Glossary of Affiliate Marketing Terms

2-Tier Program:

Affiliate program structure whereby affiliates earn commissions on their conversions, as well as the conversions of webmasters they refer to the program.

Affiliate:

A web site owner that promotes a merchant’s products and/or services earns a commission for referring clicks, leads, or sales.

Affiliate Agreement:

Terms that governs the relationship between a merchant and an affiliate.

Affiliate Marketing:

A revenue sharing arrangement between online merchants and distributors (affiliates) in which the affiliate earns a commission for producing a sale, lead or click for the merchant’s site

Affiliate Network:

A third party providing services to affiliate merchants and affiliates, including tracking technology, reporting tools, and payment processing.

Affiliate Program:

Any arrangement through which a merchant pays a commission to an affiliate for generating clicks, leads, or sales from links located on the affiliate’s site. Also know as associate, partner, referral, and revenue sharing programs.

Affiliate Program Directory:

This is the Information concerning a collection of affiliate programs. It May include information about commission rates, the number of affiliates, and commission structure.

Affiliate Program Manager:

The person responsible for any administration required for an affiliate program. Duties will include the maintenance regular contact with affiliates, program marketing and responding to queries about the program.

Affiliate Solution Provider:

Is the Company that provides the software and services to administer an affiliate program.

Affiliate URL or Link:

This is the special code within a graphic or text link that identifies a visitor as having arrived from a specific affiliate site.

Associate:

Synonym for ‘affiliate’.

Banner Ad:

Advertising in the form of a graphic image.

Blog:

Acronym for ‘web log’, a blog is basically a journal, made readily that is available on the web. The act of updating a blog is referred to as ‘blogging’ and those who keep blogs are known as ‘bloggers’

Browser:

A program that allows you to access and read hypertext documents on the World Wide Web.

Click Fraud:

Click fraud, also called pay-per-click fraud, is the practice of artificially generating traffic to advertisers’ sites either manually or through the use of automated clicking programs (called hitbots). The advertiser pays for this traffic, which has no potential for generating revenue; however, the scammer receives a percentage of the pay-per-click fees paid by the advertiser.

Click Fraud Detection/Monitoring:

This is a service that provides independent monitoring of clicks from your PPC campaigns. If you notice fraudulent activity, Google or Yahoo!/Overture may provide a refund.

Click-Through:

When a user clicks on a link and arrives at a Web site.

Click-Through Ratio (CTR):

Percentage of visitors who click through to a merchant’s Web site.

Commission:

Also known as a bounty or referral fee, the income an affiliate is paid for generating a sale, lead or click-through to a merchant’s web site.

Contextual Link:

Placement of affiliate links within related text.

Conversion:

When one of your visitors makes a purchase on the merchant’s site… i.e. converts from ‘visitor’ to ‘buyer’.

Conversion Rate (CR):

This is the percentage of visits to your site that convert to a sale. I.e. If 1 person in every hundred visitors to your site makes a purchase, and then your conversion rate is 1:100 or 1 percent.

Cookie:

A cookie is a piece of information sent by a Web Server to a Web Browser. The Browser software is then responsible for saving and re-sending to the Server whenever the browser makes additional requests from the Server. You may set your browser to accept or reject cookies. Cookies can contain user preferences, login or registration information, and/or “shopping cart” information. When a cookies browser sends a request to a Server, the Server uses the information to return customized information.

Cost per Acquisition (CPA):

The amount you pay to acquire a customer.

Cost per Click (CPC):

The amount you pay when a surfer clicks on one of your listings.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM):

The amount you pay per 1,000 impressions of a banner or button.

Creative:

The promotional tools advertisers use to draw in users. Examples are text links, towers, buttons, badges, email copy, pop-ups, etc.

Cross-linking:

This is the linking of a group of domains, usually your own, to each other for the purpose of increasing its popularity with search engines. Excessive cross-linking may lead to your site being penalized by Google or Yahoo!

Domain Name:

The unique name that identifies an Internet site.

Doorway Page:

Also known as bridge pages, gateway page, entry pages, portals or portal pages, these pages are used to improve search engine placement. Caution: some search engines will drop a site entirely if the existence of doorway/gateway pages is detected.

Endorsement Letter:

Also known as a “product review”, an endorsement is a promotional statement outlining features and benefits for a particular product or service.

Email:

Electronic mail, a message sent to another Internet user across the Internet. An email address looks like this jimsmith@bubblee.com, whereas, “jimsmith” is your user name, your unique identifier; “@” stands for “at”;” bubblee.com” is the name of your Internet Service Provider.

Email Link:

An affiliate link to a merchant site contained in an email newsletter or signature file.

Email Signature (Sig File):

A brief message embedded at the end of every email that a person sends.

