The four numbers that tell you whether a program is working
Clicks, conversion, commission and reversals. What each one means, and which of them is lying to you.
An affiliate dashboard will happily show you a big number. Big numbers feel like progress. The four that actually tell you something are less flattering and considerably more useful.
1. Clicks
The least useful number on its own, and the one people quote. Clicks tell you somebody posted and somebody looked. They say nothing about whether the audience was right, and a large click count with no sales is usually a signal that something is wrong rather than that something is working.
2. Click-to-sale conversion
This is the one. An affiliate sending forty clicks that produce three sales is worth more than one sending two thousand that produce four. The first has an audience that trusts them about your subject; the second has reach.
It's also the number that tells you who to give a better rate to, and who to send materials to. Low conversion with real clicks often just means the caption was wrong.
| Pattern | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Few clicks, good conversion | A small, well-matched audience — your best affiliate |
| Many clicks, no sales | Wrong audience, or a bot |
| Steady clicks, sales stopped | The product page changed, or a rate did |
| Sales with no clicks recorded | Attribution lost — in-app browsers, cleared storage |
3. Commission paid, net of reversals
Gross commission is a vanity number. A month with forty referred sales and nine refunds is not a forty-sale month, and the honest figure is what you kept and what you paid on money you kept.
This matters most when you're deciding whether the program is worth continuing. Look at net referred revenue against net commission, over at least two months — one month is noise.
4. Reversal rate by affiliate
A quiet but important one. If one affiliate's referred sales refund at three times the rate of everyone else's, their promotion is over-promising. That's not fraud, it's usually enthusiasm — but it costs you support time and it damages your product's reputation with people who feel misled.
- 1Look at conversion per affiliate, not aggregate clicks.
- 2Compare commission to referred revenue, both net of refunds.
- 3Check reversal rates by person once a quarter.
- 4Act on it: better rate for the converters, better materials for the rest.
Two months minimum. Affiliate programs start slowly because promotion is sporadic, and a single post can distort a first month entirely.
It depends entirely on the traffic. A newsletter link might convert at 5%; a link in a bio might convert at 0.5%. Compare an affiliate to your other affiliates, not to a benchmark.
They see their own clicks, sales and commission. Sharing your view of what good looks like — 'most people here convert around 2%' — helps them improve.
See clicks, sales, revenue and commission per affiliate in one table.
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