What’s the point in telling us EPCs if they’re completely wrong?
It’s been a while since I had a moan on this blog (oh yes it is!), but the top has been blown this week after I managed to lose several hundred pounds on PPC (There’s a reason I should stick to SEO) promoting Appliances Online via Affiliate Window.
During my preparation for the PPC, I checked AWIN for the EPCs, validation rates, conversion rates etc of the major brands in the Electrical sector. Appliances Online came out as one of the best with an average EPC of £0.64 (Only Boots Kitchen Appliances were better at £0.68). As I was buying extremely relevant traffic and then sending it via deeplinks to specific pages on the Appliance Online website, I was quietly confident that I could achieve a better EPC than £0.64, but still kept my bids well below the guide EPC (We actually paid an average of £0.41 per click).
The traffic started to flow in, and before you know it we were seeing a nice level of clicks every day. But no sales. Strange, I thought, but perhaps one of those things. I know I’m sending bloody good traffic, to the best possible page. The conversions will come.
Only they didn’t, and they haven’t. We finally ended up with two sales, and an EPC of just £0.03. 3 bloomin pence.. from highly targeted, incredibly relevant deeplinked traffic?? When the “average” EPC for the program is 64p? Something doesn’t look quite right there.
So I looked at another program in the same sector - Appliance Direct. Their “average” EPC: 13p. Our EPC (again from highly targeted traffic): 1p. I mentioned this whilst chatting to an agency manager on msn one day, who’s just taken over a program in this sector. He told me that their average EPC was 5p last month, and 9p so far this month. Yet look at the official AWIN EPC, their average EPC is given as 15p??
Now I know EPCs are not to be taken as gospel, as they are just that - an average to be used as an indicator of a programs performance. But shouldn’t they at least be correct? Or even in the right ballpark.
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Standard Deviation - thats your problem (apparently). God knows how it works - I think they take off the top 10 and bottom 10% of affiliates and produce figures based on the rest?
Topping and Tailing the figures in that manner would account for mild variations in the figures, however as someone sending highly relevant traffic to a deeplinked page, I’d expect to be nearer the Top 10% being discounted, rather than the bottom 10%
I may be totally wrong however I think EPC is screwed up by discount code sites. Their EPC will be sky high and usual content affiliates are quite low so averages out. EPC for discount code sites will be high as people go to look for a code just before the sale is completed therefore they will have high conversions and high EPC whilst content affiliates have low conversions and low EPC as users are less likely to buy and also genuine commissions maybe missed just as users dash off to get a discount code just before completing checkout.
As an example on my site EPC for one merchant 0.03p whilst on AWIN it says it should be 0.15p and believe me the traffic is very targeted. Go on have a look at your program and let me put in the comments how your actual EPC compare to a network’s EPC.
Am I talking b@ll@cks or not?
same with cj i might add..everything is down in the electronics sector…recession is killing everything
EPC figures we produce are subject to standard deviation and three months worth of data. We always caveat the stats by urging people not to take them as gospel and manage activity accordingly.
Voucher codes and cashback sites will always skew data but at least we’re not a ‘brand name bidding’ network so you don’t have to worry about that on a more general level.
Dunc, it’s disappointing you’re apparently dismissive of this information given we’re the only network who make this data available in the way we do.
Ultimately account managers are always on hand to advise should you want to take a punt on a campaign and want added reassurance on the performance stats.
Incidentally the biggest affiliate on this campaign is a PPC affiliate (not brand name bidder) who enjoys an EPC of in excess of £1 and there are only two voucher code affiliates in the top ten (an no cashback sites).
Thanks,
Kevin
Incidentally, the current standard deviation EPC is £0.76 and overall EPC £0.59.
Thanks,
Kevin
Hi Kevin, Many thanks for your comments, and reassurance that your figures are correct. Based on those assurances, I’m even more baffled as to how highly targeted, deeplinked traffic can perform at such a ridiculously low EPC compared to the “average” - I’d understand that EPC if I were just chucking random traffic at it, but this was top quality traffic, looking to buy, sent directly to the right page.
I’ve sent enough clicks to rule out simple “bad luck” with conversions, so something else must be coming into play here.