Affiliate Commission Calculator

Affiliate commission estimates what a set of monthly clicks turns into, given a conversion rate, an average order value and the merchant’s commission percentage. The headline is commission per month; earnings per click, shown alongside it, is the figure that compares one programme against another, because click volume varies enormously between traffic sources.

There is a clean reason for that. Earnings per click is the conversion rate multiplied by the average order value multiplied by the commission rate, and click volume cancels out of it entirely. Doubling monthly clicks from 20,000 to 40,000 doubles commission from 3,200 to 6,400 while leaving earnings per click at 0.16 exactly. That splits the problem in two: earnings per click measures the programme, and click volume measures the traffic. Improving one says nothing about the other.

Cookie windows decide how long a click stays attributed, and they vary widely by merchant. Amazon’s programme policies define the attribution session as ending at whichever comes first: 24 hours after the click, or the moment the customer places an order. Many niche merchants run 30 to 60 days and some go to a year on high-value items. The window is a reference field here rather than a calculation input, because whatever conversion rate has been measured from a live programme already reflects the window that programme runs. One further point sits outside the arithmetic: affiliate links have to be disclosed, and consumer-protection rules list paid promotion presented as ordinary editorial content among the practices treated as always unfair.

Run it with sensible defaults

Using 20,000 monthly clicks, a 2% conversion rate, an 80 average order value and a 10% commission rate, the calculator returns 400 conversions, 32,000 of merchant revenue, 3,200 of commission a month and 38,400 a year. Earnings per click work out at 0.16.

The three programme inputs are interchangeable in the arithmetic, which is easy to miss. Doubling the conversion rate to 4%, doubling the order value to 160, or doubling the commission rate to 20% each produce the same 6,400 a month and the same 0.32 per click. A programme paying 3% on an 80 order at 2% conversion returns 0.05 per click; one paying 25% on a 500 order at 1% conversion returns 1.25, twenty-five times more from a lower conversion rate.

That 0.16 is also the most a click can be worth to buy. Paid traffic breaks even when the cost per click equals earnings per click, so on these figures anything above 0.16 loses money on every visit regardless of how many convert.

The levers in this calculation

All four calculation inputs multiply together, so each moves the headline proportionally: a 1% change in clicks, conversion rate, order value or commission rate changes monthly commission by about 1%. Nothing in the model weights one above another.

Earnings per click behaves differently, and this is the useful asymmetry. Clicks are the only input that leaves it unchanged, because volume cancels out of a per-click figure. The other three set it. Cookie window changes nothing at all: 1 day, 30 days and 365 days all return the same 3,200 and the same 0.16, which is why it sits on the page as context for interpreting a measured conversion rate rather than as a lever.

How the math works

Conversions are monthly clicks multiplied by the conversion rate as a decimal. Merchant revenue is conversions multiplied by the average order value. Commission is that revenue multiplied by the commission rate as a decimal, the annual figure is twelve times the monthly one, and earnings per click is commission divided by clicks.

Substituting through gives the identity behind the whole page: earnings per click equals the conversion rate times the average order value times the commission rate, with clicks absent. Two rearrangements follow from it. The order value a programme needs to reach a target per-click figure is that target divided by the conversion rate and the commission rate. And since paid traffic breaks even where cost per click meets earnings per click, that same expression sets the highest cost per click a programme can sustain.