How to Evaluate an Affiliate Program?

Today, I am going to talk about “how to evaluate an affiliate program”. After you find an affiliate program (how tofind affiliate programs), you need to do an evaluation on it. Will it bring you much commission? Will it pay? You will have a series of questions before you start promoting their products on your channels.

What should you care about and how?

There are two conditions here: Affiliate network and in-house affiliate program. (What’s the difference between them?)

If you join an affiliate network such as ShareAsale, how will you evaluate the affiliate program?

For example, you have joined ShareAsale and find a clothing store affiliate program.

Check the stats of the clothing store.

You will see the commission ratio is 6%, which means if you refer an order of 100$, you will get 6$.  30 days means the cookies will be valid within 30days after the customer clicks your affiliate link. Let’s see some more important stats below.

EPC (earning per click): the higher, the better. If the EPC of an affiliate program is very low, it may represent low average sale and low conversion rate.

Reversal (rate of voids): the lower, the better. If the reversal rate is high, it may mean the conversion rate is low (for stores use different check out system.), or the return rate of the store is high.

Ave.Sale: the higher, the better. High average sale stands for high average commission, to some degree.

Ave.Comm: the higher, the better. High average commission means high commission if the quantity of orders is fixed.  

After you check all stats, you can decide if you should join it.

If you join an in-house affiliate program, then you should take more factors into consideration.

Differ from affiliate network, there’s no stats displayed (if there is, it is said by the store itself). You must find some stats more reliable.

First, you can check the stores’ stats in Alexa.

There are many stats for reference. Global rank is an indication to say how popular the store is around the whole world. You can also see how popular it is in some countries. It will give you some ideas when you promote their products.

Then, you can go to the store and check the price of their goods and shipping fee. Generally speaking, goods price decides average sale amount. Shipping fee should not be high, it will affect conversion rate.

After you check all stats of the store, you have one more important question, which is payment.

Will they pay? You can search in Google to see how many affiliates are promoting their products. If there are many, then you can trust them.

When will they pay? Some in-house affiliateprogram pay by month, some by week, you can check their information to find it.

How will they pay? PayPal may be the best choice, but if you don’t have a PayPal account, and you can not have a PayPal account, then you should check if they offer other payment methods which are available to you.

There are so many other ways here to evaluate an affiliate program; you may have your idea. Leave a comment here if you have one. I am glad to discuss with you.