Earning Per Clicks (100s of them) is the industry standard used by most affiliate and pay per click marketers to find out how attractive a product/affiliate program is. The concept if really simple. If you are promoting a product that gives you $100 per sale, and your conversion rate is 1%, your EPC is $1. In other words, for every 100 clicks, you are going to make on average $1. Now, this is an average value and you could go 200 clicks without making money. Regardless, many marketers design their sites around this metric (to increase their EPC). But is that the right metric to use?

Many experts argue that EPC is not really that relevant as far as determining the success of a campaign is concerned. At the end of the day, you may be earning $100 per click but spending $110, which means your campaing won’t be profitable. That’s why expert marketers now use EEPC to determine the profitability of each PPC campaign. EPPC = (EPC – (CPC)*100 – HCC)/100. In essence, you are subsctracting the cost that you are paying on average per 100 click and the header cost for those hundred clicks to get down to effective earning per click. There are many other ways to look at this but at the end of the day, you should always look at profit and not revenue. If you are breaking even before taking into account the header costs, then you are actually losing money.

EPC is an industry term that really gives no clear indication about how successful your campaign will be. It just shows how much you can expect to earn on average per hundred clicks. But if you can’t get those clicks for a price significantly lower than your EPC, then you are just wasting money away.