The Essential Affiliate Marketing Glossary

What metrics can I find in Awin’s reports?
 

Like any industry, affiliate marketing has its own terminology that can quickly leave the beginner confused. We have therefore collated a list of key terms that are specific to the industry as well as to Awin and provided simple definitions to help you navigate into the affiliate world. 
Please note that being an inherently localised industry you may find that some regions use different terms for the same concept. We’ve therefore included, where relevant, the variations that you may come across in different parts of the affiliate world.

This article only includes the keywords starting from A to J. The rest of the list from K to X is available in part two of this article: The Essential Affiliate Marketing Glossary pt.2

A 
Amended Date, Approved, Assisted Awin (1st), Assisted Other Channels, Average Order Value (AOV), Ad blocker, Ad server, Advertiser, Adwords, Affiliate, Affiliate ID, Affiliate Marketing Programme, Affiliate Networks, Agency, Analytics, Animated .gif, Approval Rate (percentage), Average Order Value, Awin Index

B
Banners, Bonus, Browser, Brand Bidding

C
Click Reference, Commission, Commission Group, Conversion Rate, Converted Awin, Converted Solo, Creative ID, Creative Name, Click Append, Click Command, Click-through (also called click), clickTAG, Co-Branded Landing Page, Co-registration Campaigns, Commission (also known as CPA or reward), Commission Tiers, Commission Groups, Confirmation/Thank-You Page, Conversion, Cookie, Cookie Length, Cost per Lead, Cost per Sale, CPA, CPC, CPM, Creative, Cross Selling, CSV Feed, CTR

D
Datafeed, De-Duplication, DHTML, Device, Declined, Direct Linking, Discount Code, Discrepancy, Duplicate Commissions, Domain Name, Dynamic Links, Dynamic Web Page

E
Earnings Per Click (EPC), Effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions (eCPM)

F
First Party Cookie, Forced Clicks, Frequency

G
GDPR, Geo-targeting, GIF

H
HTML, HTTP

I
IAB, Influencer, ITP , Interstitial, Inventory, Impressions

J
JavaScript, JPEG



  Amended Date
The date the advertiser made any changes to their previous validations.

Approved
The transaction has been validated and an individual publisher was attributed for the sale.

Assisted Awin (1st)
Sales or leads for which you drove the first click but were not the last referrer or the winning publisher.

Assisted Other Channels
Sales or leads for which you drove a click but the sale or referral was attributed to another channel.

Average Order Value (AOV)
Calculated by dividing your sale amount within a certain timeframe by the number of sales generated.

Ad blocker
A piece of software that can prevent online ads from displaying on a user’s device.

Ad server
A computer, normally operated by a third party, that delivers and tracks advertisements independent of the website where the ad is being displayed. The use of an ad server helps establish trust between an advertiser and publisher since the statistics are maintained by an objective third party.

Advertiser
AKA: ‘Merchant’, ‘Client’, ‘Retailer’, ‘Brand’ - Refers to a business that sells goods or services to a customer. In affiliate marketing, advertisers pay affiliates a commission for referring traffic to their site that then results in a desired action (for example a sale or lead).

Adwords
Adwords is the name of the Google tool which allows anyone to bid on keywords to appear within the sponsored listings section of the Google search engine's results pages.

Affiliate
AKA: ‘Publisher’: is the person or business who promotes the advertiser to an audience of potential customers. This is primarily done through a website, however, it may also involve a variety of other means such as an app, social media account or third party technology platform. In return, affiliates will receive a commission every time a sale is made on the advertiser's site.

Affiliate ID
Also known as Publisher ID: a unique number that identifies the publisher on the Network. It is used within all tracking links so that the Awin system knows which publisher to assign a sale to. It also tracks any banner impressions as well as clicks referred from the publisher's website.

Example tracking link with the Publisher ID highlighted in red: http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=2194&id=45628

Affiliate Marketing Programme
AKA: Pay for Performance Marketing, Performance-based, Partner Marketing or CPA). A type of revenue sharing programme where a publisher receives a commission for generating a lead or sale for an Advertiser online.

Affiliate Networks
(Also known as Performance Marketing Networks). A Network that acts as an intermediary between publishers and advertisers. It provides the tracking technology, account management tools, and the support required to run performance marketing programs & campaigns.

Agency
An Agency is an independent company used by some Advertisers to manage various pieces of online or offline marketing activity on their behalf.

Analytics
Analytics tools are used by website owners to gain a greater level of understanding of their website/online marketing activity. This can include the number of visitors, time spent on the site, popular pages, bounce rates, and exit points. The most popular free analytics tool is Google analytics. Advertisers may also use third-party companies such as Doubleclick, Atlas, or Mediaplex, which are usually charged at a CPM rate based on clicks.

Animated .gif
A type of banner that advertisers use for display advertising or to supply to their publishers. It is an animated graphic that rotates through various frames to display a marketing message, in which this animation is set to loop endlessly.

Approval Rate (percentage)
The number of pending sales that are confirmed as valid sales by an advertiser.

