Dina - MarketLeverage Blogger
March 18th, 2008, 02:50 PM
This is a working list, so definitions will be updated often!
Above the Fold: Part of a web page that is visible once the page has loaded. This term is derived from the newspaper industry, referring to the portion of the front page that is visible with the paper folded.
Affiliate: A Web site owner that earns a commission for referring clicks, leads, or sales to a merchant.
Affiliate Agreement: A legal contract between a merchant and an affiliate that outlines the terms of their business relationship.
Affiliate Information Page: A page or pages on your web site that explains clearly and concisely what your affiliate program is about.
Affiliate Link: A piece of code residing in a graphic image, or piece of text placed on an affiliate's web page that notifies the merchant that an affiliate should be credited for the customer or visitor sent to their web site.
Affiliate Manager: The manager of an affiliate program who is responsible for creating a newsletter, establishing incentive programs, forecasting and budgeting, overseeing front-end marketing of the program, as well as monitoring the industry for news and trends.
Affiliate Program (also an Associate, Partner, Referral, or Revenue Sharing Program): Commission paid by a merchant to an affiliate for generating clicks, leads, or sales from a graphic or text link located on the affiliate's site.
Affiliate Program Directory: Directory of affiliate programs, featuring information such as the commission rate, number of affiliates, and affiliate solution provider. Associate-It, AssociatePrograms.com and Refer-it are among the largest Affiliate Program Directories.
Affiliate Solution Provider: Company that provides the network, software, and services needed to create and track an affiliate program.
Associate: Synonym for affiliate.
Auto-Approve: Affiliate application approval process in which all applicants are automatically approved for an affiliate program.
Auto-Responder: an email feature that automatically sends a message to anyone who sends it a message.
Banner Ad: An electronic billboard or ad in the form of a graphic image that comes in many sizes and resides on a web site's web page. Banner ad space is sold to advertisers to earn revenue for the web site.
Blog: A web log (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled weblog) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early web logs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging".
Browser: A client program (software), such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Opera, that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.
Button Ad: A graphical advertising unit, smaller than a banner ad.
Buzzword: A trendy word or phrase that is used more to impress than explain.
Charge Back: An incomplete sales transaction (i.e. merchandise is purchased and then returned) that results in an affiliate commission deduction.
Click & Bye: Refers to the process of an affiliate losing the visitor to the merchant's site once they click on a merchant's banner or text link.
Click Fraud: (pay-per-click fraud,) The practice of artificially generating traffic to advertisers' websites either manually or through the use of automated clicking programs (called hitbots). The advertiser pays for this traffic, which has no potential for generating revenue, however, the scammer receives a percentage of the pay-per-click fees paid by the advertiser.
Click Fraud Detection/Monitoring: Service that provides independent monitoring of clicks from your PPC campaigns.
Click-through: The action that occurs when a user clicks on a link.
Click-Through Ratio (CTR): Percentage of visitors who click-through on a link to visit the merchant's web site.
Client: A software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a server software program on another computer, often across a great distance. Each client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of server programs, and each server requires a specific kind of client. A Web browser is a specific kind of client.
Cloaking: Hiding of page content or affiliate linking code.
Co-branding: Situation in which affiliates are able include their own logo and branding on the pages to which they send visitors through affiliate links.
Collaborative Commerce Networks: An interconnected group of merchants and web sites that work hand in hand as true business partners. Merchants treat their affiliates as sales and distribution channels, worthy of any and all support that manufacturers would give to their resellers.
Commission: Income an affiliate receives for generating a sale, lead or click-through to a merchant's web site. Also known as a referral fee, a finder's fee, or a bounty.
Cookies: Small files stored on the visitor's computer, which record information that is of interest to the merchant site. With affiliate programs, cookies have two primary functions: to keep track of what a customer purchases, and to track which affiliate was responsible for generating the sale (and is due a commission).
