Website Design

We can create your website for as little as

$199.99

Read more >>
Get pricing >>
Request Quote >>

Affiliate Marketing Abbreviations & Terms

AD - Advertisement, text, banner, flash, video etc. Advertising is paid communication through a non-personal medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled. Variations include publicity, public relations, product placement, sponsorship, underwriting, and sales promotion. Every major medium is used to deliver these messages: television, radio, movies, magazines, newspapers, the internet, and billboards.

CJ - Commission Junction (Network). Commission Junction is an online advertising company owned by ValueClick. Commission Junction is one of the large affiliate networks in north america, and operates worldwide. Their corporate headquarter is located in Santa Barbara, California. Commission Junction has also offices in the UK, Germany, France and Sweden. Commission Junction has over 1,500 customers including eBay, Buy.com, Home Depot, Circuit City, Experian and Yahoo!.

CPA - Cost per action. Cost Per Action or CPA (as it is often initialized to) is a phrase often used in online advertising and online marketing circles. CPA is considered the optimal form of buying online advertising from a direct response advertiser's point of view. An advertiser only pays for the ad when an action has occurred. An action can be a product being purchased, a form being filled, etc. (The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser.) Google has incorporated this model into their Google AdSense offering while eBay has recently announced a similar pricing called AdContext.

CPC - Cost per click. Cost per click (CPC) is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines. Advertisers bid on "keywords" that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red widgets, he/she would bid on the keyword "red widgets", hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy. These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.

CPL - Cost per lead. Cost Per Lead (CPL) is an online advertising term used to calculate how much the advertising dollar cost per sales lead. A sales lead is the identity of a person or entity potentially interested in purchasing a product of service, and represents the first stage of a sales process. The lead may have a corporation or business associated with the person(s). Sales leads come from either marketing lead generation processes such as trade shows, direct marketing, advertising, Internet marketing or from sales person prospecting activities such as cold calling. For a sales lead to qualify as a sales prospect (or equivalently to move a lead from the process step sales lead to the process sales prospect) qualification must be performed and evaluated. Typically this involves identifying by direct interrogation the lead's product applicability, availability of funding, time frame for purchase.

CPM - Cost per mil (mil/mille/M = latin/Roman numeral for thousand). Cost Per Mille (CPM) is a phrase often used in online advertising and online marketing circles. It means the advertising cost of every 1,000 ad impressions shown. CPM is considered the optimal form of selling online advertising from the publisher's point of view. A publisher gets paid every time an ad is shown.

CPS - Cost per sale. Cost per sale (CPS) is an advertising and marketing term, describing the cost of acquiring a customer, typically calculated by dividing the total cost of an advertisng campaign by the number of conversions. The definition of "conversion" varies depending upon the situation; it is sometimes considered to be a lead, a sale, or a purchase.

CR - Conversion rate. Conversion rate (CR) is the percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action upon visiting the website. The desired action may be submitting a sales lead, making a purchase, viewing a key page of the site, downloading a whitepaper, or some other measureable action.

CTR - Click through rate. Click through rate (CTR) is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and 1 person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1%. Banner ad click-through rates have fallen over time, often measuring significantly less than 1%. By selecting an appropriate advertising site with high affinity (e.g. a movie magazine for a movie advertisement), the same banner can achieve a substantially higher click-through rate. Personalized ads, unusual formats, and more obtrusive ads typically have higher click-through rates than standard banner ads. CTR is most commonly defined as number of clicks divided by number of impressions and generally not in terms of number of persons who clicked. This is an important difference because if one person clicks 10 times on the same advertisement instead of once then the CTR would increase in the earlier definition but would stay the same in term of later definition.

DRM - Dynamic rich media (type of Ad, technology). It has nothing to do with DRM as in digital rights management. Dynamic Rich Media (DRM) is a term used by Linkshare to describe one of their Ad Formats, which is in essential nothing else but a rich media Ad such as Flash). It has the feature that any changes made to the Ad by the advertiser via the Linkshare interface will automatically change the Ad on all publisher web sites as well, without the need for the publisher (Affiliate) to change anything on their end.

EPC - Earnings per click / earnings per 100 clicks. Earnings per click (EPC) is a way of measuring how much money was earned per user click. It is calculated by deviding the total earnings from click throughs by the number of clicks.

LS - Linkshare (Network). LinkShare Corporation is a provider of technology solutions to track, manage, and analyze the performance of sales, marketing, and business development initiatives. Linkshare boasts that it has created the largest network of affiliate partners of any program provider -- over 10 million partnerships -- in addition to becoming the first affiliate network provider to achieve sustained profitability. Linkshare also lays claim to being a pioneer in online affiliate marketing. The Linkshare network is touted by the company as the largest pay for performance affiliate marketing network on the Internet

OPM - (or APM) - outsourced (affiliate) program management. Outsourced program management (OPM) refers to online companies that specialize in affiliate program management for the merchant as a service agency very much like Ad agencies are doing the job to promote a brand or product in the offline world today.

PFI - Pay for inclusion. Pay for inclusion (PFI) is an online marketing product (Primarily for search engines) where the companies charges fees related to inclusion of websites in their index. Paid inclusion products are provided by most search engine companies, the most notable exception being Google. The fee structure is both a filter against superfluous submissions and a revenue generator. Typically, the fee covers an annual subscription for one webpage, which will automatically be catalogued on a regular basis. A per-click fee may also apply. Each search engine is different. Some sites allow only paid inclusion, although these have had little success. More frequently, many search engines, like Yahoo![1], mix paid inclusion (per-page and per-click fee) with results from web crawling. Others, like Google (and recently, Ask.com), do not let webmasters pay to be in their search engine listing (advertisements are shown separately and labeled as such).

