What is EPC in affiliate marketing?
Earnings per click or EPC refers to the average amount of money you earn every time someone clicks on one of your affiliate links. So, if your EPC is $5 that means you average $5 in commissions for every sale you make.
Why should you care about earnings per click?
You’ve probably already figured it out, but we’ll spell it out for you anyway: The higher your EPC is the more money you’ll make. Simple as that.
As an affiliate marketer, you have two ways to increase your revenue. You can either make more sales or you can increase your EPC. Early on, when your audience is still growing, there’s a lot you can do to boost your traffic and clicks. But the bigger your audience gets the slower your growth becomes and the harder it gets to increase your sales in a meaningful way.
That’s why increasing your EPC is a much better strategy. If your EPC goes from $2 to $3 that’s a 33% uptick in revenue without having to drive any additional traffic to your offers.
How to calculate earnings per click
Most affiliate programs will track your EPC for you, but it’s still important to understand how this metric is calculated.
Earnings per click is all your commissions divided by the total number of clicks on your affiliate links.
Here’s a straightforward example:
Let’s say you ran an affiliate marketing campaign that generated $1,000. During the campaign, your affiliate links received 500 clicks.
1,000/500 = $2 EPC
EPC vs CPC
You might have heard about another marketing metric: cost per click (CPC). If you’re running ads to drive traffic to your landing pages and offers, CPC is how much you pay every time someone clicks on one of your ads.
The relationship between your CPC and EPC is extremely important, because your CPC subtracted from your EPC equals your total profit. The lower your CPC and the higher your EPC, the more money your business will make.
Applying CPC to the example in the last section, you can calculate your true earnings.
To recap, you made $1,000 on 500 clicks, so your EPC is $2. In order to get those 500 clicks you paid for ads and drove 2,000 people to your landing page at a CPC of $0.25.
2,000 x 0.25 = $500
That means you spent $500 to make $1,000, so your total profit is $500.
What is a good earnings per click?
When it boils down to it, any EPC that’s higher than your CPC is good because that means you have a profitable business. But of course, higher is better.
What affiliate marketers deem a good EPC depends largely on their circumstances. Marketers with a bigger audience will likely be willing to settle for a smaller EPC because they have more volume, whereas those with a smaller audience will need a higher EPC to make meaningful profits.
That being said, you should be continually looking to maximize your EPC—there’s always room for improvement.
8 ways to boost your earnings per click
So, now that you know all about earnings per click and why it’s so important, you’re probably wondering how to increase your EPC. Here are eight ways to do just that.
Find out which affiliate programs pay the most
The easiest way to improve your EPC is to find affiliate programs that pay higher commissions. Not all affiliate programs are created equal, so you’ll want to do your research before investing time and money in promoting a product.
A quick Google search for “high-paying affiliate programs” should yield a long list of companies that pay their affiliates well. Just remember that any offer you promote needs to be relevant to your audience. It doesn’t matter how high your EPC is if the product you’re promoting isn’t something your audience will buy.
Looking for a high-paying affiliate program? Consider Leadpages.
50% commissions are great, but if the product you’re promoting is only $1 then that’s not a lot of profit. So, you’ll want to target products that have a higher sales price.
For example, programs like Amazon Associates give you access to a wide range of products ranging from a few bucks to thousands of dollars. This means you need to think carefully about price.
If you promote less expensive products you might see more sales volume but your EPC will be very low. Meanwhile, if you promote products that are too expensive your EPC will be high but it will be much harder to make a sale.
Experiment with different products and price points to find offers that yield the best EPC while still maintaining a reasonable sales volume.
Lower your CPC
While lowering your CPC doesn’t increase your EPC, it cuts your costs which means you get to keep more of the money you earn. So it essentially accomplishes the same thing, which is maximizing your profits.
When running search ads, different keywords have different CPCs. So, make sure you know the costs involved before choosing to promote a product. Ideally, you want to find a product that has a low CPC and a high EPC.
You can also decrease your CPC by improving your Google Quality Score. This involves making sure your landing pages are tailored to your ads and provide a good experience to users. Basically, your landing pages should deliver on the promises of your ads. Increasing your page load speed is another way to increase your Quality Score.
A/B test your landing pages
Continuing the discussion on Quality Score, you can also improve it by running A/B tests on your landing pages. This allows you to test different headline, copy, and image variations to see what performs best.
By continually testing and improving your page, you’ll create a better experience for users, which in turn will increase your Quality Score and decrease your CPC.
Engage organic traffic with pop-ups
Similar to lowering your CPC, you can take steps to promote your offers to organic visitors. These are users who came to your site through search engines rather than paid ads, which means they’re essentially free traffic. If you can convert more of these visitors you can really cut costs and keep even more of your EPC.
One of the easiest ways to promote affiliate offers to organic traffic is with pop-ups. You can use timed pop-ups, which display after someone has been on your site for a predetermined amount of time, or exit intent pop-ups, which appear when someone is about to navigate away from your page.
Use alert bars to get more eyes on your offers
Alert bars are another way to promote affiliate offers to organic traffic. These are small bars that float at the top of a website or landing page. They usually have a short description that explains the offer and a call to action button that people can click to learn more and make a purchase.
The great thing about alert bars is they’re less intrusive than pop-ups, so you can call attention to your offers without interrupting the user experience.
Include affiliate links in your blog posts
One more way to activate your organic traffic is to sprinkle some affiliate links into your blog posts. There are two ways you can do this.
First, you can put the links inside the body of the blog post. This helps ensure they won’t be overlooked—but be careful not to overdo it. Blogs are primarily a tool to educate and engage users, rather than sell them something. Any affiliate links inside the post should add value and make sense with the rest of the content. And too many might turn people off.
Second, you can add a call to action (which in this case would be your affiliate link) at the end of the post. Again, the link should be relevant to the content in the post to make it feel more natural.
We’ve talked about promoting affiliate offers to organic traffic to maximize your EPC, but there’s one more free audience you can market to: your email subscribers.
These people have already shown they’re interested in your brand, which makes them more likely to convert. Best of all, you don’t have to pay anything to get your offer in front of them, which means no CPC and more EPC.
You can create automated email sequences that are delivered as soon as people subscribe to your list. Like your blog content, you don’t want to include too many affiliate links in these emails. If every email you send is a promotion people are going to start unsubscribing. Make sure your email content is primarily informative and engaging, with affiliate links included where it makes sense.
You can also take the approach of including one or two sales-heavy emails in your email sequence, broken up by other emails that are strictly educational.
Get more marketing advice to boost affiliate revenue
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