Affiliate Terms Glossary

Glossary of Affiliate Terms

A

Advanced Link: Advanced links include flash banners, HTML banners, email creatives, printable coupons, videos, search box banners and other interactive links that publishers can use to promote advertisers.

Advertiser/Merchant: An advertiser, or merchant, is a company that sells a product or service online. Advertisers partner with publishers to help promote their services or products online. Advertisers provide their publishers with ads, banners, text links, and other creatives to promote in exchange for commissions on leads or sales.

API (application program interface): A set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications. Advertisers and publishers utilize API’s to systematically pull in information to store in their own internal systems. Our API is accessible through a REST-based interface and is offered to both advertisers and publishers.

Auto Escrow: This is an automatic payment system that allows the advertiser to set up a credit card to the account to be automatically charged for activity.

Attribution: method used to track the different touch points that result in a sale/lead for an advertiser

Average Order Size/Value (AOV): The AOV is calculated by taking the total amount of sales revenue and dividing it by the total number of conversions, or purchases, the advertiser recorded through their shopping cart for a specific time period.

B

Banner: A clickable graphic ad. Banners can be static or animated and are offered in various sizes. Banners often display the advertiser’s logo, best-selling products, promotions, or highlight any new offer that is available from the retailer.

Baseline Commission: The default commission rate an advertiser has set up for their affiliate program. The baseline commission is visible to publishers in the interface and they receive the baseline commission for any sale/lead they refer to the program.

Best of web: the lowest price currently available for a product across the Internet.

Bonus: An action taken within the account to pay a publisher for a placement on their site or any other monetary compensation that needs to be provided.

C

Click: occurs when a consumer uses their mouse or touchpad to click on a link.

Click-through Rate (CTR): (Clicks/Imp) * 100.

Co-Branded Landing Page: A landing page on the advertiser’s site that displays a clear relationship between the advertiser/publisher. Co-Branded landing pages may help to increase conversion rates.

Commission rate: the percentage in which a publisher is paid per sale/lead.

Commission: Compensation provided to the publisher for generating a sale/lead.

Content Publisher: A publisher that prepares and issues or delivers content to an audience. Examples include bloggers and online magazines.

Conversion: Sales/leads that have resulted from clicks through affiliate links.

Cookie: A cookie is dropped when a user clicks through an affiliate link. The cookie is then stored for a certain length of time until the user visits the site again. The website will recognize the user because of the information stored from the cookie.

Cost Per Action (CPA): A commission structure in which the advertiser pays a flat fee for each specific action (click, sign-up, sale).

Cost Per Click (CPC): A commission structure in which an advertiser pays publishers a flat amount every time a visitor clicks through a link on the publisher’s website and is redirected to the advertiser’s site.

Cost Per Lead (CPL): Cost per lead is a pricing model in which a visitor referred by the publisher completes a sign-up form with information about a visitor likely to be interested in a specific product or service. CPL advertising is also referred to as online lead generation.

Cost Per Thousand Impressions/Cost Per Thousand (CPM): A commission method traditionally used in advertising in which an advertiser pays a set amount for every 1,000 impressions served. Also referred to as "cost-per-mille”.

Coupon Publisher: These publishers focus on promoting coupon codes and promotions.

Creative: Promotional materials advertisers use to attract consumers to their websites or products. These include text links, banner ads, coupons, email copy, and videos, among others.

D

Deep linking: Deep Linking occurs when a publisher takes an existing affiliate tracking link and changes the destination URL to direct to a specific landing page within a merchant’s website.  For example, if a publisher wants to promote a specific product or category page that does not already have a corresponding tracking link available within the merchant’s affiliate program, the publisher will change the destination of another tracking link to direct to this preferred page.  Deep Linking can be enabled or disabled for each and every creative within the affiliate program

E

Earnings per click (EPC): commission/clicks

Exclusive Offer: An offer that is provided to only one select publisher.

G

Generic link: The Generic Link is the URL for the homepage of a merchant’s website.  It is available to publishers at any time and does not expire.  The Generic Link should include any additional tracking parameters that the merchant wants to capture and track within their own analytics software.  The Generic Link is one of the most frequently used creatives within a merchant’s affiliate program and, as a result, a significant portion of the program’s revenue and traffic activity may be tied to this creative.

Geo-fencing: Geo-fencing, location based targeting, is a technology that allows an advertiser to select a geographic point using latitude and longitude information and then to create a virtual "fence" around that point of a given radius

Geo-targeting: A method of marketing that identifies potential visitors and provides them with content based on their location, including country, state, and city. For instance, an ad that is served on a user’s smart phone for a store within five miles of their present location.

