Important Affiliate Marketing Terms One Must Know

● Affiliates

Affiliates are third-party marketers that specialize in helping advertisers connect with their target audiences using a variety of methods. So, the affiliate functions as a traffic provider for the advertisers. There are different types of affiliates, but the vast majority employ digital channels like social media, blogs, Youtube, and similar platforms to publish their custom content.

● Advertisers

Advertisers are people who have products or services to promote digitally, and they do this with the help of publishers. They pay commission to the publishers, which varies with the campaign models. The advertiser generally provides links, banners, texts, and content to be used to promote the products.

● Affiliate Network

An affiliate network is a group of companies that offer compatible or complementary products and will pass leads back and forth. These are the affiliate networks that focus on connecting the top marketers to advertisers looking for their skills.

● Offers/Campaigns

Offers are various ads promoted digitally. An offer URL is a URL of a product or service that needs to be promoted. It is the content asset that lives behind the form of a landing page. It is provided by advertisers to affiliates to generate original traffic on the product, which ultimately enhances the sale of that very product.

● Landing Pages

This is a page on the website where traffic is sent to make visitors click on links and convert an affiliate offer to make a profit. In simple words, it is a page where visitors land when they click on a link.

● Ads Commission / Referral Bonus

Ads commission is the amount paid to affiliates in the form of commission as consideration for promoting the product of the brand or the company. It is an incentive that keeps affiliates motivated. A referral bonus is paid to affiliates when an affiliate suggests or brings more affiliates to the company.

● Lead

In affiliate marketing, a visitor's action is referred to as a "lead." The action here could be registering for the website, using an online service, subscribing to a newsletter, or doing something else other than making a purchase.

The merchant decides the course of action. Affiliates then receive a commission for each lead under the pay-per-lead payment method. Lead also conveys the visitor's interest in a good, service, or website before he becomes a customer of the business.

● Creatives

Creatives are materials that marketers use when promoting affiliate products and services and attracting new customers. These can be in the form of banners, text, or content. It was introduced in affiliate marketing to draw the attention of the target audience.

● Audience Targeting

It is a group of specifically acknowledged audiences based on common attributes like behaviors and demographics. Targeting is used to attract a potential audience that is, in one way or the other, related to the product or service of the merchant. The objective is to target the right audience and convey the suitable information to the only related audience.

● Revenue

It is the income earned by publishers through promoting the products and services of other businesses. Various methods to promote the products are display ads in the form of links, banners, or content.

● Payout

It is an amount paid by advertisers to affiliates in consideration of promoting their products or services. In simple words, the payout of an advertiser becomes the revenue of the affiliates.

● Impressions

The impression term is prevalent to quantify the number of digital views or engagements on an advertisement. Products are promoted by affiliates through banners, text, links, or texts. So a web page visitor makes an impression each time a banner, text, link, or another form of promotional content is displayed to them. A high number of impressions leads to an increase in the efficiency of a marketing campaign.

● Clicks

It is stated as an action performed by people in the form of clicking on the ad displayed by the affiliate. Pay per Click is the model used in campaigns where affiliates receive money when someone clicks on an affiliate link.

● Conversions

A conversion is any targeted action that the user should perform on the offer page. For affiliate marketers, the conversion is the thing the advertiser pays a commission or fee for. There are different types of targeted actions, such as downloading the application, registration, purchase, email subscription, etc.

● Traffic

It simply refers to the number of visitors who reach the website, landing page, sales funnel, social media, etc. that are being promoted in a specific period of time. Traffic can either be organic or inorganic. Visitors who find the website through a search engine are considered organic traffic, but visitors that are brought to it through social sharing are considered inorganic traffic.

● Acquisition

The acquisition involves marketing goods to a new audience with the goal of acquiring new clients. In view of this, it is essential for any company's e-commerce marketing. Acquisition focuses more specifically on prospects who are in the conversion funnel's "interest" or "consideration" phases. Acquisition, then, isn't about raising brand awareness; it's about developing techniques and plans to target customers who are looking into or thinking about buying a product.

● Attribution

It is the analytical research that identifies the marketing strategies that are driving sales or conversions. In simple words, it is the practice of analyzing the marketing touchpoints a customer comes across on the way to making a purchase. The objective of attribution is to evaluate which contents and sources had the biggest influence on the choice to convert or take the desired next step.

● Tracking Links

Tracking links are provided by performance tracking platforms, which are simple URLs with appended parameters to track the user’s activity in the form of clicks, conversions, and impressions. These tracking URLs are used by affiliates to generate traffic for the campaign.

● Postback URL

It provides a way to track conversions. A postback URL is a simple URL that tracks conversions. These URLs include the data parameters such as click ID, conversion value, and the placement ID used to connect to an affiliate network server or tracking server to verify conversion validity.

● S2S Integration

S2S integration stands for server-to-server integration. It is a technique for transferring information about web or app activity from one server to another. It operates without depending on a cookie in the user's browser by transferring data from two secure servers.

