Affiliate Marketing Glossary

Ad Copy: A written sales pitch, also known simply as 'copy'. Most follow the AIDA form (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)
Advertiser: Also known as merchant, he is the person selling the goods or service
Affiliate Marketing :- a program for website publishers to earn a commission by selling products on their sites
Affiliate Networks :- An intermediary between publishers (affiliates) and (merchant) affiliate programs
Affiliate: Website owner who works for the affiliate and leads visitors to clicks, or sale of merchant’s products or services.
Affiliate Agreement: Terms and conditions agreed upon by the merchant and the affiliate regarding their style of working and commission rates.
Affiliate Fraud: This is done by an affiliate to generate illegal revenue, whereby he uses automated scripts to falsely create leads or clicks, or humans to do the same.
Affiliate Information Page: Your webpage which gives details about your commission rates, affiliate agreement, a link for existing affiliates to login, as well as a link to the signup page for new affiliates.
Affiliate Link: Through this URL tracking link the affiliate sends traffic to the merchant's web site.
Affiliate Manager: He is the person responsible for recruiting affiliates, establishing incentive program reporting of sales and running the merchant’s affiliate program.
Affiliate Program: This is the program through which the merchant rewards the affiliate for web traffic, sales or leads on a pay-per-click, pay-per-sale, or pay-per-lead basis. Can also be called an Associate Program, Partner, Referral or Revenue sharing program.
Affiliate Program Directory: This contains details of the merchants' affiliate programs. The directories are typically categorized by industry and include the typical payout or commission rates.
Affiliate Software: Software for running an affiliate program. Paying affiliates, leads, clicks, tracking impression, managing links, signing affiliates is associated with this program.
Affiliate Solution Provider: 3rd party company that provides the hosting for you.
Affiliate Tracking: The process of tracking a link uniquely by affiliate using an Affiliate Link.
Associate: Synonym for affiliate.
aStore :- is an Amazon.com affiliate product which website owners can use to create an online store on their site
Auto-Approve: A process through which all the applications processed through an affiliate are automatically approved.
Banner Ad: Advertisement on the web page about the product or service in the form of an animated GIF, Flash Movie, and JPEG.
Browser: Programs like Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Opera, used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.
Charge Back: Forfeiting of affiliate’s commission due to invalid sale.
Click-through: The action when a user clicks on a link and follows through to the merchant's web site.
Click-Through Ratio (CTR): percentage of visitors who click-through on a link to visit the merchant's web site.
Click Reference: This facility is to create unique tracking links whereby the affiliates identify sales that have come via a particular page or link within their site or PPC campaign.
Co-branding: an affiliate uses his own logo or branding on his page to send visitors to merchant’s products or services.
Commission: Income received by an affiliate for generating a sale, lead or click-through to a merchant's web site. Sometimes called a referral fee, a finder's fee or a bounty.
Cookies: small text files stored on the visitor's computer and are utilized to track which affiliate the web visitor came from and which banner or link they clicked.
Cookie Expiration/Cookie Retention: a date when the cookie expires is defined and is important because affiliate sales can only be recorded before the cookie expiration date.
Cookieless Tracking: Due to the increasing numbers of web consumers routinely deleting cookies from their PC’s and the impact of spyware programmes, some networks are beginning to introduce tracking solutions not reliant upon cookies.
Contextual Linking: This refers to the process of placing affiliate links to appropriate products within related text or articles on a website.
Conversion Rate: Percentage of clicks that result in a commissionable activity (sale or lead).
CPA (Cost per Action): The amount of cost for a conversion such as a sale or lead.
CPC (Cost per Click): Cost of an individual click when paying on a per click basis.
CPM (Cost per thousand): The cost of 1000 banner impressions.
CPO (Cost per Order): Same as CPA but refers specifically to sales.
Data Feed: This is a file containing URL, names, images & descriptions of products offered by the merchant. These files are used by many affiliates to create relevant commercial content for their own sites.
Drop Shipping: A type of affiliate marketing whereby the affiliate takes orders and payment, and the merchant delivers product direct to client. No stock is required, and buying stock at wholesale prices means commission income is higher.
E-mail Link: An affiliate link to a merchant site in an e-mail newsletter, signature, or a dedicated e-mail blast.
EPC (Earnings Per click): Rating that describes the ability to turn clicks into commissions.
Google Adsense: Google programme offering web site owners the opportunity to include ads from its pay per click advertisers. Site owners are paid a percentage of the click cost to advertiser when one of these ads is clicked.
Google Adwords: Is the pay per click 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.
HTML code: These are codes places on the affiliate’s web page(s) for linking to the merchant's site and to identify traffic coming from the Affiliate's web site.
Impression: How many times a banner advertisement was displayed or viewed.
Internet Marketing :- Marketing of products or services over the Internet
In-house: building and managing your own affiliate program internal to your company instead of using the service of an affiliate.
Link Popularity: Also known as backlinks & incoming links, this refers to the number of other sites linking to yours.
Merchant: The person whose products or services are sold by an affiliate.
Network Override: This is the charge applied by networks to merchants on top of commission payments. The cost to merchant is typically 30%.
Pay-Per-Sale: pay received by an affiliate from the merchant after he sells merchants product or services.
Pay-Per-Lead: pay received by an affiliate for leading visitors to the merchant.
Pay-Per-Click: pay received by an affiliate for leading the visitor to click on the merchant's web site.
Performance-Based Marketing: In this the affiliate receives commission only on results such as conversions to sales or leads.
Recurring Commissions: the commission received by an affiliate from a merchant whenever the merchant charges a customer a recurring fee.
Residual Earnings: This is the earning received by an affiliates not just for the first sale by a customer but for all additional sales made at the merchant's site over the life of the customer.
Reversal: Is when a merchant removes sales commissions from an affiliate due to returned goods, declined credit cards, or fraudulent activity.
ROAS (Return on Advertising Spending): The amount of revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.
ROI (Return on Investment): Profit gained in return of the money spent by the merchant on marketing and advertising campaigns.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): The process of altering and refining a site to ensure better performance and positions in the search engines.
Spider Detection: The process of detecting and ignoring automated spiders or bots such as search engines like Google/Googlebot.
Super Affiliates: Those affiliates who perform exceedingly well giving the merchant more than 90% of sales.
Targeted Marketing: Customer based marketing, targeting on customer wants and needs and providing them.
Tiered Commission: Commission structure offered by merchants which increases on a sliding scale based on performance. This can be based on number of sales or sales value.
Tracking Method: a program to keep track of referred sales, leads /clicks by an affiliate. The merchant assigns a unique web address (URL) for each affiliate, or embed an affiliate ID number into the link.
Text Link: link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.
Tracking Code: Refers to the hidden 1X1 pixel tracking code that is placed on the confirmation page of your store for tracking sales conversions.
Two-tier: Affiliate marketing strategy whereby an affiliate sign up additional affiliates below him, so that when the second tier affiliates earn a commission, the affiliate above them also receives a commission. Two-tier affiliate marketing is also known as MLM (Multilevel Marketing).
Unique Click: The process which keeps track of a visitor’s unique clicks. Unique clicks are typically tracked by recording the IP address and browser header.
Unique Visitor (UV): This refers to the number of unique individuals clicking on a link.
Viral Marketing: an advertising about a product or service that spreads rapidly through word-of-mouth or emails or through friends just like viruses do.
White Label Solution / Site (See Also Co-branding): Many merchants offer a facility where affiliates are provided with an unbranded version of their site via which to channel traffic.