Affiliate Dictionary

Here is the list of terms and abbreviations every affiliate should know:

Above the fold – after web page has loaded, the part that is visible on the upper half of the front page is said to be “above the fold”.
Adsense (Google) – 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 advertsier.
Advertiser – the person selling the goods or service, also knows as the merchant. Advertiser pays affiliates for sending traffic to their web site after a product or service is purchased.
Adware – or advertising-supported software, a program hidden within free downloaded software that transmits user information via the Internet to advertisers. The object of the Adware is to generate revenue for its author. Adware, by itself, is harmless; however, some adware may come with integrated spyware such as keyloggers and other privacy-invasive software.
Adwords (Google) – Google’s Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising program.
Affiliate/Publisher – a website owner, search engine marketer, media buyer, social marketer or email list owner who promotes merchant’s products or services and earns a commission for leads or sales.
Affiliate marketing – marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as advertiser, “retailer” or “brand”), the network, the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’) and the customer.
Affiliate Manager – an employee of affiliate company that supports publishers and looks after publishers activity in order to maintain high quality of traffic.
Affiliate Network – middle company between Advertisers and Affiliates.

B2B – Business to business marketing.
B2C – Business to consumer marketing.
Banner – advertising in the form of a graphic image on a web page.
Blogging – posting text, video, images or commenting on a blog.

CAN-SPAM Act – signed into law by president George W. Bush on December 16, 2003, establishes the United State’s first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail.
Chargeback – process in which end customer demands his money back for products and services he was billed for, but he didn’t order. Usually chargebacks are results of different types of affiliate’s or customer’s fraud actions.
Co-branding – when an affiliate gets to include its own logo and branding on the page (known as “landing page”) to which they send visitors through their affiliate links.
Confirmation/Thank You Page – page that loads when customer has completed the desired action. Usually it is page where pixel located.
Content locking – locking of the website’s content by the pop-up window which propose completing some action(survey, email submit…etc.) before website’s content will be unlocked. One of the modern advertising methods.
Contextual Link – integration of affiliate link within related text. Contextual links are often used in newsletters and related articles.
Conversion – successful complete of an action by customer for which affiliate receives his revenue.
Cookie – also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user’s browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site. The state information can be used for authentication, identification of a user session, user’s preferences, shopping cart contents, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing text data on the user’s computer.
CPA – cost Per Acquisition/Action. Actions can vary from a user inputting their email address or zip code (email/zip submit) all the way up to the purchase of a product.
CPC – cost per click.
CPL – cost per lead.
CPM – cost per thousand impressions.
Creative – advertisement provided by merchant, which should be used by affiliate in advertising campaign: banners, email text or html creatives, etc.
CTR – click thru rate. The number of people who click on an advertisement after seeing the ad. CTR=Clicks/Impressions.

DNS – translates and associates domain names with proper IP addresses so information can be delivered over the internet and its users can type a name rather than numbers.

eCPA – effective cost per action.
eCPM – effective cost per thousand impressions; allows you to compare CPC, CPA and CPM pricing models.
E-mail promotion – promotion of advertiser’s offer by sending emails to a big amount of recipients.
EPC – earning per click. This figure is calculated by dividing the commission by the number of clicks generated. The EPC will give you a gauge of how well your campaign and/or affiliate are performing. If you have a large number of clicks, but a low amount of commission, this will translate into a low EPC number, which would tell you that although traffic is being driven to your site, not many people buy something once they get there. You could then adjust your campaigns accordingly.
Exit Popups – pop-ups only appearing when visitors are leaving to an external webpage. Contain different advertising material.
Eye Tracking – researching study to measure peoples eye-movement patterns. Is used to see how Internet users scan website and editorial content for information.

Fraud – attempt to generate commission by an automated script or person through affiliate ads without any interest of the promoted product.

Impression – one view of your ad or website.
Incentivized Programs – a program where the user is given something in return for either clicking on an advertisement, viewing an ad, or completing the action. Many affiliate networks do not allow this form of marketing. Incentivized traffic provides much lower quality for advertisers because of high amount of fraud actions.
In-House – normally referred to expertise, knowledge, resource or service available within a company or service.
IP-Address – Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.
IP-Tracking – method used in order to know which affiliate referred certain visitors(customer). By storing the visitor’s IP address when he/she enters the landing page through an affiliate link the merchant will know which affiliate to pay commission on visitor’s purchase, signup or action. Other common method is to store a cookie.

Javascript – enhancing website interacting JavaScript is a scripting language used in web user applications. Owned by Sun Microsystem JavaScript is often found in web based software versions.

Keyword – word or phrase carefully chosen by online business or website owner that is then implemented in website content, headers, meta data, body text and URL string etc in order to rank higher according to that keyword in search engines.

Landing Page – the first, and sometimes only, page of an advertisers offer. Should contain a detailed information about product or service and have a strong call to action.
Lead – customer must complete an online form via an offer link from the Publisher’s website. The form is complete after the Customer has selected their area code and has provided their name, email address and billing information.
List Building – is building an opt-in email list. Most people have newsletters, similar to what we have on Daily Conversions.
Long Form Lead Gen – a form of data that includes a lot of info: address, age, etc. and typically some sort of qualifiers.