Context-Centric: Matching your product or service offer closely to the visitors of an affiliate's site. Place the product or service in-context (closely related to the content it's next to) and more people will buy.
Contextual Link: Integration of affiliate links with related text.
Contextual Merchandising: Placing targeted products near relevant content.
Conversion Rate: Percentage obtained by dividing the number of click-through's on a banner or link by the number of sales or leads that resulted. A higher CR ratio means a more effective advertiser site.
CPA (Cost Per Action): An online advertising pricing model in which payment is based solely on qualifying actions such as sales or registrations, or leads
CPC (Cost Per Click): Cost incurred to get one person to click on an advertisement (banner, text or other form of web advertising) which, in turn, leads to usage of the site referred by the link. An affiliate program that compensates using CPC pays a nominal amount for each click-through, essentially per visitor, delivered to the target site via an affiliate link. Pay Per Click search engines offer advertising paid for on a per-click basis.
CPM (Cost Per Thousand): Unit used to measure the cost to display 1,000 advertisements (banners, text ads or other online advertisements with the ability to be tracked). For example, a CPM rate of $10 for banner ads means that it will cost $10 to purchase 1,000 banner ad impressions.
CPO (Cost Per Order): Cost metric for each time an order is transacted.
Creative: The promotional tools advertisers use to draw in users. Examples are text links, towers, buttons, badges, email copy, and pop-ups.
Disclaimer: States the terms under which the site or work may be used and gives information relating to what the copyright owner believes to be a breach of his/her/their copyright.
In some cases, you may wish to permit certain activities. In other instances, you may wish to withhold all rights, or require the user to apply for a license to carry out certain actions.
Electronic magazine (eZine): Either an electronic version of existing print magazines, or a digital format only magazine.
E-mail Link: An affiliate link to a merchant site in an e-mail newsletter, signature, or a dedicated e-mail blast.
email Signature (or Sig File): Option allowing for a brief message to be imbedded at the end of every email that a person sends.
FAQ: (Frequently Asked Questions) Documents that answer the most common questions on a particular subject.
HTML code: The lines of code that affiliates use to put links on their Web sites. Affiliate solution providers often provide a tool where affiliates can simply copy the code for an affiliate link and paste it into their own HTML pages.
Hybrid Model: Affiliate commission model that combines payment options (i.e. CPC & CPA).
Impression: Advertising metric that indicates how many times an advertising link is displayed.
In-house: Alternative to using an affiliate solution provider; building affiliate program architecture within a company.
Landing page: A web page (on a merchant site) where visitors are redirected after they click on an affiliate link.
Lead: Collected information of interested visitors are used from merchant for selling.
Lifetime Value of a Customer: The amount of sales (in dollars) that a customer will spend in his lifetime with a particular company.
Manual Approval: Affiliate application approval process where all applicants are manually approved for an affiliate program.
Media Metrix: Measures traffic counts on all the web sites and digital media properties on the Internet. They regularly publish the names of the Top 50 websites in the US, the Global Top 50, and the Media Metrix Top 500 web sites.
Merchant: An online business that markets and sells goods or services. Merchants establish affiliate programs as a cost effective method to get consumers to purchase a product, register for a service, fill out a form, or visit a Web site.
Mini-site: Prefabricated HTML page for affiliates that displays new or specialized products with integrated affiliate links.
“Off the Click”: Ratio of conversions to clicks.
Pay-Per-Sale: Program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sale of a product or service that they refer to a merchant's web site. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions and the lowest conversion ratio.
Pay-Per-Lead: Program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sales lead that they generate for a merchant web site. (i.e. would include completed surveys, contest or sweepstakes entries, downloaded software demos, or free trials.) Pay-per-lead generally offers mid-range commissions and mid-range to high conversion ratios.
Pay-Per-Click: Program where an affiliate receive a commission for each click (visitor) they refer to a merchant's web site. Pay-per-click programs generally offer some of the lowest commissions (from $0.01 to $0.25 per click), and a very high conversion ratio since visitors only need to click on a link to earn the affiliate a commission.