Average Order Value
AKA: ‘Average Basket Value’ - By dividing the money spent by customers by the number of individual orders they made we can calculate the average value of those orders or ‘AOV’. Often averages will be created to show the performance of an affiliate programme. It is always advisable to make the distinction between affiliates and affiliate types when considering averages as the variations may be marked.

Awin Index
A parameter to determine the success of an advertiser program. We calculate this by taking four pieces of data (click-to-sale conversion, percentage of sales approved, earnings per click, and validation turnaround time) and applying a formula to arrive at a score out of 100.



B
Banners
AKA: ‘Creative’: a graphical type of advertising that affiliates can use to promote advertisers. These come in a variety of sizes and formats. We support standard IAB banner sizes, as well as custom sizes required by certain advertisers. We support the following formats: GIF, JPEG/JPG and PNG, and HTML5 Banners. While many people associate affiliate marketing with banner creative, they typically will account for a small proportion of sales. 

Bonus
A monetary amount that is given by advertisers to affiliates that sits outside of their conventional commission structure. This may be awarded for particularly strong performance.

Browser
A browser is a piece of software that allows you to navigate and view websites on the internet. The most common examples are Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

Brand Bidding
A term used for publishers who bid on search engine keywords that are either the advertiser's brand name or phrases containing the brand name.

C
Click Reference
Or Click ref. A tracking reference is added to a link to monitor the link’s performance.

Commission
The total commission amount of all transactions during a certain period.

Commission Group
Used to identify different groups of products or customers that earn different commission rates. 

Conversion Rate
The percentage of customers you directed to an advertiser site who made a purchase.

Converted Awin
Sales and leads attributed to you where other Awin publishers were involved in the customer journey.

Converted Solo
Sales and leads attributed to you where no other Awin Publisher was involved in the customer journey.

Creative ID
An individual number that is assigned to each piece of creative.

Creative Name
The title that is given to the piece of creative by the advertiser.

Click Append
A click append is a command which is added to a destination URL in order to define the source of the activity which drove a customer to an advertiser's site.

Click Command
A line of HTML that is generated and included in the HTML tags. This HTML replaces the href attribute in the destination web address for a creative. A click command is used to track clicks on certain types of rich media, such as HTML, and on text-link ads.

Click-through (also called click)
A click-through occurs when a visitor clicks on a link or banner on a publisher's website and is taken to an advertiser's site. It can also be used to describe the URL that a visitor goes to once they have clicked on a banner.

clickTAG
A variable that is placed within a Flash file in place of an actual URL in order to allow the ad server to use its own tracking URL.

Co-Branded Landing Page
This is a landing page that has been built to feature the logo and additional bespoke details of the site which is referred to the customer. Setting up co-branded landing pages for top loyalty sites has been proven to increase conversions.

Co-registration Campaigns
Co-registration is the practice of collecting opt-ins for multiple organisations, and sometimes for types of products or services, on a website's registration page or on a paper subscription form.

Commission (also known as CPA or reward)
The commission is the term for the money paid to a Publisher for providing leads or sales on an advertiser's publisher program. Awin completes two payment runs each month: at the start and the middle of the month.

Commission Tiers
Commission Tiers can be established to reward publishers with an increased commission for achieving greater amounts of volume. This can be based on the number of sales or the amount of revenue.

Commission Groups
Commissions can be divided into groups in order to reward different amounts for different items purchased.

Confirmation/Thank-You Page
This is the page that a visitor comes to after making a purchase or providing lead information on an advertiser's website. It is within the source code of this page that the Awin tracking tag resides.

Conversion
The number of sales divided by the number of clicks. This figure represents the percentage of people who go on to purchase after clicking on a publisher's link.

Cookie
A small text file stored on a visitor's computer that contains pieces of information, including which publisher's website they were on before they clicked on the banner/link that took them to the advertiser's website. Cookies are often used by affiliate networks to ensure that sales are tracked correctly

Cookie Length
The length of time a cookie that remains on a user's computer; the industry standard is 30 days. This means that if your tracking link is activated by a visitor to your site who purchases an item in 30 days' time, you will be allocated the commission (assuming that you were the last referrer).

Cost per Lead
The commission structure where the advertiser pays the Publisher an agreed fee for each qualified lead (potential customer) referred to the advertiser's website.

Cost per Sale
The commission structure where the advertiser pays a publisher a percentage or a flat fee for a sale of a product or service to a customer referred to the advertiser's site.

CPA
CPA stands for "Cost Per Acquisition". This is the amount that the advertiser is willing to pay for an acquisition/lead. The cost per acquisition may be set as a percentage or fixed value, and is also a metric used to monitor performance and set targets.

CPC
Cost per click (CPC) is one of the online payment models in which the advertisers pay for each click-through made on their advertisement. Prices typically range from 2 pence to over 50 pence per click-through. This is an ideal method of payment for advertisers who need to guarantee that they only pay for the viewers of the banner that has been clicked on and lea to a visit on their site.

