#A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M|N|O|P|R|S|T|U|W|

Numbers

301 REDIRECT

An external redirect from a URL to another. These redirects will send website visitors and also search engines to a whole different URL than the one that was originally typed on their browser or picked from one of the results from the SERP.

404 REDIRECT

The response when a page can not be found

A

ABOVE THE FOLD

The section of a website or blog that appears in a browser when someone lands on a page on your site without them having to scroll. Never put ads or affiliate links above the fold as Google may feel this is spammy.

ADVERTISER

The company that makes the products or services that you promote. Usually referred to as the Merchant.

AFFILIATE LINK

This is the link provided by the merchant. It contains your affiliate id for tracking and commission credit.

AFFILIATE NETWORK

A company that provides affiliate program management to a merchant. The affiliate network brings merchants and affiliates together and manages the program for the merchant. Affiliate networks provide the technology for tracking affiliate activities and tracks the affiliate sales. They may or may not make the payments to the affiliates. Examples include Share a Sale, Clickbank, and JV Zoo. We have an entire section on affiliate networks and programs

API

Application Programming Interface. This is a set of tools that a software developer can use to integrate with. Examples include Amazon’s Product Advertising api that tools like Prosociate use to import products to your website.

ASSOCIATE

Another word for an affiliate. Also the name of Amazon’s affiliate program — Amazon Associates.

AUTO APPROVAL

Merchants approve or deny affiliates an affiliates access to their program via automatic approval or manual approval.

AVERAGE ORDER VALUE (AOV) 

The average order value is the sum total of all orders divided by the number of orders. It’s a handy metric to know for forecasting your sales.

 

B

BANNER AD

A graphical ad that an affiliate puts on their website to advertise a merchant.

BLACK HAT SEO

SEO techniques that if discovered would be violations of Google’s or other companies rules. Examples would include PBN and cookie stuffing. If discovered you will be reindexed by Google or reauthorized by the merchant.

C

CHARGEBACK

The reversal of a commission when a customer returns a product to the merchant.

CLICK FRAUD

For affiliates, this is usually used in the PPC programs. Click fraud is when you (rather than a customer) programmatically or in some other way click on links to get credit.

CLICK-THROUGH

When someone clicks on your affiliate link and are taken to the merchant’s website.

CLICK-THROUGH RATE (CTR)

The number of times your affiliate link has been clicked on as compared to the number of times the link has been viewed. Your CTR is calculated by dividing the number of impressions (times the link was shown)  by the number of clicks to the merchant. The result is then multiplied by 100 to get your CTR percentage.

CLOAKING

Hiding affiliate tracking codes in a link to shorten the link and make it more user-friendly and easily tracked by the affiliate. Pretty Links is a common WordPress plugin to shorten or cloak links.

CONTEXTUAL LINK

A text link placed in your website content such as in a review article. As opposed to a sidebar or banner link.

CONVERSION

Getting a user to take the merchants desired action or commission paying goal. Such as buying a product or service, signing up for an email list or filling out a form,

CONVERSION RATE

The rate that shows the number of times your affiliate link has generated a conversion vs the number of times the link has been viewed. Calculated by taking the number of sales a link has and dividing it by the number of impressions the link received. Then multiply the result by 100 to get your conversion rate percentage.

COOKIES

A text file that is sent from a website to a file within a user’s web browser. Cookies are used to track your affiliate activity by the merchant, to install a Facebook pixel and other goals.

COOKIE EXPIRATION

The amount of time an affiliate Cookie lives for the purpose of sales credit. If a user visits your site and buys from the merchant during the cookies lifetime you get credit. Typically an affiliate cookie expires in 30-90 days. Some are as short-lived as 24 hours.

COOKIE STUFFING

A practice that somehow adds a cookie to a user when the user did not go to the merchant’s site. An example would be adding an affiliate cookie to all of your site visitors. Then if the user visits the merchant site at any time in the lifetime of the cookie the affiliate would get credit. This is a violation of all affiliate programs and a blackout technique.

CPA

Cost Per Action or Acquisition. It is the amount of money paid to the affiliate when the user performs the action desired by the merchant such as visiting the site or filling out a form.

CPC

Cost Per Click usually is used to measure ad campaigns effectiveness. It is the amount of money paid to generate a click or the number of clicks generated divided by the cost of the ad campaign.

CPM

Cost Per Thousand or the amount of money it costs to show an ad per 1000 impressions.

CSV File

Comma Separated Value file. A list of items like products with their values separated by commas. Tools like spreadsheets can create these files and many software programs like Prosociate can import files in this format.

D

DATAFEED

A file or electronically supplied information resource. Often a list of affiliate offers or products.

DEINDEXED

When you are removed from all Google search results. Typically Google does this for unnatural backlinks, PBN usage or other blackout techniques.

DISCLOSURE

A page or notice on your website to disclose to your visitors that you are an affiliate marketer and may receive compensation when they visit a merchant. Many affiliate programs like Amazon’s have rigid rules about disclosure notices for transparency reasons.

DOMAIN AUTHORITY

A number from 1-100 that attempts to define the authority of a site. It helps to understand where you will rank for a specific search term in Google and best used as a comparison to other sites. MOZ is the best-known DA ranker.

DUPLICATE CONTENT

Content that is either not original or already exists on your site.

E

E-MAIL LINK

An affiliate link in an email sent to a prospect. Some programs like Amazon do not allow affiliate links in your emails and require that the links go to your site.

EPC

Earnings Per Click. EPC is the amount you earn when someone clicks on your affiliate link and go to the merchant. It is the amount you have earned in commissions from an affiliate link divided it by the total number of clicks.

F

FACEBOOK PIXEL

A tracking code in the form of a cookie that allows you to create custom audiences in your FaceBook ad campaigns.

