The affiliate metrics glossary: clicks, conversions, EPC, and revenue

Affiliate reporting is only as trustworthy as the definitions behind it. When two dashboards disagree, it is almost always because they count the same word differently. This glossary defines every metric LimeliJourney uses, so numbers reconcile across every report and every answer the assistant gives you.

Traffic metrics

Clicks are the number of times someone followed a tracking link. Bot traffic and duplicate clicks are excluded from reporting by default, so this reflects real visits. You can re-include either with a toggle when you want the raw count.

Duplicate click is a repeat click on the same tracking link, by the same visitor, within the offer's throwout period (24 hours unless the offer sets its own). The repeat is still recorded and still redirects normally; it is simply flagged and left out of click counts.

Bot click is a click whose browser identifies as an automated agent, such as a crawler, a link previewer, or a monitoring tool. It is flagged at click time and excluded from report counts.

Unique visitors counts clicks once per visitor, so repeated clicking by the same person does not inflate the number. The gap between clicks and unique visitors tells you how often the same people return, or how noisy a source is.

Conversions versus events

Conversions are the payable outcomes that drive your counts and totals: a sale, a funded account, a qualified signup, whatever your funnel calls them.

Events are intermediate actions like a registration step or an app open. They are still recorded, attributed, and paid on their own terms; they just never inflate your conversion count or conversion rate. There are no separate "leads" or "investments" metrics: a word like "lead" is simply an event that either counts as a conversion or does not, according to how the advertiser's catalog defines it.

Conversion rate is conversions divided by clicks. A 2% rate means two conversions per hundred clicks. Events never count toward it.

Conversion lag is how long a click takes to become a conversion. Reports show two figures per stage: the median (half of conversions happen faster) and the p90 (nine in ten happen faster). A p90 far above the median means a long tail of slow converters, and if it approaches the offer's attribution window, late conversions may be arriving unattributed.

Money metrics

Revenue (received) is what the advertiser pays you for the conversions. This is your top line.

Payout is what you owe the affiliate for those same conversions.

Profit is revenue minus payout: what is left for you. It is the number that tells you whether a source is worth scaling.

Margin is profit as a percentage of revenue. A source with $100 revenue and $60 payout has $40 profit and a 40% margin.

EPC (earnings per click) is revenue divided by clicks. EPC is the single most useful comparison metric in affiliate marketing, because it normalizes sources of wildly different volume: it lets you compare a 100-click affiliate against a 10,000-click one fairly.

Average sale is revenue divided by conversions. A falling average sale with steady conversions means smaller orders, not fewer of them.

Conversion status

Every conversion carries a status. Confirmed is the normal counting state, and the only one that bills. Pending means the conversion is awaiting review: it shows in reports and roll-ups but is not billed yet. Rejected conversions stay visible at the row level but are excluded from performance and never bill.

Unattributed conversions

Storage is not attribution. A conversion is only attributed when it matches a prior click or carries an explicit affiliate ID on the pixel. A conversion that resolves no affiliate at all is recorded as unattributed, with revenue and payout set to zero, and it is excluded from every count and total. If a large share of your conversions is unattributed, the usual fix is to make sure your pixel passes the click ID, or to extend the offer's attribution window.

The metrics are only half the story; the definitions are what make them comparable. Want to see these numbers computed on your own program? Book a demo and we will walk your reports with you.