Merchant – online business that markets and sells goods or services. Merchants establish affiliate programs to get consumers to purchase a product, register for a service, fill out a form, or visit a website.

NET15/NET30 – payout schedule of affiliate networks for their affiliates. The number 15 means that you will be paid in 15 days after the “working” month. Ex: all earnings for January will be paid on 15th of February.

Offer – advertiser’s campaign utilized for affiliate by affiliate network.
Opt-in – used particularly with regard to mailing lists and advertisement, so that those who wanted the notices could subscribe.
Opt-out – enabling the receiver of unsolicited emails or spam to avoid any further messages or information. Opt-out services often allow recipient to cancel newsletter subscription etc by e.g. a clickable link. This can though also verify the e-mail marketer that the email is valid resulting in even more spam.

Payment Threshold – minimum amount of commission an affiliate needs to earn before payment is made.
PayPal – payment service that allows anyone to pay in many different ways, including through credit cards, bank accounts. One of the worlds popular payment systems. Has many restrictions for 3-rd world countries.
Pixel – a 1×1 piece of code placed on the “thank you” or confirmation page of an offer. This pixel “fires” each time the page is loaded allowing us to track completed actions.
Pop-ups – advertising displayed in own window when entering or leaving a website.
PPC – pay per click, typically refers to search engine marketing where you pay for clicks.
Pre pop – pre-population of a form. This means that the particular offer can be filled out automatically with information that you have already stored in your database. For example your traffic goes to your own website and fills out a form for more information and then once they submit they are sent to an advertiser’s offer page with their information already filled out in the form that they entered on your own website.
Privacy policy – official legal policy describing how personal information is used on particular website.

Rising Stars – publishers who met high standards of quality, transparency and growth.
ROI – return on investment.

Scrubbing – when an advertiser determines that the leads you sent did not meet their criteria or were already in their database. They will “remove” these leads and not pay you for them. This is relatively common. If you see “no scrub” it means that they won’t be doing this. Otherwise, depending on the network and their policies it happens quite frequently. Usually though, it’s the advertiser doing the scrubbing.
Search Engine Optimization/SEO – optimizing of website by implementing e.g. keyword in title, headers, body text, meta tags to increase amount and quality of traffic from search engines.
SEO report – insight into how well your website is doing in all of the major search engines.
Second-Tier System – affiliate program may offer a second-tier commission incentive meaning affiliates are rewarded when referring additional affiliate to the program. Commission is normally paid when second-tier affiliate generates a sale, lead or action.
Shaving – action that is different than scrubbing because shaving is when the advertiser takes away your lead or sale without telling you at all. Meaning, you never see these as leads or sales. The best way to determine if an advertiser is shaving (“stealing”) your leads/sales is by split testing the exact same offer on 2 or more networks.
Short Form Lead Gen – a form of data that does not include much more than just the email address, name and address.
SPAM – undesired or unwanted messages with a fraudulent purpose. SPAM is primarily known for filling up email inboxes.
Split Testing – this is testing 2 or more different things at one time. You could test 2 or more different landing Pages with the same traffic or you could test 2 or more different offers with the same traffic. This will give you data regarding what is working and what isn’t by comparing the results and differences in the split test variations.
Spyware – computer software that, much like a virus, installs itself on a computer without the user’s knowledge. As it is commonly thought to only collect personal information. Spyware is also known to be able to control and download other software.
Super Affiliate – publishers who drives huge amount of sales/leads and in the same time meet high standards of quality, transparency and growth.
Suppression list – is a list of suppressed e-mail addresses used by e-mail senders to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. CAN-SPAM requires that senders of commercial emails provide a functioning opt-out mechanism by which email recipients can unsubscribe their email address from future email messages. The unsubscribed email addresses are placed into a “suppression list” which is used to “suppress” future email messages to that email address.
Sweepstakes – marketing promotions targeted toward both generating enthusiasm and providing incentive reactions among customers by enticing consumers to submit free entries into drawings of chance (and not skill) that are tied to product or service awareness wherein the featured prizes are given away by sponsoring companies. Prizes can vary in value from less than one dollar to more than one million U.S. dollars and can be in the form of cash, cars, homes, electronics, etc.

Targeting – decision process when a businesses disclose their desired target group.
Text Link – word, phrase, sentence or complete text used for linking to internal or external webpage.
Tracking Code – is the unique link that the affiliate network gives you to send your traffic to an offer.
Tracking Platform – this refers to the actual software that the affiliate network is using to keep track of offers, advertiser, affiliates and traffic statistics.
Traffic – is determined by the number of visitors came to the website and the number of pages they visited.

Uniques – the number of unique people who visited website or application as determined by IP address.
URL – Uniform Resource Locator. The web address of a page.

Vertical – a group of offers. For example: Health and beauty vertical, debt vertical, work from home vertical, etc.
Viral Marketing – marketing strategy focusing on creating brand awareness by encouraging word of mouth and satisfied customers to spread the word. Viral marketing are often applied to already made social networks like social bookmarking sites, forums or blogs.

Web Hosting – web based service offering hosting of server space, domain name registration, email accounts, site-building and server maintenance.
Web Page Content – web page is normally filled with text, videos, images or animations. What ever is displayed on the page is it’s content.
Whois – a website that tells you who actually registered and owns a certain website.