It's not easy to understand the many terms associated with doing business online. I've put together a list
of terms to help guide your affiliate marketing efforts.
Above the fold:
a banner ad or text appearing in the active window (screen) without having to
scroll down.
Advertiser:
(also merchant) any Web site that sells a product or service, accepts payments, and
fulfills orders. An advertiser places ads and links to their products and services on other Web sites
(publishers/affiliates) and pays those publishers a commission for leads or sales that result from their
site.
Affiliate:
a Web site owner that earns a commission for referring sales to a merchant site.
Affiliate Operating Agreement:
the terms and conditions that outline a relationship between the affiliate and merchant.
Affiliate Program:
(also a Partner, Associate, Reseller, or Revenue Sharing Program): a merchant pays an affiliate for
generating sales or leads from either a banner, link or text ad from an affiliate site.
ASP:
(Application Service Provider) or a third-party entity that manages and distributes software-based
services and solutions to customers across a wide area network from a central data center.
Banner Farm:
a Web site (ranch) that raises 468 x 60's (cows), 234 x 60's (chickens) and other sized banners (goats).
The Web site owner (rancher) does not generate any substantial affiliate revenue.
Bounty:
a per lead payment to an affiliate site.
Browser:
short for Web browser, a software application used to locate and display Web pages. The two most popular
browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
CGI:
(Common Gateway Interface), a specification for transferring information between a World Wide Web server
and a CGI program. A CGI program is any program designed to accept and return data that conforms to the
CGI specification.
Co-branded pages:
Web pages that are tailored with the look and feel of two or more partner sites.
Cookie:
A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The message is then sent back to
the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. The main purpose of cookies is to
identify users and possibly prepare customized Web pages for them.
Commission:
Income received by an affiliate for some quantifiable action such as selling a product and/or service on
the affiliate Web site.
CPM:
(cost per thousand) the predominate metric for banner advertising where a rate is set for every thousand
banner impressions, e.g. $20 CPM means it will cost $20 for 1,000 banner impressions.
CTR:
click-through rate, the percentage of clicks for the number of banner impressions displayed.
CTRL-ALT-DEL:
When nothing else works, try this to reboot your non-Apple computer. :)
Cost of acquisition:
the cost incurred by a merchant or affiliate to acquire a new customer.
DSL:
(Digital Subscriber Line) elusive super fast connection over regular telephone wires that is extremely
hard to come by in most areas.
Emoticon:
acronym for emotion icon, a small icon composed of punctuation characters indicating how an e-mail message should be interpreted.
Favorites include :-) Happy, :-( Sad, and ====|:-)= Abe Lincoln.
EPC:
earnings per click
Ethernet:
magical connection between your DSL modem and your computer, a thick phone cord that gives headaches if
not connected in the right direction.
FAQ:
(Frequently Asked Questions): documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular
subject.
FTP:
(File Transfer Protocol) or the program used to send/upload files to a Web site.
Fraud:
the practice of deliberately trying to deceive someone; in this
case stealing from a merchant program. Most common in pay-per-click programs.
Free content:
editorial content designed to provide information and facts to Web site visitors.
GIF:
(Graphic Interchange Format): a common format for image files, especially suitable for images containing
large areas of the same color.
Hit:
a single request from a Web browser for a single item from a Web server. In order for a Web browser to
display a page that contains 3 graphics, 4 "hits" would occur at the server: 1 for the HTML page, and
one for each of the 3 graphics.
Home Page:
the main Web page for a business, organization, or
individual.
HTML:
(HyperText Markup Language), the authoring language used to create documents on the World Wide Web.
HTML defines the structure and layout of a Web document by using a variety of tags and attributes.
HTTP:
(HyperText Transfer Protocol): Defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web
servers and browsers should take in response to various commands.
Hybrid:
commission structures offered by merchants with a selection of pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale,
pay-per-click and two-tier.
HyperText:
text that contains links to other documents.
Impression:
the viewing of an advertising banner, link, or product on the Internet.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group):
JPEG is most commonly mentioned as a format for image files.
JPEG format is preferred to the GIF format for photographic images.
KB:
kilobyte or a thousand bytes. This is a standard of measurement for file size.
