How do I understand affiliate marketing jargon
Think of it as another language and how do you learn a new language;
You should use it frequently.
Understand the meanings of the words.
Try writing about it on your blog, if you have a blog to test your understanding.
Find someone that you can converse with using the jargon.
Try finding a podcast or audio tape where the jargon is being used and listen to it as often as possible and explain to someone what they are talking about in the audio tape or podcast if they dont understand.
Affiliate: A Web site owner that earns a commission or finders-fee for referring clicks, leads, or sales to a merchant.
Affiliate Program Can also be called an Associate Program, Partner, Referral or Revenue sharing program. In such a program the merchant rewards the affiliate for web traffic, sales or leads on a pay-per-click, pay-per-sale, or pay-per-lead basis.
Affiliate Program Directory: A comprehensive listing of merchants' affiliate programs. The directories are typically categorized by industry and include the typical payout or commission rates. Click here for a sample list of affiliate program directories.
Affiliate Software: A software program such as Affiliate Wiz for running and managing an affiliate program. This typically includes signing up affiliates, managing links, tracking impressions, clicks, sales, leads. This also includes paying affiliates, etc.
Affiliate Tracking: The process of tracking a link uniquely by affiliate using an Affiliate Link.
Banner Ad: An electronic advertisement or billboard such as an animated GIF, Flash Movie, JPEG that advertisers a product, service, or web site.
Charge Back: An invalid sale that results in the affiliate's commission being forfeited.
Click-through: The action when a user clicks on a link and follows through to the merchant's web site.
Click-Through Ratio (CTR): percentage of visitors who click-through on a link to visit the merchant's web site.
Commission: Income an affiliate earns for generating a sale, lead or click-through to a merchant's web site. Sometimes called a referral fee, a finder's fee or a bounty.
Conversion Rate: Percentage of clicks that result in a commissionable activity (sale or lead).
CPA (Cost Per Action): The amount of cost for a conversion such as a sale or lead.
CPC (Cost Per Click): Cost of an individual click when paying on a per click basis.
CPM (Cost Per Thousand): The cost of 1000 banner impressions.
CPO (Cost Per Order): Same as CPA but refers specifically to sales.
E-mail Link: An affiliate link to a merchant site in an e-mail newsletter, signature, or a dedicated e-mail blast.
Impression: How many times a banner advertisement was displayed or viewed.
Pay-Per-Sale: An affiliate marketing program that rewards affiliates based on each conversion to a sale such as when purchasing a product or service from the merchant's web site. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions but tend to have the lowest conversion rates.
Pay-Per-Lead: Affiliate program that rewards affiliates for conversions to leads. A lead might include a signup form, software download, survey, contest or sweepstakes entry, signup for a trial, etc. Pay-per-lead generally offers midrange commissions and midrange to high conversion ratios.
Pay-Per-Click: Rewards an affiliate for each unique click to the merchant's web site. This type of affiliate program is uncommon because of click fraud or fake clicks.
Performance-Based Marketing: Marketing in which the merchant only pays commissions for results such as conversions to sales or leads.
Recurring Commissions: The process of rewarding an affiliate on a recurring basis whenever the merchant charges a customer a recurring fee. For example, a web host that charges customers on a monthly basis might reward the affiliate a percentage of each month's payment from the customer.
Residual Earnings: Programs that pay affiliates not just for the first sale a shopper form their sites makes, but all additional sales made at the merchant's site over the life of the customer.
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.
Super Affiliates: The highest performing affiliates. Typically less than 1% of affiliates are super affiliates yet that 1% typically will bring more than 90% of your sales.
Targeted Marketing: Offering the right offer to the right customer at the right time.
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.
Text Link: link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.
Tracking Code: Refers to the hidden 1X1 pixel tracking code that is placed on the confirmation page of your store for tracking sales conversions.