Every term an affiliate, media buyer or SEO runs into, explained twice: first in plain words, then properly. Each entry has a worked example, the common mistakes and the sources behind it.
65 terms
An advertorial is an ad dressed as an article. It reads like a story or a review, explains a problem and introduces a product as the answer,...
Affiliate fraud is getting paid for results you did not really produce: fake clicks, fake sign-ups, or credit stolen for sales that would ha...
An affiliate network is the middleman that collects offers from many advertisers and makes them available to many affiliates in one place, w...
The approval rate is the share of your tracked conversions that the advertiser actually confirms and pays. Eighty percent means that for eve...
A cap is the maximum number of conversions the advertiser will pay for in a period, per day or per month, sometimes per affiliate. Hit it, a...
A CC-submit offer pays you when the visitor types in their credit card details, usually to claim a trial, a sample or an entry that carries...
A chargeback happens when a customer asks their bank to reverse a card payment instead of asking the merchant for a refund. The money goes b...
Cloaking is a trick in which the ad platform’s reviewers see an innocent page while real visitors are sent somewhere else. It is how bad act...
Conversion rate is the share of visitors who do the thing you wanted: out of 100 clicks, how many signed up, installed or bought. Two percen...
CPA means you get paid a fixed amount every time your traffic completes one specific action, such as a sale, a sign-up or an app install. Yo...
CPC is what you pay for one click. It is the price of traffic on most ad networks, and it is the number your earnings per click has to beat:...
CPI means you are paid every time someone installs an app through your link and opens it. The payout is small, often well under a dollar, bu...
CPL means you get paid every time someone leaves their details through your link: an email, a phone number, a filled form. No purchase neede...
CPS means you earn only when your traffic actually buys something, either a fixed amount per order or a percentage of the basket. It is the...
CTR is how many people click out of everyone who saw your ad or link. Show it to 1,000 people, get 10 clicks, and the CTR is 1%. It measures...
Direct linking means your ad points straight to the advertiser’s offer page, with no page of your own in between. It is the shortest path to...
DOI, double opt-in, means a sign-up only counts after the user confirms it, usually by clicking a link in an email. One extra step, so fewer...
EPC tells you how much money you make, on average, every time someone clicks your affiliate link. If 1,000 clicks earned you 250 dollars, yo...
The flow is the list of steps a user has to complete before you get paid: type an email, confirm it, enter a card, make a deposit. Short flo...
GEO is the country, or list of countries, an offer accepts traffic from. Send a click from anywhere else and it is either redirected or wast...
The hold period is the waiting time between a conversion being tracked and the advertiser confirming it is real and payable. During the hold...
A Hybrid deal pays you a bit now and a bit later: a smaller fixed amount for each conversion, plus a share of what that user spends afterwar...
Incentive traffic means the user gets something for completing the action: points, coins, cash back or an in-game reward for installing an a...
A KPI is the number someone uses to judge whether something is working. On an affiliate offer, the KPIs are the advertiser’s quality targets...
The landing page is the page where the visitor actually converts: the form, the checkout, the sign-up or the app store button. In affiliate...
Lead quality is whether the people you send are real, reachable and actually interested. An advertiser pays for a lead because it hopes to t...
LTV is how much money one customer brings in over the whole time they stay, not just on the first purchase. A subscriber paying 20 a month f...
NET terms tell you how long after a billing period ends you get paid. NET-30 means the money for this month’s conversions arrives about 30 d...
Nutra is the affiliate name for health and beauty products: supplements, creams, drops, slimming and wellness products. It pays well and con...
An offer is one advertiser deal listed in a network: promote this product, in these countries, with this kind of traffic, and get paid this...
An offerwall is a list of tasks shown inside an app or website where users earn rewards for completing them: install a game and reach level...
The payout is what the network pays you for one conversion. It can be a fixed amount or a percentage, it can differ by country, and it is th...
A payout bump is a raise. After you have sent an offer enough good traffic, the network or advertiser agrees to pay you more per conversion...
A prelander is a page you show between the ad and the offer. Its only job is to warm the visitor up: explain the problem, build some trust a...
RevShare means you get a cut of the money the advertiser makes from the users you sent, for as long as the deal says, instead of one fixed p...
ROI tells you how much you made back for every dollar you put in, after subtracting what you spent. Spend 1,000, earn 1,300, and your ROI is...
Scrubbing is when the advertiser declines some of the conversions you sent, so they drop out of your earnings. Some of it is legitimate: fak...
A smartlink is a single link that decides by itself which offer to show each visitor. Someone on an iPhone in Germany gets one offer, someon...
SOI, single opt-in, means a sign-up counts the moment the user submits the form. No confirmation email, no second click. For an affiliate it...
Sweepstakes offers invite people to enter a prize draw, for a gift card, a phone or cash, by leaving their email or details. The advertiser...
A trial offer lets a customer try a product or service free or cheaply for a short time, after which it turns into a paid subscription unles...
A vertical is the industry an offer belongs to: health supplements, finance, dating, sweepstakes, VPN and utilities, mobile apps, e-commerce...
Native ads are ads designed to look like the content around them: a headline and image in a news feed or a “recommended for you” box under a...
A placement is the exact spot where your ad is shown: a particular website, an app, a widget under an article or a position in a feed. One c...
Push traffic comes from notification-style ads. Either a user once allowed a website to send them browser notifications and now receives ads...
An angle is the reason you give someone to care about the offer. The same VPN can be sold as protection on public Wi-Fi, as a way to watch s...
The creative is the ad itself: the image or video, the headline, the text and the button. It is what people actually see and react to, and i...
The hook is the first thing someone sees or hears in your ad: the opening line, the first image, the first second of video. Its only job is...
ROAS tells you how much revenue each dollar of advertising brought back. Spend 1,000 on ads, get 3,000 in sales, and the ROAS is 3 (or 300%)...
Attribution is the rule that decides who gets credit for a sale when a customer touched several ads or links on the way. In affiliate market...
A click ID is a unique serial number stamped on every single click. When a sale or sign-up happens later, that number comes back with it, so...
The Conversions API is a way for a server to tell an ad platform directly that a conversion happened, instead of relying only on a pixel in...
A cookie is a small note a website leaves in your browser so it can recognise you next time. Affiliate programs use cookies to remember whic...
Deduplication means counting the same thing only once. If one sale is reported twice, the same person signs up twice, or two marketing chann...
A discrepancy is the gap between two systems that should be counting the same thing. Your tracker says 1,000 clicks, the network says 930, t...
GA4 is Google’s free analytics tool for websites and apps. It counts who visits, from where, and what they do on your pages. For an affiliat...
An MMP is a neutral referee for app installs. When someone installs an app after clicking an ad, the MMP decides which ad network or affilia...
A pixel is a small piece of code on a web page that tells another system “this visitor just did something”, such as viewing a page or comple...
A postback is a message one server sends to another to say: this click just turned into a conversion. Instead of relying on a pixel in the u...
A redirect is a forwarding instruction: you ask for one address and the server answers "go there instead". Every affiliate click uses at lea...
A sub ID is a label you stick on your own link so the reports tell you where each click came from. One offer link can carry "facebook", "cam...
A tracker is the software that sits between your traffic and the offer and writes down everything: which ad, placement and creative each cli...
A tracking link is your personal version of the offer address. It looks like a normal link, but before the visitor reaches the offer it pass...
UTM parameters are short labels added to the end of a link that tell your analytics where a visitor came from: which site, which kind of tra...