Plug-in: A small piece of software that adds features to a larger piece of software.
Recurring Commissions: Ability to earn commissions both on the initial sale, as well as subsequent purchases of the same product or service. Examples of affiliate programs that may pay recurring commissions are online dating services and web hosting services.
Residual Earnings: Programs that pay affiliates not just for the first sale, a shopper from their sites makes, but all additional sales made at the merchant's site over the life of the customer.
ROAS: 'Return on Advertising Spending'. 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 spent.
ROI: Stands for '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.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
Server: A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running, e.g."Our mail server is down today, that's why e-mail isn't getting out." A single server machine could have several different server software packages running on it, thus providing many different servers to clients on the network.
Spam (or Spamming): Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings, generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.
Storefront: Prefabricated HTML page for affiliates that displays new or specialized products with integrated affiliate links.
Super Affiliates: A small percentage of sites - the top one percent of affiliates, based on performance and earnings - that generate the lions share of the revenue for your program. They are born marketers and are very successful with the affiliate program they promote from their sites.
Targeted Marketing: Offering the right offer to the right customer at the right time.
Text Link: Link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.
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.
Two-tier: Affiliate marketing model that allows affiliates to sign up additional affiliates below themselves, so that when the second tier affiliates earn a commission, the affiliate above them also receives a commission. Two-tier affiliate marketing is also known as (MLM) Multilevel Marketing.
Unique Click: The process of only counting unique clicks from each web visitor. Unique clicks are typically tracked by recording the IP address and browser header.
Viral Marketing: The rapid adoption of a product or passing on of an offer to friends and family through word-of-mouth (or word-of-email) networks. Any advertising that propagates itself the way viruses do.
Sources:
http://www.seobook.com/glossary/
http://www.affiliatewiz.com/Affiliate-Marketing-Resources/affiliate_marketing_glossary.asp
http://www.affiliatescout.com/glossary.html
Above the Fold: Part of a web page that is visible once the page has loaded. This term is derived from the newspaper industry, referring to the portion of the front page that is visible with the paper folded.
Affiliate: A Web site owner that earns a commission for referring clicks, leads, or sales to a merchant.
Affiliate Agreement: A legal contract between a merchant and an affiliate that outlines the terms of their business relationship.
Affiliate Information Page: A page or pages on your web site that explains clearly and concisely what your affiliate program is about.
Affiliate Link: A piece of code residing in a graphic image, or piece of text placed on an affiliate's web page that notifies the merchant that an affiliate should be credited for the customer or visitor sent to their web site.
Affiliate Manager: The manager of an affiliate program who is responsible for creating a newsletter, establishing incentive programs, forecasting and budgeting, overseeing front-end marketing of the program, as well as monitoring the industry for news and trends.
Affiliate Program (also an Associate, Partner, Referral, or Revenue Sharing Program): Commission paid by a merchant to an affiliate for generating clicks, leads, or sales from a graphic or text link located on the affiliate's site.
Affiliate Program Directory: Directory of affiliate programs, featuring information such as the commission rate, number of affiliates, and affiliate solution provider. Associate-It, AssociatePrograms.com and Refer-it are among the largest Affiliate Program Directories.
Affiliate Solution Provider: Company that provides the network, software, and services needed to create and track an affiliate program.
Associate: Synonym for affiliate.
Auto-Approve: Affiliate application approval process in which all applicants are automatically approved for an affiliate program.
Auto-Responder: an email feature that automatically sends a message to anyone who sends it a message.
Banner Ad: An electronic billboard or ad in the form of a graphic image that comes in many sizes and resides on a web site's web page. Banner ad space is sold to advertisers to earn revenue for the web site.
Blog: A web log (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled weblog) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early web logs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging".
Browser: A client program (software), such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Opera, that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.