I

Impression: occurs each time an ad is displayed to a consumer

Item ID: An identifier for a specific item or SKU that the advertiser (merchant) pass through the tracking pixel to allow item-level commissioning and reporting. Typically, the item ID that is passed through the pixel can also be used on the merchant site as a search term to locate the specific item.

L

Lead: A type of transaction, where the publisher is paid out for a specific action, such as filling out a membership form, online registration, or subscription, for example. Publishers are paid flat dollar amounts for these actions.

Locking Period: Locking period is the amount of time in which a transaction is eligible to be corrected or reversed by the advertiser before a payout for that transaction is dispersed.

Loyalty Publisher: Loyalty publishers promote advertisers by offering their users an incentive to shop using their links. Traditionally, these incentives are in the form of cash back (where the user receives a percentage of their purchase amount) or points that can be redeemed elsewhere (such as airline miles).

N

Network Commission: Ascend Transaction fees.

O

Order ID: an advertiser’s unique transaction identifier (i.e. AERO-3738977456)

P

Pay Per Call: A form of affiliate marketing where the advertiser pays publishers who refer customers to their call center, and can be customized to pay for leads based on several conditions, including call time, in-call actions, call location, and more.

Pay Per Click (PPC): A form of affiliate marketing where the advertiser pays a publisher based on the number of clicks that are referred, as opposed to the number of sales or leads. The amount that is paid per click varies based on the advertiser and the specific campaign.

Process Date: The date by which a transaction processes in our system. This is used in the Transaction History Report. When there is a sale or lead that has been corrected, revised or batched in, this will be shown under the processes date.  If no activity has been made to an order, the process date will match the sale date.

Product Feed: A product feed (also known as a data feed) is a file that includes attributes and details for products that an advertiser sells on their website.

Program Terms: The terms of a program refer to the Terms and Conditions that an advertiser allows for promotion. This includes restrictions (i.e., no email marketing and/or PPC allowances, US traffic only) as well as suggestions for promotion (i.e., suggested keywords, top selling products).

Publisher ID: the unique numeric identifier assigned to each publisher in the platform.

Publisher/Affiliate: A publisher (also known as an affiliate) is an individual or company that promotes an advertiser’s product or service in exchange for earning a commission through links that direct to an advertiser’s website.

R

RSS Feed: An RSS feed (Rich Site Summary), uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video.

S

Sale (Transaction): When a purchase is made through an affiliate link.

Sale (Discount): A decreased cost of a specific item or purchase amount.

Sale Date: The date the actual purchase occurs firing the pixel.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): also known as Paid Search. The process by which advertisers increase their visibility in search engine results. This includes bidding on and winning placement for the links that appear on the top or right-hand side of a search results page

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): also known as Organic Search. The process by which advertisers improve their ranking in a search engine's unpaid search results – the links that appear in the center of a search page. This includes editing the content of a site so that more keywords appear on it.

Semi-Exclusive Offer: An offer that is provided to a select group of publishers.

SID (Sub-ID): a parameter that publishers can add to their tracking links to uniquely identify where their transactions were generated.

SKU: Stock keeping unit, typically found within a product feed. This is unique to each advertiser and customarily relates to each individual item purchasable on the advertiser’s site

Sub-Affiliate Network/Syndicator: A publisher which manages their own network of sites that promote advertisers. All activity is tracked through one account on the network.

T

Term: A payout and rules associated with it.

Text Link: A text link is a contextual creative that may feature a promotion/offer, or simply contain the name of the advertiser or a category they want to feature.

Trademark Bidding: a form of search marketing in which the publisher bids on the advertiser’s trademark.

Trademark Plus Bidding: a form of search marketing in which the publisher bids on the advertiser’s trademark followed by a keyword.

Transaction ID: Pepperjam’s internal unique transaction identifier.

Transaction Inquiry: Publishers typically submit transaction inquiries if they did not receive commission for a sale/lead that they believe should have been credited. Transaction inquiries help publishers determine why they did not receive commission for a transaction, as after they are submitted and reviewed by the advertiser, the advertiser can accept or reject the inquiry. If it is rejected, it is typically because the sale/lead was attributed to another publisher or channel outside of affiliate. Publishers can upload a transaction inquiry individually or bulk upload inquiries via CSV in the publisher interface.

U

UPC: universal product code