A 75% commission sounds better than a 50% commission.
Until the 50% offer makes you more money.
Commission percentage is one of the easiest numbers for affiliates to compare, which is probably why vendors put it front and center when recruiting them. But experienced affiliates know that the highest commission percentage does not necessarily mean the most profitable promotion.
What matters is what happens when you actually send traffic.
How Should Affiliates Choose Which Products to Promote?
Affiliates should evaluate the entire economics of an offer, not just the commission percentage. Conversion rate, earnings per click, average order value, refunds, customer experience, vendor history and audience fit can all have a bigger impact on the success of a promotion than whether the commission is 50%, 60% or 75%.
A higher percentage of a poorly converting offer is still a poorly converting offer.
And a promotion that makes money today but creates refunds, complaints or distrust with your audience can become very expensive in ways that never appear in the initial commission report.
Commission Percentage Doesn’t Tell You What You Will Earn
Consider two $100 products.
Product A pays a 75% commission but converts 1% of the traffic you send.
Product B pays a 50% commission and converts 3%.
Send 1,000 qualified visitors to each and the math looks very different.
Product A generates roughly 10 sales and $750 in commissions.
Product B generates roughly 30 sales and $1,500 in commissions.
The lower commission percentage produced twice the revenue.
Obviously, real promotions have more variables than a simple example like this. There may be upsells, recurring commissions, different average order values and different refund behavior.
That’s exactly the point.
Commission percentage by itself tells you almost nothing about how valuable an offer will actually be to promote.
EPC Gives You More Information, But It Still Isn’t the Whole Answer
Earnings per click, or EPC, helps affiliates compare what traffic has actually generated. That’s much more useful than looking at commission percentage alone.
But EPC still needs context.
An offer with a strong EPC based on a small amount of traffic may behave very differently once larger affiliates start promoting it. A recently launched product may not yet have enough data to tell you much. And an impressive EPC before refunds settle can look less impressive several weeks later.
Affiliates should look at EPC alongside order form conversion rate, traffic volume, average order value and refund behavior, not as a standalone score that determines whether an offer is good.
Numbers become useful when you understand what is behind them.
Audience Fit Can Beat Every Number on the Leaderboard
One of the biggest mistakes affiliates make is assuming that because an offer performs well for someone else, it will perform well for them.
It might not.
An affiliate with an audience of experienced software buyers may perform extremely well with an advanced automation product. The exact same offer sent to an audience of beginners may fall flat.
Another offer may have lower marketplace-wide metrics but match that audience perfectly and substantially outperform it.
The best affiliate doesn’t ask only, “How well is this product converting?”
They ask, “How well is this product likely to convert for my audience?”
That distinction matters.
Your list is not generic traffic. Your audience has expectations, interests, purchasing habits and a relationship with you. The strongest promotions happen when the product actually fits them.
Look Beyond the Front-End Sale
Affiliates should also understand the rest of the funnel before deciding what an offer is worth.
What happens after the first purchase? Are there upsells? Is there recurring revenue? Does the funnel increase average order value without creating a bad customer experience? Are commissions paid throughout the funnel or only on the front-end product?
A $27 front-end product with a strong converting funnel can be worth considerably more than a $97 product with nowhere else for the customer to go.
But there is another side to that.
A funnel can also become too aggressive.
If customers feel like they have to fight their way through six upsells to get what they thought they already purchased, you may make more money on the first promotion and lose trust with the people you sent there.
A good funnel increases customer value. It shouldn’t make the customer regret clicking your link.
Refund Rate Changes the Real Economics of an Offer
The commission displayed when the sale happens isn’t necessarily the commission you ultimately keep.
Refunds matter.
If Offer A generates $5,000 in commissions but later gives back $1,500 through refunds, while Offer B generates $4,500 and retains nearly all of it, the second promotion may have been far more valuable.
And the cost isn’t only financial.
When customers are unhappy with something you recommended, they often come back to you.
That means support emails, complaints and, more importantly, damage to the trust you’ve built with your audience.
As we covered in Part 1 of this series, a promotion can be profitable and still not be worth repeating.
Check the Vendor, Not Just the Product
A strong sales page can be built quickly.
A strong reputation takes longer.
Before sending meaningful traffic to a vendor, look at their history. What happened to the products they launched six months ago or a year ago? Are they still available? Are customers still being supported? Does the vendor have a history of delivering what was promised?
If every previous launch has disappeared and the vendor is already on to the next one, a high commission rate shouldn’t make that history irrelevant.
You’re not simply choosing a product.
You’re choosing whose business you’re willing to put in front of your audience.
Experienced affiliates understand that a vendor’s track record is part of the offer.
Your Reputation Has an Acquisition Cost Too
Affiliates often calculate the value of their traffic but forget to calculate the value of their credibility.
Building an audience that opens your emails, clicks your links and trusts your recommendations takes time and money.
Every promotion borrows from that trust.
If you consistently recommend good products, people are more likely to pay attention the next time you email them. Recommend enough bad ones and eventually even a great offer becomes harder to sell.
That means the highest-paying promotion today may not be the highest-value decision for your business.
There will always be another product to promote.
Rebuilding an audience that stopped trusting you is much harder.
What Should Affiliates Look at Before Promoting an Offer?
Before choosing an affiliate offer, look at the whole picture:
- Conversion rate: Are people who reach the order form actually buying?
- EPC: What has traffic actually earned?
- Average order value: What is each customer worth across the funnel?
- Refund and dispute behavior: Are those commissions likely to stick?
- Funnel structure: What experience are you sending your audience into?
- Audience fit: Does the offer actually make sense for the people who trust you?
- Vendor history: Does this person continue supporting the products they sell?
- Customer experience: Will you be comfortable having your name attached to the recommendation afterward?
No single number answers all of those questions.
That’s why smart affiliates don’t simply sort a marketplace by commission percentage and start mailing from the top.
The Best Offer Isn’t Always the One Paying the Most
High commissions are great.
Nobody is arguing for getting paid less.
But the goal isn’t to earn the largest percentage of a sale. The goal is to generate the most profitable, repeatable revenue from an audience that still trusts you when the promotion is over.
Sometimes the 75% offer will absolutely be the right choice.
Sometimes 50% will make you considerably more money.
And sometimes the smartest decision is not to promote either one.
The percentage is just one number.
Smart affiliates choose the business behind the number.
This is Part 2 of JVZoo’s series on what makes affiliates keep promoting. Read Part 1: Why Affiliates Stop Promoting Your Product, Even When It Converts.
Next in the series: Your Refund Rate Is Telling Your Affiliates More Than You Think.
