click your link receives you’re earning 80 cents.
Simple enough, right?
What exactly are you supposed to do with that number, though? What is its purpose, and how do you know if you’re looking at a good EPC or a bad EPC?
How to Utilize EPC Data
There’s actually a couple different EPC metrics that are useful to affiliate marketers:
Your own EPC on either a single campaign or all of your campaigns cumulatively
The ‘Network EPC‘ of a campaign featured at an affiliate/CPA network like MaxBounty
Calculating your own EPC can be a helpful way to determine your budget for certain types of paid traffic.
If you’re promoting campaigns with Google Ads, you can see how much you’re paying on average for each click. This is referred to as your cost per click or just CPC. You can then calculate your EPC and use both numbers to determine your overall profitability on a campaign.
Let’s say your cost per click is $1.20 and after calculating your EPC you discover it’s $1. You now know that you’re losing more money than you’re making. Therefore, you either have to find a way to reduce your CPC or increase your conversion rate to become profitable.
Alternatively, if your EPC is higher than your CPC, you know that you’re currently running a profitable campaign.
Knowing and understanding this data can be especially valuable for keyword bidding and when it comes time to scale your campaigns.
The second useful EPC metric is network EPC.
When you’re searching for your next profitable campaign at MaxBounty, you’ll notice there’s an ‘EPC’ column beside each campaign. This number represents the average earnings per click generated by all MaxBounty affiliates who have promoted that campaign. It’s also referred to as Network EPC.
A campaign’s network EPC can tell you how profitable it’s been for other affiliates. This can give you an idea of how profitable it’s likely to be for you as well.
Let’s look at the best way to use this data when selecting campaigns.
How to Use Network EPC to Help You Choose Campaigns
You likely already know that the affiliate campaign with the highest payout/CPA (cost-per-action) rate does not mean it’s also the most profitable. A campaign’s rate usually just reflects its conversion type. Therefore, one that converts on a sale is obviously going to have a higher CPA rate than one that just requires an email submit.
This is where EPC can be useful.
Earnings per click can provide you with a metric that you can use to determine a campaign’s earning potential.
Does this mean that if one campaign has a $20 rate and a $0.20 EPC and another has a $10 rate and a $0.30 EPC, that the latter campaign is better?
Not necessarily, but there are specific scenarios where it can be an indication that one campaign has a greater chance of making you money than another.
We mentioned above how you can view the earnings per click of any campaign at MaxBounty. However, just like with CPA rates, choosing to promote a campaigns solely because of a high EPC is not the best approach. There are simply too many differences and variables between campaigns to make this viable.
When you can use it to your advantage is when you’re looking at two or more campaigns that share some similar qualities.
For example, let’s say that you want to promote a sweepstakes campaign.
You search for sweepstakes campaigns in MaxBounty’s Affiliate Dashboard and find two that fit your promotion strategy.
You check out both campaigns, their traffic source permissions, creatives, their landing pages, and to you, neither campaign seems to have an obvious advantage over the other.
This is where it could make sense to promote the campaign with the higher EPC.
It’s possible both campaigns might even be from the same advertiser. You’ll often see a campaign split into multiple versions that target different countries or feature slightly different products or services. Analyzing their EPCs can give you some insight into which one has been more successful for other affiliates.
Why Network EPC Can Be Misleading
We mentioned at the top of this post how there are scenarios where Network EPC data can mislead you. Outliers and unique factors that can skew the metric in one direction are usually the culprit.
This can cause you to dismiss a great campaign because of its low EPC. Alternatively, you might choose an inferior campaign because you were enticed by its high EPC.
Let’s look at these scenarios in more detail to ensure you’re making informed decisions.
Scenario 1: Outlier Traffic Source and Affiliates
Not all affiliate marketing traffic sources were created equal.
Some traffic types rely on a high volume of clicks to achieve conversions while others are more targeted and thus have higher conversion rates.
For example:
An affiliate promoting a campaign to a targeted email list is likely to see a higher conversion rate than an affiliate promoting the same campaign using PPV (pop-up/under) traffic.
The email campaign is likely to attract fewer impressions and clicks because its audience is smaller. However, the users clicking the campaign link are more likely to generate a lead because they’re already interested in that type of product/service.
Therefore, the email affiliate’s earnings per click is likely higher than the PPV affiliate, even if they were ultimately earning the same amount.
The chart below illustrates how traffic source outliers can easily distort a campaign’s EPC.
You’ll notice that Campaign 1 has the more attractive average EPC, but affiliates are generally earning more promoting Campaign 2.
This can also occur a few other ways.
Scenario 2: Direct Linking vs Custom Landing Pages
There’s generally two types of paths you can use when promoting an affiliate campaign: direct linking OR using a custom landing page (sometimes also referred to as a squeeze page).
Direct linking is when your traffic source directly links to your campaign link. For example, running a Facebook ad that when clicked on directs users to the landing page of the campaign you’re promoting at MaxBounty.
Alternatively, your ad could direct to a custom landing page that contains the campaign link. Your sales path or funnel would then look something like this:
traffic source > custom landing page > campaign landing page > campaign link
Although every campaign and traffic source is different, promotion strategies that use a custom landing page generally have higher conversion rates than those that use direct linking. That’s because your landing page is helping pre-sell the product or service prior to the user making a decision. It’s also where affiliate marketers get to flex their creative muscle and gain an advantage over other affiliates.
Therefore, an affiliate direct linking with a high-volume traffic source could be flooding that campaign with a high number of clicks but few conversions.
Just like with the first scenario, if one or more affiliates are doing this, it could easily lower that campaign’s network EPC.
Scenario 3: Small Campaign Performance Sample Sizes
Finally, It’s important to know how long a campaign has been active before you analyze its EPC. This is because small sample sizes can easily spike or plummet this data.
The outliers that we mentioned in the first two scenarios can impact a campaign’s network EPC even more if that campaign was only recently launched.
You’ll notice that newer campaigns at MaxBounty have ‘New’ displayed under their EPC value. We purposely do this to prevent affiliates from placing too much importance on extremely small sample size EPCs. However, even once the EPC value is activated and displayed it can still sometimes be a relatively small sample size.
Make it a habit to discover when a campaign was launched so that you know its been collecting data for some time.
How Important is it to Use EPC?
It may seem like we’re offering contradictory information by telling you that earnings per click can be useful and yet it can also mislead you. The fact is, both are true.
EPC will always be a useful metric for determining your own profitability. This is especially true for cost per click traffic sources like Google Ads.
Network EPC can also be useful for campaign selection when used with a bit of caution.
We recommend utilizing your MaxBounty Affiliate Manager whenever you can to learn more about a campaign’s earnings per click. They’ll happily let you know if its an accurate representation of the campaign’s profitability or if outliers are skewing the data.
Ultimately, your own experience and knowledge will determine how useful EPC data is to you. They’re also going to be the best tools for helping you interpret and analyze that data. Our hope is that this guide has made those tools more accessible to you going forward.
The post EPC in Affiliate Marketing: The Ultimate Earnings Per Click Guide appeared first on MaxBounty Blog.