PID - Publisher ID (Affiliate/Affiliate site ID). Publisher Identification (PID) is a unique number assigned by an add publisher to an affiliate in order to track traffic, leads, sales and commissions. This unique identifier is used by the publisher's ad servers to maintain the integrity of the marketing campaigns by its many affiliate programs.

PF - Performics (Network). Performics is an affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, data feed marketing, and online lead generation program company. Performics places a strong emphasis on certification of its employees, especially the certification for "Google Qualified Professionals", and maintains the status of "Google Qualified Company". Performics provides both search engine marketing and affiliate marketing services and is currently the 3rd largest affiliate network in the United States. When members of the industry refer to the "Big Three" affiliate networks, they mean the following 3 networks: Commission Junction/BeFree, Linkshare and Performics

PFP - Pay For performance. Pay for performance (PFP) systems link compensation to measures of work quality or goals. In this model, performance is determined in advance and can be as simple as acheiving predetermined sales goals, sales leads or traffic goals. When the predermined goal is reached the payment, based on performance is then paid out. Many Advertisers are moving towards this online marketing model.

PPC - Pay per click. Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines. Advertisers bid on "keywords" that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red widgets, he/she would bid on the keyword "red widgets", hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy. These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.

PPCSE - Pay per click search engine. Pay per click search engine (PPCSE) is an advertising technique used by search engines. Advertisers bid on "keywords" that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red widgets, he/she would bid on the keyword "red widgets", hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy. These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.

PPI - Pay per impression. Pay Per Impression (PPI) is a phrase often used in online advertising and marketing related to web traffic in relation to ad units viewed per customer. This type of advertising arrangement closely resembles Television and Print Advertising Methods for speculating the cost of an Advertisement. Often, industry agreed approximates are used. With Television the Nielsen Ratings are used and Print is based on the circulation a publication has.

PPL - Pay per lead. Pay per lead (PPL) is an online marketing term used to pay per sales lead. A sales lead is the identity of a person or entity potentially interested in purchasing a product of service, and represents the first stage of a sales process. The lead may have a corporation or business associated with the person(s). Sales leads come from either marketing lead generation processes such as trade shows, direct marketing, advertising, Internet marketing or from sales person prospecting activities such as cold calling. For a sales lead to qualify as a sales prospect (or equivalently to move a lead from the process step sales lead to the process sales prospect) qualification must be performed and evaluated. Typically this involves identifying by direct interrogation the lead's product applicability, availability of funding, time frame for purchase.

PPS - Pay per sale. Pay per sale (PPS) is an online advertising term used to calculate the earnings by an affiliate based on a per sales basis. Sale is an economic term referring to the exchange of goods and services for money. Sale is a type of contract for the exchange of goods, property or services. There are several types of sales.

ROI - Return on investment. Return on Investment (ROI) or Rate of Return is the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. The amount of money gained or lost may be referred to as interest, profit/loss, gain/loss, or net income/loss. The money invested may be referred to as the asset, capital, principal, or the cost basis of the investment. ROI is also known as rate of profit, rate of return or return. Return can also refer to the dollar amount of gain or loss. ROI is the return on a past or current investment, or the estimated return on a future investment. ROI is usually given as a percent rather than decimal value.

SAS - ShareASale (Network). ShareASale (SAS) is an affiliate marketing network based in Chicago, IL USA. ShareASale services two customer sets in affiliate marketing: the Affiliate, and the Merchant. Affiliates use ShareASale to find products to promote, and earn commission for referrals on those products. Affiliates use their own website, blogs, PPC campaigns, SEO campaigns, RSS and email, as well as a number of other means. Merchants use ShareASale to implement, track, and manage their affiliate program. ShareASale was founded in 2000, and to date has over 2,000 merchant programs hosted on its network platform, such as the University of Minnesota, uBid and Bozai Boy of New York. ShareASale's affiliate network is an Adware free network - not accepting any affiliate who used Adware or similar software products to place ads

SE - Search engines. A search engine (SE) is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network, or in a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieves a list of items that match those criteria. This list is often sorted with respect to some measure of relevance of the results. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently. Without further qualification, search engine usually refers to a Web search engine, which searches for information on the public Web. Other kinds of search engine are enterprise search engines, which search on intranets, personal search engines, and mobile search engines. Different selection and relevance criteria may apply in different environments, or for different uses. Some search engines also mine data available in newsgroups, databases, or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorthmic and human input.

SEM - Search engine marketing. Search engine marketing (SEM) is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). The three main methods of SEM are: Search engine optimization attempts to improve rankings for relevant keywords in search results by improving a web site's structure, content, and relevant backlink count. Pay per click advertising uses sponsored search engine listings to drive traffic to a web site. The advertiser bids for search terms, and the search engine ranks ads based on a competitive auction as well as other factors. Paid inclusion can provide a guarantee that the website is included in the search engine's natural listings. However, as of 2006 the leading search engine, Google, does not offer this service.

SEO - Search engine optimization. Search engine optimization (SEO) as a subset of search engine marketing seeks to improve the number and quality of visitors to a web site from "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. The quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase or requesting further information. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing first to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and secondly to human visitors. The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers", an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.

SERP - Search engine result page. Search engine results page (SERP) is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.

SID - URL parameter the affiliate can pass to get tracked with sales and leads. The Oracle System ID or SID is used to identify a particular database. Set the ORACLE_SID environment variable on UNIX and Windows (or ORA_SID on VMS systems) to work on a particular database. Column in the V$SESSION and other views used for identifying a database session.