EPC is commission earnings divided by the clicks that generated them. If your links sent 200 clicks to a merchant and earned £50 in commission, your EPC is 25p per click. It is the affiliate's unit economics in one number: compare it to what a click costs you to acquire and the campaign maths finishes itself.
Property visitor? This is the one meaning of EPC with no buildings in it at all: the certificate is this way.
The two conventions
Some dashboards report plain per-click earnings. CJ (Commission Junction) popularised the per-100-clicks convention: commissions ÷ clicks × 100, alongside 7-day and 3-month windows so affiliates can see momentum as well as level CJ. Awin and other networks document their own metric variants Awin. The same programme can therefore show "£0.25" on one network-style report and "£25" on another while performing identically. Check the convention before comparing anything.
Network EPC versus your EPC
The EPC printed on a programme listing is an average across every affiliate promoting it: coupon sites, cashback giants, content publishers, all blended. Your audience will not be average. Network EPC is best used to screen out programmes that convert badly for everyone, and to shortlist candidates worth a real test with your own traffic, whose EPC is the only one that pays your invoices.
What moves it
- Conversion rate on the merchant side: landing pages, pricing, checkout
- Commission structure: rate, cookie window, what counts as a valid sale
- Traffic intent: comparison-shopping clicks out-earn drive-by clicks by multiples
- Validation and reversals: returned orders claw commissions back out of your numerator
Run your own numbers in the EPC calculator, worked examples included. And if you arrived here from the acronym's other worlds, the index sorts all six.