Button Ad: A graphical advertising unit, smaller than a banner ad.
Buzzword: A trendy word or phrase that is used more to impress than explain.
Charge Back: An incomplete sales transaction (i.e. merchandise is purchased and then returned) that results in an affiliate commission deduction.
Click & Bye: Refers to the process of an affiliate losing the visitor to the merchant's site once they click on a merchant's banner or text link.
Click Fraud: (pay-per-click fraud,) The practice of artificially generating traffic to advertisers' websites either manually or through the use of automated clicking programs (called hitbots). The advertiser pays for this traffic, which has no potential for generating revenue, however, the scammer receives a percentage of the pay-per-click fees paid by the advertiser.
Click Fraud Detection/Monitoring: Service that provides independent monitoring of clicks from your PPC campaigns.
Click-through: The action that occurs when a user clicks on a link.
Click-Through Ratio (CTR): Percentage of visitors who click-through on a link to visit the merchant's web site.
Client: A software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a server software program on another computer, often across a great distance. Each client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of server programs, and each server requires a specific kind of client. A Web browser is a specific kind of client.
Cloaking: Hiding of page content or affiliate linking code.
Co-branding: Situation in which affiliates are able include their own logo and branding on the pages to which they send visitors through affiliate links.
Collaborative Commerce Networks: An interconnected group of merchants and web sites that work hand in hand as true business partners. Merchants treat their affiliates as sales and distribution channels, worthy of any and all support that manufacturers would give to their resellers.
Commission: Income an affiliate receives for generating a sale, lead or click-through to a merchant's web site. Also known as a referral fee, a finder's fee, or a bounty.
Cookies: Small files stored on the visitor's computer, which record information that is of interest to the merchant site. With affiliate programs, cookies have two primary functions: to keep track of what a customer purchases, and to track which affiliate was responsible for generating the sale (and is due a commission).
Context-Centric: Matching your product or service offer closely to the visitors of an affiliate's site. Place the product or service in-context (closely related to the content it's next to) and more people will buy.
Contextual Link: Integration of affiliate links with related text.
Contextual Merchandising: Placing targeted products near relevant content.
Conversion Rate: Percentage obtained by dividing the number of click-through's on a banner or link by the number of sales or leads that resulted. A higher CR ratio means a more effective advertiser site.
CPA (Cost Per Action): An online advertising pricing model in which payment is based solely on qualifying actions such as sales or registrations, or leads
CPC (Cost Per Click): Cost incurred to get one person to click on an advertisement (banner, text or other form of web advertising) which, in turn, leads to usage of the site referred by the link. An affiliate program that compensates using CPC pays a nominal amount for each click-through, essentially per visitor, delivered to the target site via an affiliate link. Pay Per Click search engines offer advertising paid for on a per-click basis.
CPM (Cost Per Thousand): Unit used to measure the cost to display 1,000 advertisements (banners, text ads or other online advertisements with the ability to be tracked). For example, a CPM rate of $10 for banner ads means that it will cost $10 to purchase 1,000 banner ad impressions.
CPO (Cost Per Order): Cost metric for each time an order is transacted.
Creative: The promotional tools advertisers use to draw in users. Examples are text links, towers, buttons, badges, email copy, and pop-ups.
Disclaimer: States the terms under which the site or work may be used and gives information relating to what the copyright owner believes to be a breach of his/her/their copyright.
In some cases, you may wish to permit certain activities. In other instances, you may wish to withhold all rights, or require the user to apply for a license to carry out certain actions.
Electronic magazine (eZine): Either an electronic version of existing print magazines, or a digital format only magazine.
E-mail Link: An affiliate link to a merchant site in an e-mail newsletter, signature, or a dedicated e-mail blast.
email Signature (or Sig File): Option allowing for a brief message to be imbedded at the end of every email that a person sends.
FAQ: (Frequently Asked Questions) Documents that answer the most common questions on a particular subject.
