When an affiliate campaign loses money, the usual suspect is conversion rate: wrong traffic, weak landing page, poor ad. In our campaigns the real reason was more often decided before the first click: the commission per order was too small for any conversion rate to save it.
A fashion boutique we ran in August 2026:
Each click was worth about $0.38 and cost $0.49. Return on ad spend was 0.77×: every dollar of ads came back as 77 cents. The sample was small (a few dollars of spend), but the maths doesn't need a large sample. At that price per click, even a perfect campaign can't make a profit.
These are programmes where we had both ad spend and tracked commission in 2026. Brands are not named; they are hand-picked campaigns, and some rows are small samples.
| Programme type | Commission / order | Conversion | Return on ad spend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audio electronics | ~$15 | 8% | 4.4× |
| Kids' activity products | ~$8 | ~13% | 3.6× |
| Paint-by-number kits | $7.02 | 33% (5 of 15) | 3.7× |
| Wellness products | $10 | not measured | ~3× |
| Wellness products | $5.35 | not measured | ~2× |
| Printed apparel | $3.70 | 20% | 1.5× |
| Fashion boutique (above) | $2.27 | 18% | 0.77× |
Read it from top to bottom: return on ad spend falls with commission per order much more steadily than it moves with conversion rate. The two highest conversion rates on the list, 20% and 18%, sit next to the two weakest returns.
A click is worth commission per order × conversion rate. Conversion rate is usually somewhere between 5% and 20%, so it can multiply your result by about four. Commission per order runs from about $1 to $20 or more, which is twenty times. The bigger range decides the outcome.
Brand-name clicks also have a floor price. If a click costs $0.30 and your commission is $2, you need 15% of clicks to convert just to break even, before any margin.
If commission is under 5%, skip paid search unless the average order is over $300.
Look at commission per order in dollars first. Then check that the click price for your keywords is below half of what a click is worth: that's the ceiling we explain in how to set a max CPC for an affiliate coupon campaign.
Once commission per order is healthy, conversion rate is what turns a 2× campaign into a 5× one. Send coupon-intent searches to a page that answers "is there a working code?" honestly, and only bid on keywords that show buying intent. But get commission per order right first.
AffWorth shows commission per order, the break-even bid and the real brand-keyword bid for each programme. 100 rows a day are free, no account needed.
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