Super Affiliate System Glossary

There are many new terms that John and the team use during the training program, and that are used on the forums and all networks that are related to affiliate marketing. We want to make sure that you are familiar with all of them, and can refer to the ones you are not sure about, here. 

Advertiser: The person selling the goods or service, also knows as the merchant.  The advertiser or merchant pays affiliates for sending traffic to the merchant's web site after a product or service is purchased. Ex. John Crestani is the advertiser/merchant of the SAS system on clickbank.

Affiliate: A Web site owner that earns a commission or finders-fee for referring clicks, leads, or sales to a merchant. that's you :) Also known as JV or Joint Venture. 

Affiliate Agreement: terms between a merchant and an affiliate that govern the relationship.  This includes the terms on which the affiliate will be rewarded for the traffic sent to the merchant's web site.

Affiliate Information Page: A page on your web site that explains the terms of your affiliate program including your commission rates, affiliate agreement, a link for existing affiliates to login, as well as a link to the signup page for new affiliates.

Affiliate Link / Hoplink: A URL tracking link that identifies the affiliate and sends traffic to the merchant's web site. Generated by Clickbank especially for you.

These links are unique in order to track the traffic coming from the presell page / website. 

Affiliate Manager: The person responsible for running the merchant's affiliate program.  This includes recruiting affiliates, establishing incentive programs, creating media for the affiliates, reporting on sales and paying affiliates.

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.

Auto-Approve: Affiliate application process whereby all application are immediately accepted/approved upon submittal by the affiliate.  This term can also be used to describe the process of automatically accepting all sales recorded by affiliates.

Autoresponder: A program that automatically generates a set response, based on predefined occurrences and time periods, sent to a particular email address.

Banner Ad: An electronic advertisement or billboard such as an animated GIF, Flash Movie, JPEG that advertisers a product, service, or web site.

Browser: A client program (software), such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Opera, that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.

ChargeBack: An invalid sale that results in the affiliate's commission being forfeited.

Click-through / Hop: 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.

Co-branding: situation where affiliates are able include their own logo and branding on the pages to which they send visitors through affiliate links.

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.

Cookies: small text files stored on the visitor's computer, which record information that is of interest to the merchant site. In affiliate software cookies are utilised to track which affiliate the web visitor came from and which banner or link they clicked.  They can also store the date/time of the click for purposes of tracking the time elapsed between a click and a conversion to a sale or lead.

Cookie Expiration/Cookie Retention:  When a cookie is planted on a web browser, a date when the cookie expires is defined.  This date is important because affiliate sales can only be recorded before the cookie expiration date.  This period will also determine if repeat sales will be recorded.

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.

Direct Linking: Refers to having your affiliates links go directly to the landing page rather than a redirect.  This can help with your search engine ranking.

E-mail Link: An affiliate link to a merchant site in an e-mail newsletter, signature, or a dedicated e-mail blast.

EPC (Earnings Per click):  Average earnings per 100 clicks.  A relative rating that describes the ability to turn clicks into commissions.

HTML code: Refers to the lines of code that an affiliate places on their web page(s) for linking to the merchant's site. This HTML code contains the unique identifier that identifies the traffic as coming from the Affiliate's web site.

Impression: How many times a banner advertisement was displayed or viewed.

Multiple Tiers: Refers to running a multiple tier affiliate program where affiliates who refer other affiliates earn commission off of those affiliates.

Manual Approval: Refers to the process of validating an affiliate application and then approving them after validation. This can also refer to the process of approving sales after they have been validated.

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.

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.

ROAS: stands for 'Return on Advertising Spending'. This is 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 spend, and a ROAS of $5 means you generate $5 in sales for every $1 in spending.

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.

Spider Detection: The process of detecting and ignoring automated spiders or bots such as search engines like Google/Googlebot.

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.

Solo ads: A marketing piece used in email marketing in order to get traffic, leads, and… eventually, make sales. SOLO Ads are email ads; this is, a selling email through which you're promoting your offer.

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.

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.

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.