Affiliate Marketing Glossary

Ad ware: It is an unnecessary and unethical practice where in personal information on a computer can be had while installing a shareware.

Advertiser: Any person or business who wants to advertise or promote products and/ or services.

Affiliate: A Web site owner who promotes the merchants’ or advertisers’ products or services.When a lead or sale takes place, the affiliate will earn commission. Affiliates  can drive traffic to their website by different means, the most common method is by using the website content,another method is by paid traffic (see below)

Affiliate Fraud:  Fraudulent activity by an affiliate designed to generate illegal revenue by having or trying to get commisions which are not legitimate. This can include using automated scripts to falsely create leads or clicks, or getting humans to produce the same.

Affiliate Link:  A website link containing code which tracks the visitors sent to a merchants site by an affiliate. Each affiliate link contains a unique id specific to an that affiliate and will record sales, visitors, and impressions generated allowing the merchant to track progress. 

Affiliate Manager:  A person dedicated to managing the accounts of affiliates.

Affiliate Network:  An agency that provides a third party service between affiliate and merchants and will provide tracking, reporting and payment services. They allow affiliates access to a large variety of merchants.

Autoresponder: An email robot that sends replies automatically, without human intervention. For example, if you had a page of marketing information you want to send out, you could ask visitors to send an email to "info@yourname.com," the address of your autoresponder. The autoresponder will automatically email the person your information. Many autoresponders will, at the same time, send an email to you, listing the visitor's address.

Click through:  It is the successful landing on the web page after clicking on a link. The click through ratio  refers to the ratio of the number of impressions to the number of click made on the link.

Commission: The payment for affiliates for sales generated by their traffic to the Merchants site, normally based on percentage of sales.

Commission Reversal: Commission deducted from the affiliate in the event the purchaser returns the goods, declined credit card or fraudulent activity.

Cookie: It is a small text file that helps in tracking sales.Cookies are usually valid for a specific period of time usually 60 days, during this time the affiliate will still earn commission on any purchases made by the customer they originally referred to the merchants site.

Cookie Length:  It determines the period of the time for which the cookie or information of the merchant will remain active.

Cookieless Tracking: Due to the increasing numbers of pc users  deleting cookies from their PC’s and the impact of spyware programmes, some networks are beginning to introduce tracking solutions which do not rely on cookies.

CPA: Cost Per Action refers to the cost the advertiser has to pay for any action by the user after being exposed to the matter on the affiliate’s site.

CPC: It is the cost that an advertiser or merchant has to pay for any legitimate or genuine click by a customer. In search engines cost per click is one of the compensation models and is used for sponsored links.

CPL: It refers to the cost that is to be paid by the advertiser for any sales lead generated.

CPM: Cost Per Mille refers to the cost per thousand impressions on banner ads. Some affiliate programmes pay on a CPM basis.It is the amount you pay per 1,000 impressions of a banner or button.

CR: It refers to the Conversion rate. It is the percentage of clicks that are converted to a sale. For example10 sales for every 100 visitors would constitute a 10% conversion rate.

CTR: Click Through Rate is the percentage of actual clicks against the impressions made. The click through rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks an advert receives by the number of impressions. For example if a banner advert was shown 100 times and received 20 clicks it would have a click through rate of 20%.

Customer Tracking ID:  It is the link used to track whether any particular customer has done any transaction or not.

Deep Links: These are links that appear in inside pages, making the user to go through products and content on the pages.

Dedicated Landing Page:  It is the page made exclusively for the landing after users click on affiliate links and banners. It is very similar to home page.

Drop Shipping:  A type of affiliate marketing whereby the affiliate takes orders and payment, and the merchant delivers the product direct to customer. No stock is required, and buying stock at wholesale prices means commission income is higher.

EPC: It refers to the earnings made for a single click.

EPM: It is the earning made for 1000 clicks

Google Adsense:  Text and image ads that are precisely targeted to page content, from which the webmaster earns a percentage of the price per click paid by the advertiser.

Google Adwords:  Is the pay per click (PPC) advertising solution offered by the Google search engine. Advertisers pay a cost per click which is relative to the type of site content, and how much other advertisers are willing to pay.

Graphic Interchange Format (GIF):
An image file format, suitable for simple files. A JPEG is the preferred format for storing photographs.

