What Is EPC And Does It Matter To Affiliate Marketers?

It was only when I joined Warrior Plus that I first cam across EPC’s. Earnings per click or EPC as it is more commonly known, is probably one of the most important numbers for an affiliate marketer to know and understand.

Having a good understanding of what EPC is and how it is calculated can help you to quickly identify offers that will help you reach your income goals.

With so many different products and offers to choose from to promote, it can be difficult to identify which ones will be the best ones to promote.

Some affiliate networks only tell you what commission percentage of the product price you get but not the actual EPC.

When you are working with limited resources such as limited onsite advertising space, a limited marketing budget or limited time to invest in marketing etc it is important that you do all that you can to maximize your return on investment (or ROI) and this is what understanding the EPC rate can do for you.

What Is Earnings Per Click And How Does It Work For Me?

EPC is a way of calculating how well an offer is converting and how profitable it can be for an affiliate who chooses to promote it. The formula for making this calculation is very easy. It basically works like this:

1. A merchant or product owner will create a sales page for a new product or offer, then create a tracking link, which can be done by using any one of the many different link cloaking or link shorteners available such as bitly.com, Googles url shortener goo.gl/ or tinyurl.com, etc…

2. Run a test on that offer by sending traffic to the offer, this is can be done using free traffic such as an email list, classified listings, etc.or it can be done using paid traffic such as pay per click advertising, banner ads, etc… Track the number of clicks from the sales page of the offer and see how many clicks it took to make any sales.

3. Once this is completed you can now divide the amount of the commission being offered, by the number of clicks received to get that sale.

So, if for example the product is being sold for $50.00 with a 50% or $25.00 commission and the link on the sales page got 25 clicks before making the first sale, you would compute the EPC in the following way $25.00 / 25 clicks = $1.00 so you could estimate the EPC to be $1.00 for this offer.

The advice I had from James Francis, one of my coaches, was to not promote anything with an EPC of less than $0.70. Higher is better obviously.

Some of the best affiliate network sites like JVZoo.com, Warrior Plus, Share a Sale,  and some others use this system of measurement to help you select the offers to promote that will provide you with the best opportunity to earn a good return on your investment of time, resources or efforts to promote a product.

With Clickbank products you get an idea if the product converts well by the gravity and the refund rate. If the product owner has an affiliate page then they sometimes tell you the EPC of the product.

You could always contact the owner of the product to ask them what their EPC is. Most of the big name internet marketers will state the EPC of a new product on their JV page.

They will have already sent out test email promotions to see how their sales page converts.  If they want affiliates to promote their product they need to have a good EPC.

It is important when looking at this number to keep in mind that these are the numbers that someone else has worked out and that your actual results may be better or they may be worse.

Some of the things that will affect individual results are as follows :

Type of traffic to be used – Will you be using cold traffic (no pre-sale material) or will you be using a responsive buyers list . If you have a responsive buyers list that trust your recommendations, then you are going to get a much higher response and conversion rate, which will be reflected in a high EPC rate.

Quality of the content – sales page and pre-sale content is what is important here. Providing high quality, pre-sale content can help you drive more traffic to an offer and if the visitors see the value in the product then this will also help to produce a higher EPC rate for you.

Price point – This can often be offset by including an extra or high value bonuses that may be worth even more than the product sales price. This will often help to increase conversion and produce a higher EPC rate as well.

The key is to select offers with high epc rates and to then put as many of the above factors to work for you so that you can increase your rate as much as possible.

One of the big things that you can do to help ensure your success is to always pre-sell your offers this can also be done by doing a personal review and including a bonus or discount offer when possible.

Do you look for the EPC of a product before you promote it as an affiliate marketer?