Affiliate Marketing Terms

Here are a few terms that you might want to know as you dig deeper into the Affiliate Marketing business:

A

Above the Fold – Describes the part of an email message or web page that is visible without scrolling down the page. This term is important because all content above the fold is assumed to be more valuable to the reader as they see it first.

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.

Adwords – Google’s Pay Per Click advertising 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 govern 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 – Information about a collection of affiliate programs. May include information about commission rate, number of affiliates, and commission structure.

Affiliate Program Manager – The person responsible for administering an affiliate program. Duties should include maintaining regular contact with affiliates, program marketing and responding to queries about the program.

Affiliate Solution Provider – Company that provides the software and services to administer an affiliate program.

Affiliate URL or Link – Special code in a graphic or text link that identifies a visitor as having arrived from a specific affiliate site.

Associate – Synonym for ‘affiliate’.

Autoresponder – An email robot that automatically replies answers emails sent to it. They are often used as e-mail marketing tools, to immediately provide information to prospective customers and then follow-up with them at preset time intervals.

B

Banner Ad – Advertising in the form of a graphic image

Bridge Page - See Doorway Page

C

Chargeback - Incomplete sales resulting in commission reversals

Cookie-cutting - A cookie cutter page is one that’s made from a generic content template

Contextual Link: – Affiliate links placed within related text

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

Creative – The promotional tools advertisers use to draw in users (i.e.: text links, towers, buttons, badges, email copy, pop-ups, etc.)

Customer Bounty - Pays the affiliate partner for every new customer that they direct to a merchant

D

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

E

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

Exclusivity – The prohibition of the affiliate from promoting competing products on their site

eZine: ‘electronic magazine’

G

Gateway Page – See Doorway Page

I

Impression – How many times a banner advertisement was displayed or viewed

K

Keyword – The search term that a user may enter at a search engine. For example, someone who wants to find a site that sells printer paper might enter ‘printer paper’ at a search engine

Keyword Density – The ratio between the keyword being searched for and the total number of words appearing on your web page. If your keyword only occurs, say, once, in a page that has twenty thousand words, then it has a density of 0.005 percent

L

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’

Lifetime Value – The total amount that a customer will spend with a particular company during his or her lifetime

Link Popularity – The total number of qualified Web sites linking to your Web site

LVCLVC – Lifetime Value of a Customer. The estimated lifetime sales total for a particular customer

M

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.

N

Niche Marketing: Focused, targetable market segment

P

Parasite - Technology designed to alter the normal performance of click tracking and disrupt affiliate business

Pay-Per-Click - Rewards an affiliate for each unique click to the merchant’s web site

Pay-Per-Lead - Affiliate program that rewards affiliates for conversions to leads. A lead might include a signup form, software download, survey, contest or sweepstakes entry, signup for a trial, etc. Pay-per-lead generally offers midrange commissions and midrange to high conversion ratios

Pay-Per-Sale - An affiliate marketing program that rewards affiliates based on each conversion to a sale such as when purchasing a product or service from the merchant’s web site. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions but tend to have the lowest conversion rates

Performance-Based Marketing - Marketing in which the merchant only pays commissions for results such as conversions to sales or leads

R

Recurring Commissions – The process of rewarding an affiliate on a recurring basis whenever the merchant charges a customer a recurring fee. For example, a web host that charges customers on a monthly basis might reward the affiliate a percentage of each month’s payment from the customer

Return Days – Number of days after a click through that the affiliate still earns a commission

Residual Earnings – Programs that pay affiliates not just for the first sale a shopper form their sites makes, but all additional sales made at the merchant’s site over the life of the customer

ROAS - ‘Return on Advertising Spending’. This is the amount of revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. For instance, a ROAS of $1 means you’re generating $1 in sales for every $1 in advertising spend, and a ROAS of $5 means you generate $5 in sales for every $1 in spending

ROI - ‘Return on Investment’. This is what all marketing managers want to see from the money they spend on their marketing and advertising campaigns. The higher the sales, the large the number of shoppers and the greater the profit margin generated by sales – the better the ROI

S

Search Engine Optimization – 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 those keywords are searched upon.

Search Term Suggestion Tool: – Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for at Overture during a given month.

Snowballing – This system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others’ existence, yet generate income for the higher level signup

Spider Detection - The process of detecting and ignoring automated spiders or bots such as search engines like Google/Googlebot

Super Affiliates- The highest performing affiliates

T

Thin Affiliates sites - This refers to low-quality Affiliates sites, unpopular with the search engines

Tracking Method - The way that a program tracks referred sales, leads or clicks. The most common are by using a unique web address (URL) for each affiliate, or by embedding an affiliate ID number into the link that is processed by the merchant’s software. Some programs also use cookies for tracking

U

Unique User – A unique visitor to your Web site

W

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