Keywords:
words used by search engines to index your document in addition to words from the title
and document body. Typically used for synonyms and alternates of title words.
Mailing Lists:
a collection of e-mail addresses and personal information from your site visitors.
Developing an opt-in e-mail list can be an effective vehicle for letting your visitors know of upcoming
sales, promotions and hot deals.
Merchant:
an online business operating an online service. Or a business that offers an affiliate
program for affiliates to either re-sell the product or service or display free content on a Web site.
Meta Tags:
provide keywords and descriptions on pages that for some reason may lack text. There are
several meta tags, but the most important for search engine indexing are the description and keywords tags.
The description tag returns a description of the page in place of the summary the search engine would
ordinarily create. The keywords tag provides keywords for the search engine to associate with your page.
Online Reporting:
reports accessible through a password-protected area that provide affiliate sales,
commission earned, banner impressions, clickthroughs and returns for a specific period of time.
Pay-Per-Lead:
commission structure where the merchant pays the affiliate a flat fee for each qualified
lead (customer) that is referred to the merchant site.
Pay-Per-Click:
commission structure where the merchant pays the affiliate a fee for every unique
visitor that is referred to the merchant site.
Pay-Per-sale:
commission structure where the merchant pays a percentage or flat fee to the affiliate,
based on the revenue generated by the sale of a product or service to a visitor who came from affiliate
site. Some programs offer a sliding scale of commissions to reward affiliate sites with high traffic; other
programs stick to a flat commission rate for any level of sales.
Pixel:
Short for Picture Element, a pixel is a single point in a graphic image. Graphics monitors
display pictures by dividing the display screen into thousands (or millions) of pixels, arranged in rows
and columns. Many solution providers require that affiliates display a 1x1 pixel for tracking purposes.
Privacy Statement:
a document outlining the protection of the collected personal information from
your visitors. A privacy statement should tell your visitors that you will not sell their name or any personal
information to any other source.
Product Reviews:
enhance the content on your site and provide your visitors with additional information
on a particular product. A quick review of your featured item provides the visitor with additional information
needed to make a purchasing decision.
.
Publisher:
(also Affiliate) an independent party, or Web site, that promotes the products or services
of an advertiser in exchange for a commission.
Real-time:
No delay in the processing of requests for information, other than the time necessary
for the data to travel over the Internet.
Response Rate:
the percentage of people that join an affiliate program, based on the total number
of people that have been solicited in a marketing effort or advertising campaign.
Recurring Revenue:
a recurring commission based on the spending behavior of a particular customer.
Revenue:
income generated by driving sales or leads to a merchant site.
Robot:
a program that runs automatically without human intervention. Typically, a robot is endowed
with some artificial intelligence so that it can react to different situations it may encounter. Two common
types of robots are agents and spiders.
ROI:
return on investment or the assessment of the usefulness of a marketing effort or advertising
campaign.
Solution Provider:
a third-party technology company responsible for the development of affiliate
tracking technology, online reporting and payment aggregation.
Spam:
any unsolicited e-mail message sent to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups;
also known as junk mail.
Spider:
a program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search
engines.
Syndicated Content:
fresh content that is automatically updated in the HTML or source code on a
daily basis. Syndicated content sites provide Webmasters with a wide selection of headline news, sports
scores, stock quotes, e-mail, calendars, chat games, horoscopes, comics, movie reviews, weather reports
and more.
Top Level Domain:
the unique name that identifies an Internet site
(i.e: refer-it.com, tennis.com). Not a sub folder or homepage building site such as:
http://www.refer-it.com/main.cfm?screen=webmaster&header=webmaster -or-
http://geocities.yahoo.com/johndoe/homepage.html
Two-tier:
affiliate structure that allows affiliates to sign up sub-affiliates in a tiered structure..
When the second tier affiliate makes a sale, the primary affiliate receives some small portion of the commission.
Sometimes disguised as multilevel marketing (MLM), two-tier programs could provide a lucrative ongoing revenue
stream for your affiliate site.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator):
The standard way to give the address of any resource on the Internet
that is part of the World Wide Web (WWW), e.g. www.internet.com.
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