Affiliate marketing is a vast subject to learn at least for beginners. The subject can become so tricky unless one digests the definition of basic Affiliate marketing key terms used in a day to day operation.
Here are the most common 54 Affiliate marketing key terms to help you understand the subject much better.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing. The affiliate is paid for sales, clicks or leads generated through his online efforts. The online efforts include blogs, websites, Social media, advertising. The affiliates receive a commission from conversions when a customer clicks the affiliate link and completes the desired action such as
Affiliate
A person or a company that promotes the products/services of the advertiser. An affiliate is also termed as publisher. We can also term an affiliate as a website owner that earns commission on conversion of a sale. An affiliate may earn referral fee for referring leads, clicks or sales to a merchant.
Advertiser
The person selling the goods/services is called Advertiser. In other words, A person or company that offers the products/services to customers. An advertiser is also termed as a merchant.
Adsense
The advertisement monetisation platform from Google ad network. You can register your website on Google Adsense so that Google will automatically show ads on your website at relevant places. All you require is to place a small JS code.
Adwords
Google Advertisement network for purchasing ads in different formats to be displayed on Google Search and other Google networks. Google Adwords is one of the top-rated advertising which is easily reachable to the targeted users.
Affiliate Network
An affiliate network is an intermediary channel between the publisher (affiliate) and the advertiser (merchant) which hosts the affiliate programs on their website. With affiliate networks, the affiliate software is hosted and managed by the network instead of hosting on advertiser website.
Affiliate Agreement
The terms agreed between the affiliate and merchant that governs the relationship.
Affiliate Manager
Affiliate manager is the person responsible for running the merchant’s affiliate programs. This can include discovering and recruiting affiliates, designing incentive programs and creatives and finally reporting.
Affiliate program
An affiliate program consists of the offer, commission structure, terms and conditions. It can also be called a Partner, Referral or Revenue sharing program. The merchant rewards the affiliate for web traffic, sales or leads on a pay-per-click, pay-per-sale, or pay-per-lead basis.
Affiliate Tracking
The process of tracking the unique link by affiliate using an Affiliate Link.
Affiliate Link
An Affiliate link is the unique tracking code embedded in a URL format. This link contains the affiliate information. For example, the affiliate link may look like http://yourdomain.com/?aid-123. These links are set to be unique per affiliate and can include text links, banner links, product links.
Affiliate Software
Affiliate software is a program for managing affiliate programs. The features of such software includes signing up affiliates, link management, impression and conversion tracking, analytics, performance, affiliate payouts.
Auto-Approval
Affiliate programs applied by the affiliates on the affiliate networks and approved instantly without manual review of affiliate manager.
Average CPA
The Average EPC (Earning Per Click) is the money that you are likely to make on every click, on an average, with that particular merchant.
E.g.: An Average EPC of 0.99 Rs for merchant X means that you will be earning around 1Re, on an average, on every click that you send out to merchant X via your content. Average CPC for all merchants is applied using the following formula
Average EPC = total commission made by publishers on average
the total number of clicks sent out.
Banner Ad
Banner is a picture-based ad placed on the affiliate website with a link directed to the advertiser website. The format of a banner ad typically is an
animated GIF, Flash Movie, JPEG that advertises a product, service, or web site.
Charge back
Charge-back is an invalid sale that results in affiliate earnings on that sale is reversed back.
Click Through Ratio (CTR)
CTR is the percentage of clicks received against total impressions. For example, if your advertisement received 1000 impressions and number of clicks are 10, then the CTR is 10/1000 = 0.1%.
Click Through
It is actually clicking the link and arriving at the website at a later time.
Conversion Rate (CR)
The rate at which the affiliate links converted into a sale or action.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Publishers get paid per click received. Cost of a click when paying on a per click basis
Cost per Thousand (CPM)
CPM is the cost of 1000 impressions
Cost per Action (CPA)
The amount of cost for a conversion such as a sale or lead.
Cost per Sale (CPS)
The amount of cost for a conversion such as a sale or lead.
Cost Per Order (CPO)
CPO is same as CPA but refers in specific to sales.
