The affiliate marketing industry is already worth $17 billion worldwide and is projected to reach $27 billion by 2027. As the market expands, more people are turning to affiliate marketing to earn income without creating their own products or services.
This growth also means greater competition and more affiliate marketing programs you can choose from. And yes, you don’t have to participate in one affiliate marketing program only – instead, you can join several affiliate programs at the same time to diversify risks and ensure all your leads are sold at the highest possible price to companies that are most relevant to their product interest.
Now, how do you choose an affiliate marketing program?
At the very least, you need to evaluate your traffic potential under the program’s conditions and the payout type and size. All this can be done with an affiliate marketing calculator, which can provide a fairly accurate estimate of your earnings based on factors like your product, audience, lead quality, exclusivity, and more.
Read on to learn how an affiliate marketing calculator can help you choose the right affiliate marketing program.
Estimate Your Earnings Before Joining an Affiliate Marketing Program
Affiliate marketing earnings vary dramatically depending on the niche, product, traffic type, payment structure, and other factors. There is no universal “average” that works for everyone, and assumptions rarely reflect real results. However, an affiliate marketing calculator can help you roughly estimate your earnings.
For example, cheaper retail products typically pay less, with commissions starting at a few cents and going up to maybe a dozen dollars for the most expensive retail products. In this case, however, profit comes from volume rather than high payouts.
On the other hand, high-ticket affiliate niches like home services, HVAC, and solar can sometimes pay hundreds of dollars per lead, with the trade-off being stricter qualification criteria and typically lower volume. An affiliate marketing calculator can help you estimate your income potential and, most importantly, whether the affiliate program in question is even worth joining. It’s not out of the question that, if the predicted ROI is slow, you might want to consider other affiliate programs.
How an Affiliate Marketing Calculator Works
There’s no single affiliate marketing calculator that fits all industries and cases. The exact set of KPIs varies widely by niche.
For example, in solar, one of the most important metrics is location because states with more sunlight are typically more profitable for solar affiliates. The same goes for HVAC: weather conditions and seasonality greatly impact the demand.
For home services, HVAC, and solar, KPIs usually include:
- Estimated number of leads you can generate
- Payout per lead
- Click-through rate
- Traffic quality (In some programs, advertisers adjust payouts depending on how well leads match their criteria)
- Conversion rate (for pay-per-sale affiliate programs)
- Average order value (for pay-per-sale affiliate programs)
- Recurring revenues (for programs that provide recurring payouts, like programs with subscription-based products or long-term contracts)
These KPIs can vary by program, so if the program itself doesn’t have a calculator, it might be worth finding one that offers a similar set of criteria. That said, if you’re struggling to find the exact type of calculator you need, evaluating your affiliate marketing income based on basic metrics might still be a good starting point.
Factors That Influence Affiliate Earnings
Two similar publishers in the same niche can achieve completely different ROI, depending on their traffic type and quality, even if they submit the same number of leads to the same advertiser.
For example, phone calls are typically more expensive than leads, albeit harder to generate. Likewise, exclusive leads may be up to ten times more expensive than shared leads, albeit harder to generate. If you’re willing to estimate your income accurately, you need an affiliate marketing calculator that factors in these nuances.
Otherwise, the evaluation won’t be accurate, and the only way to bring it closer to reality would be through manual re-evaluation and adjustments, which may or may not be accurate, depending on your experience and predictive capabilities.
Here are some more factors that an affiliate marketing calculator might not account for:
- Seasonality: for example, in plumbing, the number of leads generated in autumn, winter, and spring is likely to be higher than in summer. So if you’re making an estimate during the summer months, you may need to factor in the potential increase in traffic during the rest of the year.
- Affiliate marketing skills: If you’re new to affiliate marketing, chances are you are going to miss some important things in both your income estimation and marketing itself. It goes without saying that expert affiliate marketers earn more under the same conditions than beginners.
- Competition level: High competition can limit earnings by driving down conversion rates across the board, and it’s not always possible to predict significant changes in competition. On the other hand, if competition decreases, which may sometimes happen, your earnings are likely to grow.
In general, if you really want to be accurate with your affiliate marketing earnings estimation, it would be reasonable to calculate an average for the entire marketing cycle, whether it lasts a year, a quarter, a month, or shorter. Factoring in all potential lows and ups will allow you to make a fair average ROI estimate and approach affiliate marketing with a clear long-term vision.
Profitise
Profitise’s affiliate marketing calculator is designed for publishers that run pay-per-lead and pay-per-call programs. Here, advertisers pay for a lead or a qualified call, not for a sale or recurring subscription.
It simplifies estimation, since affiliates need to enter only core KPIs (key performance indicators), such as the average monthly number of leads and the payout per prospect. In such programs, traffic volume itself is less critical than the final number of approved leads. As long as a publisher can consistently generate qualified prospects, the traffic volume becomes secondary.
Since pay-per-lead campaigns rarely achieve 100% approval, the Profitise team includes an approval rate field. This allows publishers to model realistic outcomes rather than assume every lead will be validated.
Affiliates who run paid ads can factor it into the calculations by adding typical ad spend. This field is optional: leaving it at 0 disables ROI calculations, making the tool useful for both publishers who prefer paid ads and those who rely on organic traffic.
Getreditus
Getreditus’ affiliate marketing calculator is designed for SaaS companies and affiliates who want to estimate their potential earnings by promoting software products with recurring payments.