FIRST CLICK

A first click affiliate programs pay the affiliate who’s visitor first clicked on the affiliate link. As long as your cookie has not expired the user visiting another affiliate and then the merchant will not override your cookie.

G

GEO-TARGETING

The automatic redirection of the user to a specific page based on their location.

H

HTACCESS FILE

A file in your website home directory that sets 301 redirects and other rules.

I

IMPRESSION

How many times an ad is shown to a visitor on a page.

IN HOUSE

A merchant who runs their affiliate program by themselves rather than an Affiliate Network.

INDIE PROGRAM

An independent affiliate program the same as an in-house program.

J

JOINT VENTURE (JV)

A business relationship for one event such as when a developer teams up with an affiliate and share the commissions or profits.

K

KEYWORD

The terms, word or phrase that describes the contents of a Web page. In SEO you target keywords that people often search for.

KEYWORD DENSITY

The percentage of times a keyword appears on a web page as compared to the total number of words on the page

KEYWORD RESEARCH

Researching the number of times and other metrics related to a keyword’s use in documents for search engine optimization.

L

LANDING PAGES

The page that a user is sent to that is usually specific to a particular product or affiliate offer. Typically a landing page has no additional sidebars, headers or navigation to distract the visitor from the offer.

LAST CLICK

As opposed to first click. It sets the affiliate to be paid as the last one that a user visits. Previous affiliate cookies will be overridden by the last affiliate visited. This is the most typical setup.

LONGTAIL KEYWORD

A phrase as opposed to a single or short head keyword. For the keyword dog training, a long tail variation would be dog training for pit bulls.

LSI KEYWORDS or SEMANTIC KEYWORDS

These are related keywords such as synonyms. Google is now focused on inferring a page’s meaning vs. a simple match of literal keywords.

M

MANUAL APPROVAL

When a merchant reviews potential affiliates on a case by case basis prior to approval.

MERCHANT

The company that makes the product that is offered to the affiliate.

META DESCRIPTION

The page description that you want Google to use in their search results page.

META TAGS

These are the tags or metadata that Google uses to learn about the meaning and context of your page. Examples are meta description and title. Not to be confused with HTML meta tags which are no longer relevant to search results.

META TITLE

The meta tag that represents the title you want Google to use in their search result page for your document.

MOZ

A company that does SEO research and data analysis. They provide DA ranking of sites.

N

NICHE

A specific topic or vertical that your website is about.

O

OFF-PAGE SEO

The part of SEO that relates to links back to your document from other sites and social media.

ON-PAGE SEO

All of the technical SEO items that relate to your content. Including meta descriptions, image alt attributes, etc. See our Prosociate on-page SEO.

OPT-IN RATE

The percentage of people who subscribe to your mailing list compared to the number of people who were presented the signup form.

P

PAGE AUTHORITY

The strength of a particular page as measured by MOZ.

PBN

Private Blog Network. These are websites whose sole purpose is to provide backlinks to your site and improve your ranking and authority with Google. If discovered you will be deindexed by Google.  Effective but dangerous.

PPS

Pay Per Sale. In a PPS affiliate program, the affiliate is paid a commission when a sale is made such as Amazon’s program.

PAY PER CLICK (PPC)

A PPC based affiliate program pays a commission whenever someone clicks on their affiliate link also refers to advertising program payouts like Google AdWords.

PAYMENT THRESHOLD

The dollar amount of commissions an affiliate must earn before being paid.

PLR

Private Label Rights. This is content that you can purchase and market under your own brand.

R

RECURRING COMMISSIONS

With recurring commissions, you are paid on the initial sale and you also receive commissions on future payments by the purchaser to the merchant. This is common with SAAS products and Hosting. We have a post with over 125 recurring commission programs.

REVERSAL RATE (RR)

 The percentage of sales that get reversed by the merchant. This can help you understand the quality of the offering.

ROBOTS.TXT

A file in your website home directory with instructions for Google and other crawling agents. Tells the crawler if they have permission and any files to ignore

S

SAAS

Software as a service. Cloud-hosted applications that often pay commissions for on a monthly basis. Dropbox is a SAAS application

SEO

Search Engine Optimization. The practice of optimizing your website to get it to show up higher in the search engines for specific topics and keywords.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page. This is the page a user receives from a search. You want to always be on page one of the SERP as most user never go to page 2 and beyond.

SOLO ADS

Sending your affiliate offer to a rented email list. USually segmented for your affiliate offer. Payment can be by the click, the number of e-mail sent, opened, or other metrics.

SPLIT TESTING

Also called  A/B testing. This is the testing of two versions of content with different copy, design, etc. to search which converts better.

SQUEEZE PAGE

These are like landing pages with only the information about the product or offer. Typically shorter and mostly text. These pages are more specific in goal than a landing page which may have multiple objectives.

SUB-DOMAIN

A domain below your main domain. Such as demo.yourdomain.com

SUPER AFFILIATES

The top affiliates in an affiliate program, typically the top 5% who combined often generate more than 75% of the total sales for the affiliate program.

T

TEXT LINK

Is an affiliate link that is text-based vs an image or banner ad.

TOS

Terms of Service. These are the rules of your affiliate program. Breaking these can get you reauthorized and you may forfeit payments due you. See our post, Amazon rules don’t get banned.

TRACKING CODE

This is the affiliate code assigned to you by the merchant.

U

UNNATURAL BACKLINKS

Backlinks that are manipulated. PBN networks and paid guest posts are examples of natural backlinks.

W

WHITE HAT SEO

SEO that does not violate any Google or other terms of service.

WHITELABEL

Whitelabeling is when a  merchant allows an affiliate or reseller to sell products under their own brand with no mention of the original merchant.

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