The funnel is four multiplications
Monthly visitors times the click-through rate gives clicks, clicks times the purchase conversion rate gives sales, sales times the average order value gives the gross value of those orders, and the commission rate takes your share of that gross.
At the defaults - 50,000 visitors, a 2% click-through, a 3% conversion, a $75 basket and a 10% commission - that works out to 1,000 clicks, 30 sales, $2,250 of orders and $225 for you. Every line in that chain is printed in the table, so the arithmetic can be checked at any stage instead of only at the end.
Because each stage multiplies the next one, a zero anywhere cancels the whole payout: traffic that never clicks buys nothing, and clicks that never convert earn nothing, however large the number at the top of the funnel looks.
Every stage is a separate lever
Raising traffic is the slowest and most expensive lever, because it only feeds the top of the funnel. Improving the click-through or the conversion rate multiplies the traffic you already have, and often costs an afternoon of headline, page-structure and recommendation copy rather than a new content program.
The page prices that directly. One extra point of click-through on the default traffic is 500 more clicks, 15 more sales and about $112.50 a month, all of it from visitors who were already arriving before anything changed.
That per-stage view is the reason the table separates the lines: effort belongs where the multiplication is weakest, not where the dashboard is loudest. A page with strong traffic and a flat click-through will not be fixed by buying more traffic.
Honest expectations beat hopeful ones
A click-through rate of 1% to 3% and a purchase conversion of 1% to 5% are ordinary figures, and the low single digits are the right baseline for a plan. They vary enormously by product and audience, which is exactly why a modest assumption is the safer starting point.
Put a thin commission on top and a large traffic number can produce a small check. Two hundred thousand visitors at a 1% click-through, a 1% conversion, a $40 basket and a 5% commission comes to $40 a month.
That is the value of walking the funnel on this page: it exposes the gap between the audience you attract and the money you keep, before months are spent growing a number that was never going to pay. Every stage is visible, so the weakest one is named rather than averaged away.
High ticket, low volume is still real money
Nothing in the funnel demands mass traffic. Thirty thousand visitors at a 3% click-through is 900 clicks; a 2% conversion is 18 sales; at a $300 order and a 15% commission that is $810 a month, or about three cents per visitor.
The calculator treats every stage as a number, so a narrow but well-matched audience can out-earn a generic one that multiplies badly. Matching the offer to the audience lifts the two middle rates at once, and both are yours to measure from your own merchant dashboard and analytics.
What the page cannot see is where credit lands. Cookie windows and multi-touch attribution rules can split a sale away from your link, so read the result as an upper bound on the commission rather than a promise of it, and compare it against the payouts your program actually reports.
What one visitor is worth
Dividing the commission by the traffic gives a figure that survives comparison with anything else: at the defaults, 50,000 visitors and $225 a month is $0.0045 a visitor, or $4.50 per thousand. That is the number a paid-traffic budget has to beat, and the number that makes two programs comparable at last.
It also ranks the two middle rates honestly. One extra point of click-through takes 2% to 3%, a 50% jump, and pays $337.50; one extra point of conversion takes 3% to 4%, a 33% jump, and pays $300. A point is not a proportion, so measure each rate against the traffic you actually have rather than the traffic you hope for.
Recompute it whenever a rate moves, and log the figure: an EPC of $4.50 at 3% conversion becomes a different number at 2%, and the only way to see that is to hold the traffic steady, change one rate at a time, and compare like with like. Two weeks of steady traffic says more than a single good day.
Danfio