It’s split into two different calculators, so you can choose the one that fits your role. In the advertiser-oriented version, the tool helps merchants estimate their monthly revenue by examining the number of affiliates, the average number of paid referrals per partner, average revenue per customer, and approximate commissions.
Getreditus’ affiliate-focused calculator allows you to estimate revenue based on product pricing, commission rate, payout structure, referral volume, and commission duration. Instead of guessing returns from a single sale, you can see how recurring commissions stack up over time when promoting subscription-based products.
Over The Top SEO
The affiliate marketing calculator from Over the Top SEO focuses on traffic-based revenue estimation. Unlike calculators built around affiliates or programs, it starts from a publisher’s core asset, website traffic, helping affiliates estimate how traffic translates into daily, monthly, and yearly income.
By plugging in visitors, pageviews, CTR, conversion rate, and commission size, and optionally CPM for display ads, you get a rough income projection without overcomplicating the math. At the same time, the calculator doesn’t assume a specific niche or network, making it suitable for any industry.
Refersion
Referison’s affiliate calculator is made for brands evaluating the financial impact of running an affiliate program. This tool focuses on orders, commissions, and profitability, making it especially relevant for e-commerce and DTC businesses.
To use the calculator, advertisers must enter a few core metrics: average order value, expected monthly affiliate orders, and affiliate commission rate. Based on these inputs, Refersion evaluates affiliate-generated revenue, total commission costs, net profit, and ROI.
The ROI model reflects Refersion’s Enterprise plan, so platform fees are included in the calculations. As a result, the numbers are closer to what brands actually spend if they use this platform.
AffiliateWP Value Calculator
Advertisers use the AffiliateWP value calculator to pressure-test an affiliate program before committing budget. It shows how changes in commissions, affiliate volume, or order value affect long-term revenue and ROI.
To estimate their net revenue and ROI, advertisers must enter the number of current affiliates, the average number of new affiliates per month, the typical monthly sales per affiliate, the commission rate, the average order value, and the monthly affiliate marketing budget. Once you enter these numbers, the affiliate marketing calculator provides estimated gross revenue, commission payouts, marketing costs, net revenue, and ROI.
Levanta
Levanta’s affiliate marketing calculator is built specifically for Amazon sellers, with a strong focus on forecasting Prime Day performance. Levanta uses benchmark data from thousands of Amazon brands that have successfully leveraged affiliate marketing.
To obtain projections, sellers submit key business details, such as product category, average order value (AOV), the commission rate, and the marketplaces where they sell.
Beware that you won’t get instant results with this affiliate marketing calculator. Once you submit the details, Levanta’s experts will review them and email you a revenue projection report within 1–2 business days.
Partners Livechat
The Commission Calculator by LiveChat (Text) is a versatile tool that helps users quickly calculate earnings across different commission models. While it’s positioned for affiliates, this tool can help anyone working with performance-based payouts.
In fact, there are multiple small calculators, each suited to a different payment model: from flat-rate and percentage-based to tiered, recurring, and even bonus-based. Each model includes examples, making it easy to understand how earnings are calculated in real-world scenarios.
Influencer MarketingHub Affiliate Income Calculator
Influencer MarketingHub provides a free affiliate marketing calculator for publishers who want a quick estimate of how their site performance translates into revenue. Rather than focusing on program-specific payouts or advertiser metrics, this tool highlights the relationship between site traffic and affiliate income.
Publishers need to enter their approximate daily or monthly visitor count, pageviews, typical click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and commission fee. Using this info, the calculator estimates the cost per 1000 pageviews and the daily, monthly, and yearly income.
This calculator helps you to see how improvements in traffic, CTR, or conversions could boost overall earnings. That’s why it’s great for early-stage planning or comparing different traffic scenarios before diving deeper into niche-specific affiliate income modelling.
Rewardful
Rewardful’s affiliate ROI calculator is designed for SaaS companies that want to evaluate whether launching or scaling an affiliate program makes financial sense. Here, advertisers need to enter core inputs such as average revenue per new customer, affiliate commission rate, monthly affiliate traffic, visitor-to-customer conversion rate, and any additional program costs such as tools, incentives, or affiliate manager time.
Based on these numbers, the affiliate marketing calculator instantly estimates monthly customers and revenue, commission spend, payout per sale, CAC (customer acquisition cost), and overall affiliate ROI.
Monetize Your Traffic with Profitise
Profitise is a leading insurance, home services, and solar affiliate network for affiliates selling high-quality web leads and phone calls. With hundreds of businesses already on board and more to come, Profitise is the go-to place to monetize your traffic.
With Profitise, you get:
- Embeddable JavaScript forms to generate qualified insurance and solar leads
- Large lead market to sell your traffic instantly
- High price for your web and call leads
- Free assistance from your affiliate manager
Sell leads with Profitise as an affiliate.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the affiliate marketing earning potential for a novice?
For beginners, earnings are usually modest at first. It can take weeks or even months to earn just a few dollars, and it’s totally fine. But once you establish a reputation, it becomes easier to scale up and turn your affiliate efforts into an actual income stream.
How to calculate affiliate marketing earnings per month?
Multiply your expected traffic, potential conversion rate, and payout per lead or sale. While it won’t give you precise results, it will be enough to roughly estimate results. Don’t forget to adjust your calculations for lead quality and seasonality.
Why do you need to estimate your affiliate marketing earnings?
It helps you to plan your strategy, set realistic goals, and compare programs. It also prevents you from wasting time on efforts that won’t give you a desirable ROI.