● Fallback

The terminology "fallback" is generally used for redirecting traffic to any other URL or offer. In such cases, where a user wants to optimize all the unused traffic in the form of out-of-target clicks, blocked clicks, restricted traffic, etc. to other suitable offers, then the fallback feature can help users with it.

● Application Program Interface (API)

It is a set of guidelines that programs can use to communicate with one another. In this way, APIs serve as a mediator to facilitate information exchange and communication between apps and websites as well as other software applications. APIs are mainly leveraged to transfer data from an internal software program to the cloud and to retrieve cloud data into an internal system.

● Deep Links

Hypertext links to pages on a website other than the home page are referred to as deep links. The term "deep" describes a page's position in a site's hierarchical page structure. Therefore, any page that comes after the home page at the top of the hierarchy can be said to be deep. Deep links can also be configured to send users to particular pages or events, which may tie into campaigns that one wants to undertake.

● Cookies

The smallest pieces of data that a web server creates and delivers to a web browser are called cookies. The cookies that web browsers receive are stored for a predetermined amount of time, which indicates how long a potential customer who clicks on the affiliate link could generate sales during a specific campaign.

● Performance Marketing Platform

Performance marketing software are result-oriented software that provides useful insights on the basis of various attributes to measure the performance of live campaigns. It enables affiliate marketers and ad networks to easily track, analyze, measure, and optimize useful statistics of campaigns through various data points such as clicks, conversions, impressions, leads, bounce rates, etc.

● Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP)

MMP is an external third-party platform that tracks, analyzes, organizes, and visualizes data from the mobile apps to provide marketers with a constant view of the campaign's performance and effectiveness across partners and channels. It uses a wide range of technologies to track and attribute mobile events like clicks, app installs, engagement, and so forth.

● Click-Through Rate

It is the number of clicks your campaign receives that counts as the number of times it was viewed. It is a ratio showing how often people who see your ad end up clicking it.

For example, in your live campaign, if you got 8 clicks and 100 impressions, then your CTR would be 8%.

● Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

It is a sort of performance evaluation that is used to measure progress toward a strategic target or objective. Different businesses use different KPIs to evaluate their performance in affiliate marketing. The decision to set KPIs is based on a number of variables, such as the product value, unique customer acquisition, return on investment, return on ad spend, revenue, click traffic penetration, etc.

● Conversion Rate

The number of visitors to the website who complete a specified action, divided by the total number of visitors to the website, is the conversion rate. In conversion campaigns, affiliates are paid on the basis of specific, predetermined actions.

● A/B Testing

A/B testing, commonly referred to as split testing, compares two versions of a website or app to see which one performs best. In short, it is an experiment where consumers compare two or more variations of the website by utilizing statistical analysis to ascertain which variation is performing better for a specific conversion aim.

● ROI/ ROAS

Return On Investment or Return On Ad Spend is the practice of attributing the profit and revenue of an organization. It is the return earned from the amount previously spent on ads. ROI is used to justify marketing spending and budget allocation for ongoing and future campaigns and initiatives. Numerically, it is calculated by dividing gross profit minus gross expenditure by gross expenditure and then multiplying it by 100.

● Cost Per Click (CPC)

It is a campaign model in which an advertiser puts an ad in an advertising venue (like Google, Youtube) and pays that venue each time a visitor clicks on the ad. In simple words, affiliates receive a commission from the advertiser whenever someone clicks on the advertisement

● Cost Per Action/Acquisition (CPA)

It is an action-based campaign model where advertisers pay affiliates when visitors complete an action on some type of form. For example, sign up, registration, purchase, etc. are defined by the advertiser.

● Cost Per Sale (CPS)

It is a sale-based campaign model where affiliates are paid whenever they produce a sale. Affiliate commissions for affiliates in CPS campaigns can be a fixed amount or percentage of sales.

● Cost Per Mile (CPM)

This is an impression-based campaign model where the advertiser will pay a set fee for his ads to be viewed 1000 times. In this model, advertisers will pay an affiliate for every 1000 impressions on the affiliate's website with the use of the advertiser's banners.

● Cost Per Lead (CPL)

In the CPL model, the advertiser is required to pay a set amount for each lead that is generated. Leads are acquired when a website visitor registers, makes a purchase, joins a mailing list, or engages in another sort of subscription. With the CPL model, a business has complete control of its brand throughout the campaign.

● Affiliate Manager (AM)

A person who manages an affiliate program and the publishers on behalf of an advertiser is known as an affiliate manager. Their basic functions include adding new affiliate partners to the program, supervising the onboarding procedure, and determining various strategies to improve the effectiveness of the affiliate marketing channel. Additionally, they focus on process improvement and giving the partners the help they require to get the greatest results.

● Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

A URL is nothing more than the web address of a specific resource. In affiliate marketing, an affiliate link is a general URL to track the traffic that is sent to the advertiser's website.

● Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

It is the practice of improving the user experience of your website or landing page based on website visitors' behavior to enhance the possibility that the visitor will convert to the specified page. Any publisher, advertiser, or affiliate should give priority to the process of conversion rate optimization. Whatever the conversion objectives may be, enhancing the online experience to boost conversions will lead to the ultimate business growth.