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Case Study: EPC Is King
Posted by Ad Hustler | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Case Studies | Posted on 23-12-2008
You may have heard a lot of big names in this industry say that payout of an offer doesn’t matter, EPC is all that matters. It’s human nature to think that the offer with the bigger payout will make you more money. Duh, seems like common sense right? Unfortunately, common sense doesn’t always prevail in affiliate marketing.
What is EPC?
Earnings Per Click.
How is EPC determined?
Take the total amount you made on an offer and divide it by the amount of clicks it took to make that much money. For instance let’s say you run an offer that pays out $10. Let’s also assume you convert 1 in 50 clicks to a lead. Your EPC will be 20 cents ($10 divided by 50 clicks = 0.20). Pretty simple math and most networks do this for you automatically in their reporting interfaces.
So now that we are all on the same page about what EPC is and how to calculate it, here’s the question. Let’s say you run the exact same offer at 2 different networks with the exact same payout. Will the EPC be the same? Technically it should be, but in practice, is it really?
I decided to do a small case study to find out:
12/19/08
Network A: 0.12 Cents EPC
Network B: 0.07 Cents EPC
12/20/08
Network A: 0.13 Cents EPC
Network B: 0.08 Cents EPC
12/21/08
Network A: 0.14 Cents EPC
Network B: 0.10 Cents EPC
12/22/08
Network A: 0.14 Cents EPC
Network B: 0.09 Cents EPC
12/23/08
Network A: 0.12 Cents EPC
Network B: 0.08 Cents EPC
Consistently, the offer on Network A performed better then the offer on Network B. Keep in mind, same offer, same payout. It sounds weird, but this can happen with any offer on any network. A 4-5 cent difference in EPC can add up big time if you are sending tons of traffic to the offer. At 5,000 clicks per day you can make an additional $200-$250 per day on the offer just by running it at the network with the better EPC. Just because Network A performed better on this test, DOES NOT mean that every offer of theirs will perform better split tested against Network B. There are tons of variables that can effect the performance of an offer on a network.
The lesson learned should be pretty simple. Always split test the offer you are running with the same offer on other networks. You could be leaving a lot of money on the table by running an offer that is underperforming the same offer on another network.