EPC:

Term used by the Commission Junction affiliate network, this is your ‘average earnings per 100 clicks’. This number is calculated by taking commissions earned divided by the total number of clicks times 100.

Forum:

Online community where visitors may read and post topics of common interest.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

Lists and answers the most common questions concerning a particular subject. They are generally posted to avoid having to answer the same question repeatedly.

Hit:

A hit is a single request from for a single item on a web server. To load a page with 5 graphics would count as 6 ‘hits’, 1 for the page plus 1 for each of the graphics. Hits therefore are not a very good measurement of traffic to a website.

Home Page:

Your primary HTML page, the first page anyone would see in your Web site. This is also called a “landing page”.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML):

The primary “language” used to create World Wide Web documents (web pages).

Impression:

An advertising metric that indicates how many times an advertising link is displayed.

In-house:

Merchant that administers its own affiliate program.

IP Address:

This is a unique number, consisting of 4 parts. They are separated by dots, e.g. 165.115.245.2. Every machine on the Internet has a unique IP address.

Keyword:

This is the search term that a user will enter into a search engine. For example, someone who wants to find a site that sells printer paper might enter ‘printer paper’ into a search engine.

Lifetime Commissions:

An affiliate program that pays a commission on EVERY product or service that the customer buys from the merchant, once you’ve sent the referral, i.e. the customer is yours ‘for life’.

Manual Approval:

Process in which all applicants for an affiliate program are reviewed individually and manually approved.

Merchant:

A business that markets and sells goods or services.

Newsgroup:

A newsgroup is a discussion that will take place online, surrounding a particular topic. The discussion will take the form of electronic messages called “postings” that anyone with a newsreader (standard with most browsers) can post or read.

Newbie:

Someone who is new to the Internet.

Niche Marketing:

Focused, targetable market segment.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC):

This is an advertising payment model, where the advertiser will only pay for an ad that is clicked upon. Also, an affiliate program where an affiliate receives a commission for each click (visitor) they refer to a merchant’s web site.

Pay-Per-Lead (PPL):

This is an affiliate program in which they receive a commission for each sales lead that they generate, for a merchant web site. Examples include completed surveys, competitions or sweepstakes entries, downloaded software demos, or free trials.

Pay-Per-Sale (PPS):

These are 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.

Recurring Commissions:

Earn commissions both on the initial sale and subsequent purchases of the same product or service. Examples of affiliate programs that may pay recurring commissions are online dating services and web hosting services.

Referring URL:

The URL a user came from to reach your site.

Residual Earnings:

Programs that pay affiliates for each sale their sites make, at the merchant’s site over the life of the customer.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

This is the process of choosing keywords and keyword phrases relevant to your site or page on your site, and placing those keywords within pages so that the site ranks well when customers search for these keywords

Search Term Suggestion Tool:

Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for at Overture during a given month.

SPAM:

The term “spam” is Internet slang, referring to unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) or unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Some people refer to this kind of communication as junk e-mail to equate it with the paper junk mail that comes through the US Mail. Unsolicited e-mail is e-mail that you did not request; it most often contains advertisements for services or products.

Super Affiliates:

The top 1 or 2% of affiliates that generate approximately 90% of any affiliate programs earnings.

Targeted Marketing:

The process of distinguishing the different groups that make up a market, and developing appropriate products and marketing mixes for each target market involved.

Text Link:

A link not accompanied by a graphical image.

Third Party Tracking Software: Software located on a server other than your own, that tracks and records visits to your Web site.

Tracking Method:

This is the method by which an affiliate program tracks referred sales, leads or clicks.

Tracking URL:

A web site URL, (http://www.awebsite.com), with your special code attached to it, i.e. http://www.awebsite.com/?myID. Visitors arriving at the side are tracked back to you through your special code.

Two-tier:

Affiliate program structure whereby affiliates earn commissions on their conversions as well as conversions of webmasters they refer to the program.

Unique User:

A unique visitor to your Web site. This is probably the best indicator of site traffic.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL):

The address of a site On the internet. An example of a URL is: http://www.byebye925.com/articles/index.html The “http” stands for “hypertext transfer protocol”; “://” signals the beginning of the address; “www.byebye925 .com” is the domain name; “/articles” is the directory; and “index.html” is the name of the HTML file.

Viral Marketing:

A marketing technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users.

Virus:

A computer virus is defined as a set of commands, created intentionally, that will do some level of damage to a computer. A computer virus does not float around in cyberspace, but is always attached to something. This ’something’ could be a text file (MSWord document), an email, a photo, a music clip or a video clip. Your computer must receive one of these ‘carriers’ in order to get a computer virus.

Web Host:

A business that provide storage, connectivity, and services necessary to serve website pages and files

Web Site:

A collection of HTML pages.