Affiliate Marketing Terminology

I decided to put together a quick Affiliate Marketing terminology guide for you guys. Please leave a comment if you want any additional terms defined, I’ll be happy to add to the list!

Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing is the business of Affiliates promoting Advertisers Products. The point is to make sales in exchange for getting paid the portion of the sale price (Commission) or a fixed dollar rate per lead/sale aka Cost Per Action (CPA).

Network – This is the starting point of any affiliate program. This is the middle man between the Advertisers and Affiliates.

Affiliate – The affiliate is the one promoting the Advertiser’s product.

Advertiser – This is the company that is supplying the product to the network to then be promoted by Affiliate’s.

Offer – Offer is another name for the Product. Generally in Affiliate Marketing there are special deals such as $1 for the first month and this is where the Offer part comes from. It could also be said that it just refers to what they are Offering.

Traffic – When an Affiliate sends people to the Advertiser’s Offer via different methods of promotion; these people that are being sent to the Offer, are the traffic.

Affiliate Manager – This is your point of contact at the Affiliate Network. This is the person that should be helping you, answering your questions and being your aide in making more money with that offer.

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, after the fact, 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.

Shaving – This 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 aka stealing your leads/sales is by split testing the exact same offer on 2 or more networks.

Affiliate Program – This is used more in traditional affiliate networks such as CJ or Linkshare. The advertiser’s line of products that you must “join” is the affiliate program.

Tracking Platform - This refers to the actual software that the Affiliate Network is using to keep track of offers, advertiser, affiliates and traffic statistics.

Conversion – When an Affiliates traffic is sent to an Offer and they complete that lead form or purchase that product, then a Conversion has occurred and is credited to the Affiliates account.

CPA – Cost Per Action, this is a flat fixed rate that affiliates are paid when they generate a lead or sale on a particular offer.

Payout – Same as above.

Commission – Should be self explanatory. This is percentage of the sale price that you get if the Offer you are promoting has this type of pay model.

Pre pop - Aka 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.

Conversation Rate - This is the rate in which an Affiliate’s Traffic completes the Offers as opposed to leaving the Offer page without taking any action. For example, if 10 people are sent to an Offer and 5 buy and 5 people don’t, your conversion rate is 50%.

Landing Page - This is a seperate website that you have created, usually to pre-sell an Offer so that once someone is then sent to the Offer they are already interested in the product because you have hyped it up on your landing page.

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 isnt by comparing the results and differences in the split test variations. For example, take a look at this blog post: Always Split Test

Impression - One view of your ad or website.

CPC - Cost Per Click. This is the cost that you are paying per click to get Traffic.

CPM - Cost Per Thousand. Contrary to how it sounds, this is the cost per 1,000 impressions (roman numeral M) when you are buying banner space or dealing in impressions.

PPV – Pay Per View. This is the cost you are paying per view to get someone to see your ad. This is usually referring to interruption marketing like pop-ups.

ROI – Return on Investment. You spend $100 on Traffic and make $200 in Offer conversions. You have a positive ROI.

Tracking Code - This is the link that the Affiliate Network gives you to send your Traffic to an Offer.

List Building – This is the art of building an opt-in email list. Most people have newsletters, similiar to what we have on Daily Conversions.

Above the fold -This refers to the top portion of a website, the part that you see when you load the page without scroll down.

If you need a definition for any additional terms then please leave a comment below and I’ll write a definition of that term for you!