What are Affiliate Commissions?

Affiliate commissions are not regular wages that you get paid with every paycheck but rather a bonus that gets paid to you when you meet these targets. To be more precise, an affiliate commission is a percentage that affiliates earn when they drive traffic or sales to advertisers’ products. Altogether at the end of the month, all commissions amount to a publisher’s salary. The average affiliate commission rate varies greatly depending on an affiliate vertical and a product type, but it is common for the commissions to vary between 5 and 30%.

You can set up your affiliate program with different types of commissions, but the bottom line is whether you pay for predetermined actions or you share a part of the derived revenue. To that end, affiliate commissions can be primarily divided into CPA, or cost per action, and RevShave (Revenue Share). 

​​CPA Commission

If you google what CPA stands for, you will always find two transcriptions: Cost-Per-Action and Cost-Per-Acquisition. Both of them are actively used in affiliate marketing. However, the baseline is Cost-Per-Action. Under the CPA scheme, affiliates agree to a fixed amount or percentage of an action defined in the affiliate program guidelines of a particular advertiser. 

RevShare Commissions

In comparison to CPA, the RevShare commission model implies sharing a percentage of the revenue brought by the paying visitors. The difference in the percentages paid under the CPA scheme is that in RevShare this payment doesn’t have a one-time nature. Under RevShare, affiliates can get a percentage from the buyers they brought during their entire lifetime.