CPV – Cost per view
Publisher get paid for every view received on the advertisement
CPI – Cost per Install
Publisher get paid for every app install on the mobile
Creative
A Creative can be a banner or text links, badges, pop-ups, emails etc. In other words, its an advertisement.
Cookies
A cookie is a text file that a Web site puts on the user computer to track the information for a predetermined period of time. The cookie helps the affiliate to have a sale recorded in his account that happens anytime during its storage time.
A user clicks the affiliate link on your website and is redirected to your advertiser site but has not completed a sale at that time. He instead goes back to the site directly after a week and purchased on the site. Since the first visit has come through the affiliate site so the stored cookie identifies that sale as generated through the affiliate.
Coupons
A coupon is an offer that comes with a code generated by the merchant. This code is identified by the advertiser website during check out.
Cashback
Some affiliate sites share their commission with the users in the form of a cashback. Once a user activates a deal/coupon on the affiliate site, a certain percentage of the commission will be shared with the user by the affiliate site.
Deeplink
Deep linking is the practice by which an affiliate builds directly a link to a specific product page on the advertiser website. If this setting is active, affiliates can direct traffic to a specific page on the advertiser’s site.
Deal
A deal is an offer with a specific discount available on the product that comes with an expiry date.
Earnings Per Click – EPC
Average earnings per 100 clicks. A relative rating that describes the ability to turn clicks into commissions.
Email (Text/HTML)
This specifies if the advertiser allows an email marketing campaign in text/HTML formats.
Impression
A measure of the number of times a given ad is shown on a specific page. One impression means the ad was displayed one single time.
Link Cloaking
Link cloaking means hiding the longer affiliate link and make it shorter and pretty. This practice may attract penalty from search engines.
Manual Approval
Manual approval refers to the approval of affiliate applications after validation.
Multiple Tiers
Multiple Tiers refers to running a multiple tier affiliate program where affiliates who refer other affiliates earn commission off of those affiliates.
Multiple Conversions
If you want to allow more than one conversion from a single session, you can enable this setting. When this setting is enabled, multiple conversions are allowed from the same transaction ID. When disabled, de-duplication rejects conversions fired on the same transaction ID.
Native Ads
Native Ads are a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed.
Social Media
Product Feeds
Product feeds are
POP Traffic
Pop up ads appearing on the web/mobile while the user is browsing the affiliate site
Pay Per Sale (PPS)
Commission payable to an affiliate on the successful event of a conversion to a sale such as purchasing a product on the advertiser website.
Pay Per Lead (PPL)
Commission payable to an affiliate on successful generation of a lead for the campaign of the advertiser
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is the commission payable to the affiliate for each click received on the advertiser website through the affiliate site
PostBack URL
PostBack URL is a URL that will be useful if it’s necessary for you to get information about complete conversion automatically. For
Postback-request will be send to specified URL using method GET. You can use macros specified below to transmit request parameters.
Example Postback-link for transmitting amount of received funds and subaccount:
http://example.com/mystat.php?myprofit={sum}&mySubID={sub1}Smart link
Offer rotator, normally connected to an algorithm that ranks offers based on their performance.
SEM – Brand Keywords
Search Engine Marketing. Using brand keywords like for example, Amazon in Google Adwords.
SEM – Generic Keywords
Search Engine Marketing. Using generic keywords like Top Cameras 2019 or coupons.
SEM – Brand + Generic keywords
Using both brand and generic keyword combinations like Amazon coupons.
Tracking Information
Simply means how the traffic generated by the affiliate to the advertiser targeted landing page is tracked. This segment contains information on what sources of traffic allowed such as web, mobile web, mobile app, deep link. It also includes whether tracking
Tracking Frequency
The time interval for reporting traffic between the affiliate website and advertiser website on a click or conversion event. This can be real-time if the advertiser has a robust affiliate tracking software or some advertisers use cost-effective tools like Google Analytics which can delay the tracking by 24 hours or in some cases 48 hours.
Text link
Text Link is simply a hyperlink placed inside a post that takes the user directly to the advertiser website.
Web/Mobile/App
All advertisers have web and mobile tracking allowed to record the affiliate traffic. However, only a few advertisers allow the mobile app tracking due to limitations of their tracking software to effectively track the app visits or for other reasons.