Partner Federation — last updated September 2026
Metrics That Matter: A Practical Guide to Reading Your Partner Dashboard
Most partner dashboards throw a lot of numbers at you — clicks, signups, FTDs, active clients, commission, sometimes a dozen more. Only a handful of those numbers actually change what you should do next. This page pulls together the ones that matter most — conversion rate, EPC, CAC, LTV, and churn — and, more importantly, what to actually do when each one moves.
This isn’t a new set of concepts. CAC and LTV and churn already have their own glossary entries. What’s missing on the site until now is how they connect to each other and to the two numbers every dashboard shows by default — clicks and conversion rate — in the order you’d actually check them day to day.
On this page:
Clicks & conversion rate
Clicks are the easiest number on any dashboard to look at and the least useful one on its own — a spike in clicks with no matching spike in qualified clients tells you traffic quality changed, not that anything is going well. Before conversion rate even comes into it, CTR (Click-Through Rate) tells you whether the link itself is earning clicks in the first place — a distinct, earlier-funnel question worth checking before assuming a problem is downstream. Conversion rate (qualified clients ÷ clicks, however “qualified” is defined for that broker’s program — a deposit, a KYC pass, a minimum trade count) is what actually tells you whether the traffic you’re sending is any good.
There’s no universal “good” conversion rate to benchmark against — it depends heavily on the traffic source, the geo, the broker’s own onboarding friction, and how tightly “qualified” is defined in that specific program — see the Conversion Funnel page for how each stage between click and active trader compounds. The CPA Affiliates page’s own worked example uses a 2% click-to-qualified-client conversion rate for a paid-social campaign purely as an illustration of the mechanics, not as a target to hit.
What matters practically: if conversion rate drops on one specific traffic source or campaign, the problem is almost always on your side — targeting drift, ad creative fatigue, a landing page issue. If conversion rate drops broker-wide, across every source you send to that broker at the same time, that’s much more likely to be a broker-side issue (an onboarding change, a KYC bottleneck, a platform problem) worth raising with your account manager rather than something to fix in your own campaigns. It also pays to check the calendar before either conclusion — see Seasonality in Partner Income for how known quiet periods can look like a broken funnel when they aren’t.
The same isolate-first logic applies if you’re running a Master IB network — one underperforming Sub-IB is usually just that Sub-IB, while a drop across the whole network points somewhere broader. See Scaling Into a Master IB for watching network-level metrics as it grows.
EPC (Earnings Per Click)
EPC (Earnings Per Click) is total commission earned divided by total clicks sent, over a given period. It’s the one number on this page that isn’t already a glossary term on the site, because it’s less a concept to define than a calculation most partners have to run themselves — dashboards report clicks, conversions, and commission separately, but rarely do the division for you.
Formula: EPC = Total commission earned ÷ Total clicks sent
EPC earns its place on this list because it’s the only number here that works as a fair comparison across completely different payout models. A CPA campaign, a revenue share campaign, and a lot rebate campaign each pay out on a different basis and a different schedule — comparing their raw conversion rates or raw commission totals tells you very little about which one is actually the better use of your traffic. EPC nets all of that down to one comparable figure: dollars earned per click, full stop.
A purely illustrative example (not a benchmark): Campaign A sends 5,000 clicks and earns $2,500 in commission that month — an EPC of $0.50. Campaign B sends 2,000 clicks and earns $1,800 — an EPC of $0.90. Campaign B wins on EPC despite far fewer clicks, and quite possibly despite a lower raw conversion rate too, if its converting clients are worth more individually (a higher CPA tier, or clients with stronger revenue share potential). This is exactly the kind of comparison conversion rate alone can’t make, since it says nothing about how much each conversion is actually worth.
The practical use: when deciding where to put more budget or more content effort, rank campaigns and traffic sources by EPC first, not by clicks or conversions in isolation.
CAC
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is total acquisition spend divided by the number of paying clients acquired — the full definition and formula are on its glossary page. What belongs here is how it fits alongside EPC on an actual dashboard-reading routine.
No partner dashboard reports CAC directly, because the broker’s dashboard only sees what happens after a click arrives — it has no visibility into what that click cost you to generate. CAC has to be tracked on your own side, against your own ad spend or content cost, then set next to what the dashboard reports back per qualified client.