HTML code: The lines of code that affiliates use to put links on their Web sites. Affiliate solution providers often provide a tool where affiliates can simply copy the code for an affiliate link and paste it into their own HTML pages.
Hybrid Model: Affiliate commission model that combines payment options (i.e. CPC & CPA).
Impression: Advertising metric that indicates how many times an advertising link is displayed.
In-house: Alternative to using an affiliate solution provider; building affiliate program architecture within a company.
Landing page: A web page (on a merchant site) where visitors are redirected after they click on an affiliate link.
Lead: Collected information of interested visitors are used from merchant for selling.
Lifetime Value of a Customer: The amount of sales (in dollars) that a customer will spend in his lifetime with a particular company.
Manual Approval: Affiliate application approval process where all applicants are manually approved for an affiliate program.
Media Metrix: Measures traffic counts on all the web sites and digital media properties on the Internet. They regularly publish the names of the Top 50 websites in the US, the Global Top 50, and the Media Metrix Top 500 web sites.
Merchant: An online business that markets and sells goods or services. Merchants establish affiliate programs as a cost effective method to get consumers to purchase a product, register for a service, fill out a form, or visit a Web site.
Mini-site: Prefabricated HTML page for affiliates that displays new or specialized products with integrated affiliate links.
“Off the Click”: Ratio of conversions to clicks.
Pay-Per-Sale: Program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sale of a product or service that they refer to a merchant's web site. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions and the lowest conversion ratio.
Pay-Per-Lead: Program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sales lead that they generate for a merchant web site. (i.e. would include completed surveys, contest or sweepstakes entries, downloaded software demos, or free trials.) Pay-per-lead generally offers mid-range commissions and mid-range to high conversion ratios.
Pay-Per-Click: Program where an affiliate receive a commission for each click (visitor) they refer to a merchant's web site. Pay-per-click programs generally offer some of the lowest commissions (from $0.01 to $0.25 per click), and a very high conversion ratio since visitors only need to click on a link to earn the affiliate a commission.
Plug-in: A small piece of software that adds features to a larger piece of software.
Recurring Commissions: Ability to earn commissions both on the initial sale, as well as subsequent purchases of the same product or service. Examples of affiliate programs that may pay recurring commissions are online dating services and web hosting services.
Residual Earnings: Programs that pay affiliates not just for the first sale, a shopper from their sites makes, but all additional sales made at the merchant's site over the life of the customer.
ROAS: 'Return on Advertising Spending'. 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 spent.
ROI: Stands for '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.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
Server: A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running, e.g."Our mail server is down today, that's why e-mail isn't getting out." A single server machine could have several different server software packages running on it, thus providing many different servers to clients on the network.
Spam (or Spamming): Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings, generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.
Storefront: Prefabricated HTML page for affiliates that displays new or specialized products with integrated affiliate links.
Super Affiliates: A small percentage of sites - the top one percent of affiliates, based on performance and earnings - that generate the lions share of the revenue for your program. They are born marketers and are very successful with the affiliate program they promote from their sites.
Targeted Marketing: Offering the right offer to the right customer at the right time.
Text Link: Link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.
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.
Two-tier: Affiliate marketing model that allows affiliates to sign up additional affiliates below themselves, so that when the second tier affiliates earn a commission, the affiliate above them also receives a commission. Two-tier affiliate marketing is also known as (MLM) Multilevel Marketing.
Unique Click: The process of only counting unique clicks from each web visitor. Unique clicks are typically tracked by recording the IP address and browser header.
Viral Marketing: The rapid adoption of a product or passing on of an offer to friends and family through word-of-mouth (or word-of-email) networks. Any advertising that propagates itself the way viruses do.
Sources:
http://www.seobook.com/glossary/
http://www.affiliatewiz.com/Affiliate-Marketing-Resources/affiliate_marketing_glossary.asp
http://www.affiliatescout.com/glossary.html