CPM
Cost per thousand (CPM) is one of the online payment models by which advertisers pay for every 1000 impressions of their advertisement. Prices typically range from £1 to over £50 per thousand impressions. This is an ideal method of payment for advertisers who want to guarantee only the number of people who sees their banner. The "M" in CPM is from the Roman numeral for 1000. The Roman numeral M was derived from the Latin word "mille" meaning "thousand".

Creative
A phrase commonly used to describe banner adverts.

Cross Selling
The art of encouraging a customer who is visiting your site to acquire additional or complementary items to their initial/main purchase. An example would be someone buying a holiday being marketed into also taking a car hire or travel insurance.

CSV Feed
CSV stands for "Comma Separated Values" and this is a format in which Publishers can download all products for a particular advertiser.

CTR
CTR stands for "Click Through Rate". This is the percentage of visitors that view a banner advert and subsequently click through to the advertiser's website. It is measured as below.

For example, a banner serves 125,000 impressions (views) and 1,600 clicks, 125,000/1,600 = 1.3% CTR.

D

Datafeed
A Datafeed is supplied by an advertiser and processed by Awin in order to ensure that all links and images are trackable by Awin. The affiliate will then use the outputted Datafeed within their websites.

De-Duplication
De-duplication is the process of attributing a sale to one online marketing channel under predefined conditions, these conditions will decide which tracking tag is shown on the confirmation of sales page. This can occur when a customer has visited publisher sites from both networks and ends up with two publisher network cookies on their computer.

Declined
The transaction has been validated and an individual Publisher was not attributed for the sale.

Direct Linking
Direct Linking is when a publisher's ad links directly to an advertiser’s site without going via a landing page or publisher site first.

Discount Code
This is a code that advertisers supply to publishers for them to promote on their sites that gives extra money off a purchase. Typically, the code is input at the first stage of the checkout process, which then takes off the value of the discount prior to entering card details.

Discrepancy
A difference between the statistics recorded for the same ad on two different ad serving systems, e.g. between a publisher’s ad server and an agency’s ad server.

Duplicate Commissions
A duplicate commission is a commission that has appeared on the advertiser control panel more than once, normally due to a visitor refreshing the confirmation/thank-you page.

Domain Name
A domain name is a friendly name that we use to get to a website, for instance, www.mysite.com

Dynamic Links
Dynamic links are links that can be updated quickly and easily by an advertiser across their publishers' websites; this is ideal for keeping product information on publisher's sites up-to-date.

Dynamic Web Page
A web page that is generated from a template at the time of request from the affiliate. This allows the addition of personalised elements, live feeds of data, and other dynamic data.

E
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Earnings Per Click (EPC)
Calculated by dividing your commission that is within a certain timeframe by the number of clicks generated.

Effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions (eCPM)
Calculated by dividing your commission within a certain timeframe by the number of impressions generated, then multiplying that number by 1000.

F
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First Party Cookie
The cookies that are generated and placed on a user’s browser by the website the user is visiting directly. The domain owner uses first-party cookies to collect analytics data of visitors and to provide a better user experience.

Forced Clicks
A click that occurred without the user's consent.

Frequency
A term used to describe the number of times the same advertisement is shown to the same visitor during a particular session or time frame. This can be accomplished through the use of cookies.

G
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GDPR
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation came into effect on 25th May 2018 with the objective of giving individuals control over how their personal data is used by businesses. It has arguably set a legal precedent for governing the use of personal data and has inspired other subsequent variations on the same matter in several locales outside of the EU.

Geo-targeting
The practice of using location-based information to target specific types of customer.

GIF
The graphical interchange format (GIF) is a graphical file extension. Most banner advertisements are created in GIF format.

H
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HTML
HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) is a computer programming language from which most webpages are constructed.

HTTP
The format most commonly used to transfer documents on the World Wide Web.
I
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IAB
IAB stands for Internet Advertising Bureau, a trade association for digital advertising. The board regularly meets to discuss items on the digital agenda, including research and promotion of the best practices for the industry.

Interstitial
An intrusive type of advertisement that loads between web pages without having been requested by the visitor.

Inventory
The number of ad spaces available for sale on a website.

Impressions
A measure of the number of times a web page is loaded. Often used to measure the effectiveness of display or banner advertising. Every time a banner is loaded, your impressions count increases.

Influencer
A term used to describe publishers who have great influence over a particular customer demographic. Examples in affiliate marketing would include bloggers and social media personalities with substantial, loyal followings.

ITP
Apple’s name for the ‘Intelligent Tracking Prevention’ facility that its Safari web browser uses to suppress the use of 3rd party cookies. The initiative was first launched in 2017 to prevent individuals from being tracked across sites by marketers and analysts. ITP has since undergone further iterations that have refined its ability to carry this out.

J
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JavaScript
JavaScript is a cross-platform, object-based scripting language, that is commonly used on web pages to add interactivity and dynamic content, such as banner rotation.

JPEG
Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a graphics format that displays photographs and graphic images.

Please note that this article only includes the keywords starting from A to J. The rest of the list from K to X is available in part two of this article.
See - The Essential Affiliate Marketing Glossary pt.2