This is where EPC and CAC meet: EPC tells you what a click is worth in commission; CAC tells you what a click costs to acquire in the first place. When your cost per click on a channel starts exceeding that channel’s EPC, you’re losing money on that channel regardless of how attractive the broker’s headline payout rate looks. The CAC glossary page’s own example makes this concrete: a $400 CPA payout against $900 in ad spend for one qualified client is a loss on that conversion, however good the $400 figure looks in isolation.
LTV
LTV (Lifetime Value) is the total revenue or commission a referred client generates over the entire time they keep trading — again, full definition on its glossary page. The practical dashboard habit worth building: look at LTV by cohort (clients referred in a given month, tracked forward), not as a single running number, and don’t judge a slow month for revenue share or spread share purely on that month’s payout.
A revenue share partner’s commission in any given month is really a trailing signal of decisions made months earlier — which clients were referred, how well they were qualified, what they were told to expect. A quiet month can simply mean a recent cohort hasn’t hit its stride yet, not that something is wrong. The standard way to judge whether acquisition spend on a given source is actually worth it is the LTV:CAC ratio (see the LTV glossary page) — a client with high LTV justifies a much higher CAC than one who deposits once and disappears.
Churn
Churn is the rate at which referred clients stop trading and go inactive. It’s the number that turns a promising LTV projection into a disappointing one, and it’s usually the earliest warning sign a dashboard gives you — often weeks before conversion rate or EPC visibly move, because it takes a cohort some months to reveal whether it’s actually going to stick around.
The practical habit: track churn by cohort and by traffic source, not just as one aggregate number for the whole book of referred clients. A rising churn rate concentrated in one source usually means a targeting or expectation-setting problem specific to that source (clients arriving without a real intent to trade, or being sold on unrealistic expectations); a churn rate rising across every source at once is more likely a broker-side issue — platform problems, a bad run of market conditions, a support or execution complaint pattern — worth raising rather than fixing on the marketing side.
How the numbers connect
Read in order, these five numbers describe one funnel: clicks arrive, conversion rate turns some of them into qualified clients, EPC nets the resulting commission back down to a per-click figure so campaigns can be compared fairly, CAC tells you what generating those clicks actually cost you, LTV tells you what a qualified client is worth once you follow them forward in time, and churn is what shortens or extends that LTV.
They also don’t all need checking on the same schedule. Conversion rate and EPC are worth checking campaign-by-campaign, as often as you review spend — they’re immediate and reflect what’s happening right now. CAC is worth recalculating whenever you’re evaluating a new traffic source or considering scaling an existing one. LTV and churn are cohort numbers and move slowly by nature — checking them monthly or quarterly, by cohort, gives a far more honest picture than watching them daily, which mostly just shows noise.
FAQ
What’s a good EPC?
There’s no universal good EPC — it depends entirely on the payout model, the niche, and the traffic source, and even varies month to month for the same campaign as market conditions change. The useful comparison is always internal: rank your own campaigns and traffic sources against each other, not against a number from outside your own dashboard.
Why doesn’t my dashboard just show me EPC?
Most partner dashboards report clicks, conversions, and commission as separate line items rather than doing the division for you. Calculating EPC yourself — even in a simple spreadsheet, dividing total commission by total clicks for the same period — is usually the fastest way to get it.
Is a rising CAC always a bad sign?
Not necessarily — a rising CAC on a channel that’s also producing clients with higher LTV can still be a good trade. The number that actually tells you whether it’s a problem is the LTV:CAC ratio, not CAC in isolation.
How do I calculate churn if my dashboard doesn’t report it directly?
Take the number of active clients at the start of a period, and count how many of them are no longer active by the end of it. Divide the second number by the first to get a churn rate for that period. Doing this by cohort (clients who joined in the same month) rather than for your whole client base at once gives a much clearer signal.
Should I optimize for conversion rate or for EPC?
EPC, when the two disagree. A campaign with a lower conversion rate can still have a higher EPC if the clients it does convert are worth more — a higher CPA tier, or stronger long-term trading activity under revenue share. Conversion rate on its own says nothing about how much a conversion is actually worth.
Do these metrics apply the same way to every partnership model?
The mechanics are the same, but the numbers that matter most shift by model. CPA and CPL partners live and die mostly by conversion rate, EPC, and CAC, since the payout is fixed once a conversion happens. Revenue share, spread share, and lot rebate partners need to weight LTV and churn more heavily, since their payout is entirely contingent on how long and how actively a client keeps trading.
Related Terms
CAC · LTV · Churn · Revenue Share · Getting Paid · Tracking & Attribution · Marketing-Channels Playbook · Negotiating Your Rate