Affiliate Marketing Glossary

Earnings Per Click (EPC)

To calculate EPC, simply divide your total revenue by total clicks on your affiliate links (ie HopLinks on ClickBank).

Average Order Value (AOV)

Total revenue / # of initial orders. As a seller in the e-commerce space, your average order value (AOV) is a crucial metric in gauging the overall health of your offer.

Lifetime Value (LTV)

AOV # of orders per year average retention time in years.

Cost Per Action (CPA)

An affiliate marketing commission model centered around "cost per sale.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

# of clicks / # of visitors on a webpage.

Conversion Rate

# of buyers / # of visitors who saw an offer.

Tracking Links

A special URL that tracks behaviors, such as clicks or purchases.

One Time Offer (OTO)

An additional offer presented in an order flow.

Landing Page

The main sales page for a seller.

Affiliate

A business owner or entrepreneur who promotes products or services for a third party in exchange for a commission, typically offered for new sales or leads.

Affiliate link

An affiliate link is a specific type of tracking link that you can generate from a seller to promote their offer. This can be a text link or an image link. (Also see "HopLink")

Affiliate marketing

An industry built around the model of selling products through affiliates. Each time an affiliate makes a sale for a seller or brand, the affiliate will receive a commission.

Affiliate network

A company that oversees affiliate relationships for a number of other companies, managing functions such as technology, recruitment, tracking, payments, etc. This is similar to the idea of an affiliate marketplace, but not identical.

Attribution

The concept of attribution applies to all of marketing as a way to determine which marketing channels provided value in making new sales or growing revenue. For example, you can use a tracking link to see how many sales came from an email.

Average Payout Value (APV)

The average commission amount you get paid for each sale as an affiliate.

Banner ad

An image-based Internet advertisement that can be placed on an affiliate's website.

Commission

The payout an affiliate receives in exchange for promoting a seller's product.

Commission Rate

The standard rate a seller pays their affiliates in exchange for an offer promotion.

Conversion

Describes the completion of a specific goal online. Examples of conversion goals include new email subscribers, new opportunities or leads, and new sales or customers.

Cookie

A text file that is stored in a browser for a specified period of time (ie cookie duration) in order to hold information such as last date visited. Cookies are used to track unique IDs in the affiliate marketing world.

Cookie Duration

The amount of time a cookie will give credit to an affiliate for purchases made from a specific customer.

CPM - Cost per mille (CPM)

how much you have to pay to get your display ad or text ad viewed one thousand times. In this case, the CPM is paid out based on impressions, rather than clicks or sales.

First Click

This type of attribution in affiliate marketing gives credit to the affiliate who first referred a customer to an offer.

JV

A joint venture(JV) partnership is just that: a partnership between two or more parties in an affiliate marketing venture.

Impression

An impression is a single view of your ad, video, or webpage. Impressions are a useful way to measure things like conversion rate (how many people took an action compared to total impressions on a page), and they're also used in the CPM model for pricing.

Last click

This type of attribution in affiliate marketing gives credit to the affiliate who last referred a customer to an offer.

Lead

A lead is a sales contact, prospect, or potential customer, often pursued by businesses that sell high-ticket products or custom services.

Niche website

A niche website is a website that focuses on a specific topic

Authority website

Authority websites focus on a high level of categorisation and are more broader e.g the cover multiple niches.