When affiliates first get into this industry, they are usually always in search of offers with the highest payout. They figure if the payout is higher then they will automatically make more money. Obviously that’s not the case, since people can bank with $2 gaming offers even harder than someone running a $50 free trial offer.

A much better metric to go by is EPC (earnings per click). If you are making $0.50 a click on an offer, that is much better than $0.25 a click, right? Seems simple enough. It’s true, EPC is a much better measurement of the quality of a campaign that simply going by the offer payout. But is it the absolute best method? Nope.

Here’s the problem. Even if an offer gets $0.50 a click instead of $0.25 a click, you might still want to run the $0.25 offer. Why? Because it may get more clicks. This is where eCPM (estimated cost per mille, or estimated cost per thousand impressions). This one can be a bit trickier to figure out than EPC, where you just divide earnings by the number of clicks. But if you are willing to do the math, eCPM will give you the most accurate picture of which offer makes more money.

Here’s how to figure your eCPM:

eCPM = (revenue/number of impressions delivered)*1000

This really works to find out which offer is working the best for you on a landing page with multiple offers, or if you are split testing two different offers on a landing page. It doesn’t really work if you are just direct linking, unless you are doing PPC and you want to count your ad impressions as the impressions, but that gets a little dicey. So if you are using landers, get calculating and see what you find out, you may be surprised by the results.