Affiliate Marketing Glossary- All The Terms You Need

Last Updated on May 14, 2024

As the affiliate marketing industry matured and became a marketing channel that will spends in the U.S. only 8.2 billion U.S. dollars by 2022 (up from 5.4 billion recorded in 2017.) source  It only makes sense that it will have its own language.  So today we gathered all the essential affiliate marketing terms and created an affiliate marketing glossary to guide you through. Let’s get to it.

Advertiser/Vendor

a person or organization that offers services or products to customers.Advertisers are willing to pay affiliates for each new customer or lead they bring. It helps them promote their brand and acquire new customers with relatively low risk.

Affiliate

a person or organization that promotes offers. Also referred to as publisher/partner. An affiliate can be a site owner, mobile app developer, influencer and basically anyone who has the traffic to promote an offer.

Affiliate Network

Acts as an intermediary between affiliates and advertisers. Examples are Augusta Precious Metals, MaxBounty, Clickbank, Shareasale.

Traffic

People visiting your website through paid or organic methods.

Traffic source

Where the traffic is generated, it can be your own website/app, it can be traffic you buy on google, Facebook, Instagram linkedin and more.

Vertical

The category of an offer, for example: Insurance, Dating, Downloads, Software.

Conversion

An event generated by a user that an advertiser is willing to pay for. It can be a subscription to a service, lead generation, sale of a product, installation of a mobile application. Conversion is the final goal of  advertising for which advertisers pay to affiliates.

Impression 

A metric to measure a single ad view.

Click through rate (CTR)

The ration of people who clicked on your ads divided by the impressions of the ad. clicks ÷ impressions = CTR.

Traffic Source

Where the traffic is generated, it can be your own website/app, it can be traffic you buy on google, Facebook, Instagram linkedin and more.

Conversion

an event generated by a user that an advertiser is willing to pay for. It can be a subscription to a service, lead generation, sale of a product, installation of a mobile application. Conversion is the final goal of  advertising for which advertisers pay to affiliates.

CLICK-THROUGH RATE (CTR)

the percentage of clicks for the number of advertising impressions displayed to visitors or bought from other networks.

Tracking 

Capturing online visits data and reporting it. 

Tracking Software

A software that tracks and reports clicks, impressions, ctr, earnings, costs and all important aspects of your online campaigns/activity. Examples: ClickMagick, Voluum

S2S TRACKING

a tracking method based on sending post-backs from advertiser’s systems to an affiliate tracking software.

Tracking Token

A tracking token is a variable generated dynamically from your traffic source. When you set up a traffic source in your tracking software you will have the option to add tracking tokens that will give you back variables such as location, device type, os, publisher ID and more into your tracking reports.

Tracking URL

A URL that is used to track your affiliate activity, usually generated from your affiliate networks and your tracking software.

Direct Linking

Refers to sending visitors straight to the affiliate offer without an intermediate page usually referred to as a landing page.

Landing Page

A webpage to which affiliates refer traffic. For example if you promote dog food product you can create a page that lists all the benefits of the product you promte and only once the user clicks through your page they get to the offer.

Sales Funnel

A series of 2 or more pages that are designed to generate desired actions (lead, sale, call)

CTA

Call to action. Usually refers to a button on a page that as the name suggests calls for an action. Buy Now, Register, Sign Up etc.

SOI-Single Optin

A conversion flow that only requires one action to convert. For example a user is asked to submit their email address.

DOI-Double Optin

Refers to conversion flow that requires a visitor to perform 2 steps before the conversion counts. For example the user is required to submit their email address and also confirm by clicking a link on an email sent to them. 

Pay per Sale (pps ) /cost per sale (cps)

The affiliate needs to persuade the visitor to make a purchase of a product or a service. Can be a physical product (Hand lotion) or a digital product (online course, software).

Pay per lead (ppl) /cost per Lead (cpl)

The affiliate needs to persuade the consumer to visit the merchant’s website/app and complete a desired action, such as:

• Fill out a contact form.
• Sign up for a trial of a product.
• Download an app

Example: an online school looking to recruit potential students and is willing to pay $25 for every prospect who fills in their contact information and express interest in a specific degree program.

Pay per Call

The affiliate needs to persuade the consumer to make a phone call.Usually the conversion point changes depending on the merchant requirements. Some pay based on the number of minutes (i.e if call is longer than 2 minutes). Some based on action within the call (if customer clicked 2 and 5 in the IVR System.

PPC -Pay per click/ cost per click

Not very common model as it is very easy to generate clicks online so this model will be very likely to generate low quality traffic and even fraud traffic. Pay per click means you will get paid every time someone clicks your affiliate link. Merchants will only pay you via this model if you can prove (or already proved) that you’re traffic is high quality. If you are buying traffic this term refers to how much you will pay per click.

CPA-Cost Per Action

This term can be used in different ways and basically refer to any of the payment models we mentioned before (PPS, PPC, PPL PAY PER CALL).

ROI

Return on investment. (Revenue-Cost)/Cost*100

Affiliate Marketing Glossary- Wrapping up

Hopefully you found this affiliate marketing glossary helpful and it helped you understand the core terms of the affiliate marketing industry. Got questions? Comments? Don’t be shy and leave a comment!

FAQ

 

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