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What Does EPC Mean in Affiliate Marketing?
Earnings per click (EPC) is a special metric in affiliate marketing that shows the average amount of revenue you earn each time someone clicks on your affiliate links.
Knowing how much you earn for each click is fundamental to calculate your affiliate marketing revenue and identify which campaigns work better for you and bring more commissions.
Moreover, EPC is often displayed by affiliate marketing networks to help affiliate marketers evaluate and compare their earnings potential to that of other merchants.
Whether you are running an affiliate program or sharing affiliate links from affiliate partners, EPC affiliate is one of the essential metrics to be successful at your campaigns.
EPC indicates your earning potential.
Why EPC Marketing Matters
Most affiliate marketers aren’t aware of the EPC marketing metric and how to calculate it. Instead, they mostly know about another popular marketing term: Cost per Click (CPC.)
What is Cost per Click (CPC)?
So, they look for products with the lowest CPC and run costly pay-per-click ads (PPC) to that affiliate link, hoping the ads can make enough money to cover the costs.
Now, the thing is, they may make a small profit this way. But if you know how to calculate EPC accurately, you don’t need to rely on hope.
Like in any other marketing effort, making decisions based on data and insights helps you make incredible improvements in affiliate marketing.
Once you know your EPC, you can see predictable success and even target other affiliate products with higher EPC.
So, what is EPC for?
Although EPC stands for earnings per click, this can be a little misleading. EPC formula shows you the value for the clicks you obtain, not just the value of one click on its own.
It’s a cost-per-click formula that allows analyzing data on multiple clicks at once. Then, it returns a result of your earnings per 100 clicks.
EPC is a valuable analytics metric for affiliates and a common payment structure for affiliate websites.
You should consider that:
- An individual action like a click may not bring in any money,
- Having a high bounce rate or a lot of clicks that don’t turn into sales or sign-ups may not get you any earnings.
Also, given that different types of purchases or sign-ups can earn you varying amounts of commission, calculating your clicks is significant.
How is EPC Calculated?
It’s very simple to calculate your earnings per click. Here’s the EPC formula:
The total amount of commissions you earn / the number of clicks you obtained with your affiliate links = EPC
For example, let’s say you were running ads for an affiliate product and your total profit was $100. And all of your revenue came from 50 clicks on your affiliate link. In this case, to calculate the EPC:
$100 (Total revenue) / 50 (Total clicks) = $2 (EPC)
Many affiliate marketing sites provide this information for affiliate marketers. They simply calculate the EPC of their affiliate products for you. You may see this piece of data called “network EPC” because it comes from the affiliate program’s partner to provide an average.
You might ask, “if earnings per click affiliate programs give this information, why doesn’t everyone just promote products with higher EPC and go extra on ads for that affiliate link?”
The catch is this information shows only the average e earnings per click, meaning they aren’t the same for every affiliate partner. For example, one may get $3 EPC through a link while another gets only $1. So the average becomes $2.
Therefore, choosing the affiliate product with the highest EPC doesn’t necessarily bring you good income.
You need a solid marketing strategy for that.
Let’s see how you can boost your EPC marketing FAST.
7 Simple Ways to Improve Your Earnings Per Click (EPC)
Here are the seven simple ways to improve your earnings per click (EPC):
1. Convert Abandoning Visitors with Exit-Intent
First of all, you should know that re-engaging is a gem in digital marketing. You can create a targeted exit-intent popup for your affiliate product and display it on your website.
In that case and for many other marketing uses, we suggest using Popupsmart exit-intent technology.
So, how do exit-intent popups work for affiliate products?
When visitors are browsing a specific web page, they will see a popup if they show an intent to abandon your site.
You will present an offer on your exit popup and add a call to action button that directs users to your affiliate products. If your audience takes interest, they purchase and you make money.
The best part is that this way, you will be earning just with your organic traffic. You will not need to pay for expensive affiliate ad campaigns. That means there will be lower ad costs, high EPC, and higher total profit.
2. Target with a Non-Intrusive Floating Bar
Some digital marketers and website owners worry about popups, thinking popups will hurt their UX. However, in most cases, this isn’t true at all. When used correctly, popups are very effective in converting passive traffic into customers.
Floating bars are one of the most user-friendly types of popups. That is why many worldwide brands use them on their websites.
What is a floating bar?
These types of popups are displayed on top of a web page without coming in between the user and the content.
We recommend targeting your floating bar popup by page, but it would also work well for sitewide.
No matter where you choose to display a floating bar campaign, it can boost your EPC marketing efforts and drive more affiliate sales.
3. Link to the Highest Bidder
The competition in the marketplace plays an integral part in increasing EPC. The more competition in the marketplace, the higher the earnings per click will be.
That’s why it’s essential for online publishers to link to the highest paying merchant to receive the highest payouts for their links.
4. Use Affiliate Links in Your Blog Posts
Another way to boost your EPC marketing efforts is by embedding affiliate links in your blog posts.
Did you know that according to a research, content and blogs generate almost 40% of affiliate publisher commissions in the United States?
It’s no longer a secret for marketers that you can drive tons of organic traffic to your site by creating valuable, quality content. If you already have a consistent blog page on your website, you can start creating content for your affiliate product, always putting value first.
Regardless of whether you already have a blog or you will start one, make sure to follow the best SEO practices. This way, you can rank on search engines and start attracting more visitors to your site.
Then, you can embed the affiliate links directly in the content to drive more sales.
Sidenote: You can use popups on your website to increase blog post engagement in the first place.
For affiliate links, the most popular content types include:
- Product reviews
- Resource pages
- Comparison articles
- Product list
Mind that it’s also useful to warn your readers whenever you add an affiliate link to your content.
WPBeginner is a good example of this. They assure users that they only promote affiliate products they use and like.
5. Focus on Fast Hosting
What most affiliate marketers don’t realize about EPC is if you can’t make people stay on your website, they will not click your affiliate links, in-content links, or ads.
According to a study, the average website load time is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile. Even just one-second delay will reduce;
- Pageviews by 11%
- Conversions by 7%
- Customer satisfaction by 16%
You should keep your hosting fast and reliable to secure more visitors so that you can drive more clicks to your affiliate links and generate more EPC.
6. Leverage Affiliate Marketing Through Email Series
Using affiliate email marketing sequences is an effective method to improve your EPC marketing. However, mind that adding affiliate links to email can either;
- Bring very high profits.
- Get you banned from your email service provider.
The difference between the two results ultimately depends on your approach.
Email service providers don’t want spam emails at all because it hurts their open rate percentages. When email automation services see an expansive email list sending out campaigns full of affiliate links, they perceive it as spam and shut it down.
Why Do Emails Go to Spam Instead of Inbox & What to Do So They Don’t Anymore
But that doesn’t mean you can’t add affiliate links to your emails. You just need to make sure to create an email series that doesn’t look spammy.
You need to provide value in your content and then highlight your affiliate products.
Your automated email series for EPC marketing can look something like this:
- Welcome email
- Sharing Content
- Lead nurturing to build a connection
- Affiliate link email
- More content sharing
- Nurturing
- Affiliate link email
And that’s it! Don’t forget to test and tweak your copy to get the best results.
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