Home Page: Your primary HTML page, the first page anyone would see in your Web site. Also known as the "landing page".

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): The primary "language" used to create World Wide Web documents (web pages).

Impression: It is the number of times a banner advertisement was displayed or viewed inside the browser window.

Integrated:  It refers to connecting a merchants site to a tracking system that monitors the sales through leads generated in the network.

Internet Service Provider (ISP): The company you call from your computer to gain access to the Internet.

IP Address: A unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 162.124.345.1. Every pc on the Internet has a unique IP address.

Internet Service Provider (ISP): The company you call from your computer to gain access to the Internet.

Keyword: The search term that a pc user may enter into a search engine. For example, someone who wants to find a website that sells coffee tables may enter 'coffee table' into a search engine.

Local Cookie:   It is used to block multi- network tracking and help in finding as from where any lead has been generated.

Links:  These can be any contextual or graphical content which lead to a specified web page.

Merchant: An individual or business which markets and sells a product or provides services.

Multi-Level Marketing(MLM): Also known as Network Marketing, MLM involves the sale of products through a group of independent distributors who buy wholesale, sell retail, and sponsor other people to do the same.

Network Cookie:  These are information or data that tracks sales over a given network.

Network tracking ID: It is the information that is used to find as what sales have come from a definite network.

Niche Marketing: Focused, targetable market segment.

On topic: Refers to web sites of affiliates that bear close similarity with merchants’ sites.

Override commission: These are the charges that are levied upon the merchant by the network.

Payment threshold:  The minimum amount that is to be earned by the affiliate for the payment to be released. 

Pay Per Click (PPC):  It refers to Pay Per Click. It is the payment to the affiliate for leading the visitor to click on the merchant's web site.

Pay Per Lead (PPL): An affiliate program in which an affiliate receives a commission for each sales lead that they generate for a merchant web site. Examples include completed surveys, contest or sweepstakes entries, downloaded software demos, or free trials.

Parasite ware:   It refers to any software component that gets installed, knowingly or unknowingly, and which can cause potential damage to the computer. Some parasite wares are also used by some marketing companies to get unauthorized access and extract information from the users.   

Pay Per Sale (PPS): Programs in which the affiliate receives a commission for each sale of a product or service that they refer to a merchant's web site.

Pop-ups & Pop-unders:  These are advertisements which are not embedded in the page. They either get loaded on top of the page in the browser or appear below the loaded page.

Program: It refers to the set of tasks that an affiliate is willing to take and thereby creating an account or joining the network.

Program management:  It is the specified program where the affiliate can find links and banner of merchants, join new merchants and make changes in the account.

Profit: The amount of money you earn from your sales. For example, if you sell 10 videos at £50.00 each, and each costs £10 to produce and ship, your profit would be £40.00 per video or £400.00 in total.

Publisher: It refers to the website owner or the one who puts advertisements on his web site.

Referral: It is used to define an affiliate or user who is exposed to the merchant’s site or program by any registered affiliate.

Real-time Reporting: It refers to the 24x7 reporting service provided by the network. It is usually provided as a console or panel with data and reports shared over the Internet. The affiliate and merchants can at any time check their status.

Reversal:  It is the cancelling of the order after purchasing or while purchasing. Sometimes the buyers return the products and therefore the payments on these leads by merchants are cancelled.

Reversal rate:   It is the percentage of valid sales against the reversals made by the merchants.

Revenue Report:   It is a control panel used by the affiliates and showcases all the merchants that have been signed up by the affiliate. The panel is provided with a number of utilities and tools to monitor the marketing activities by the affiliate.

ROI:  It refers to Return On Investment and describes the returns, monetary, that a merchant gets for any investment made. The investment refers to the over all cost including that charged by the network and the affiliates.

SSL 3.0: It is a technology which allows secure data transfer and is used in money transactions. SSL 3.0 is provided by credit card companies and Internet banking providers.

Spy ware: Refers to the software that allows unauthorized access to users computer and drawing out of essential information without users permission.

Tracking:  It refers to the monitoring of all actions that take place on the pages of the affiliates and merchants. The tracking systems are used to calculate the amount that an advertiser has to pay.

Virtual network:  It is the network of websites of a single merchant associated with the network.

Visitor:  Any pc user who lands on the merchant’s web site or affiliate’s site is known as a visitor.