CPA бизнес растет с каждым годом все больше и больше! CityAds выпустила свою подборку всевозможных терминов, понятий, сленга и аббревиатур. Словарь терминов CPA будет полезен как новичкам так и опытным вебмастерам. 

 

Полный словарь с русской версией доступен по ссылке.

Ad Network - A company that connects advertisers to publishers (owners of websites). There are several pricing models available, and you bid for impressions, clicks or views. Why use ad networks? To reach a lot of websites while at the same time being able to optimize your traffic.

Advertiser - An advertiser is the owner of an offer/product. They pay affiliates for every conversion. When an ad network speaks about “Advertisers”, they refer to people who buy traffic there.

Adware - Can also be referred to as “spyware.” It’s usually a part of computer programs people download without actually realizing that the adware is a part of the file. In most cases, these types of ads are unwanted and also quite hard to get rid of, even in case a user uninstalls the program.

Affiliate Link - A unique linking code. It enables the advertiser and/or the network to track any activity. This code is embedded in a text or graphic link which in turn identifies a visitor as hailing from a specific affiliate website when the graphic or text is clicked on.

Affiliate Marketing Forum - An online community where users can get access to information on various topics related to the affiliate marketing industry.

Affiliate Program - An arrangement through which the advertiser pays a fee to an affiliate for the action of generating clicks, sales or leads from links located on that affiliate’s website. These can also be known as partner, associate, revenue sharing or referral programs.

Alexa Rank - A platform which estimates and ranks based on users’ browsing behavioral patterns. Alexa’s data panel is a sample containing all internet users.

Affiliate-manager - Partner network employee who is engaged in the purchase of traffic. Sometimes affiliate managers are called Advertiser employees who purchase CPA traffic.

Alt Text - Alternative text. It’s a word or sentence that can actually be used to inform site users about the content type of a linked image. It’s similar to what is known as “anchor text.”

Anchor Text - The clickable words on a hyperlink.

API - A set of functions and procedures allowing the creation of applications that access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other service.

APK Offers - APK stands for Android Application Package, which is the file format used by Android operating systems for installing mobile applications – Apps.

Auto-Download Offers - Once the user clicks the banner, the content is automatically downloaded without the consent of the end user.

Backlink - Incoming links. This refers to all the links on other websites that actually refer to the website in question.

Banner Ad - An ad affiliates use to advertise a given product.

Bid - The bid that you set as your maximum CPC will most often be different from the actual CPC. Price depends on targeting, country, CTR, etc.

Black Hat SEO - The practice of increasing a web page’s ranking in a search engine results page (SERP) using shady methods. These methods are not allowed by the search engine’s terms of service and can therefore make your website become banned from both the search engine and affiliate websites. Google’s Webmaster’s Guidelines is one of many platforms that have denounced Black Hat SEO proponents.

Blacklist - If you have a RON but you realize you wanna stop buying traffic from some websites, you’ll create a filter – Black List (BL) – containing those unwanted websites. The term Blacklist can be applied to many more situations whenever you want to avoid specific parameters.

Charge Back - A product returned or a sale that falls through. Due to the fact that the sale failed to materialize, the advertiser will actually deduct the amount you were previously given as a commission for that specific sale from your affiliate marketing commissions.

Click Fraud - Generating fake clicks in a program based on the PPC price model. These fake clicks can either be generated by robots or humans and, since the traffic is of no use, persons who create a way to fake clicks are usually banned from affiliate networks.

Click ID - It’s the user’s identification code. It contains info about the segment, browser, hour, day, etc. It essentially contains data of where and when the user performed an action.

Click-Through Rate - The Click-Through Rate measures the percentage of clicks compared to the impressions. If you’re using banners, it’s very important to check your CTR performance since it’s one of the most important indicators, allowing you to make decisions. Normally, a high CTR means that more people are clicking your banners.

Click-Through - This is the act of actually clicking a link and later arriving at a website (destination).

Cloaking - The process of either hiding a webpage’s content or an affiliate tracking code on a link. This is a negative practice since it’s against the guidelines of search engines.

Commission - Known as a referral fee. The income the affiliate gets for generating a lead or sale to an advertiser’s website.

Content Farm - Term used to describe a site or group of websites that publishes huge amounts of cheap, low-quality content. This content is specifically created to generate traffic for search engines, thus generating ad revenue.

Contextual Links - This means there are links on the article.

Conversion Rate - The conversion rate is the number of conversions which have occurred measured against the amount of visitors who have clicked through to the advertisers website as a result of viewing your link. Example: 1 sale in 100 visits to the advertiser’s site would be a conversion rate of 1%.

Conversion - When a website’s visitor makes a purchase. The action of getting a sale, lead or subscription is referred to as a conversion.

Content - The content of the page or site - text, images, sounds, videos and other files.

Cookies - A text file sent from a site to a specific file in a user’s web browser. Cookies are used to assign a specific ID to a given user who has clicked the affiliate link to get to an advertiser’s website.

CPA – Cost per Acquisition - Action (CPA), sale (CPS), lead (CPL) or conversion. The CPA model is directly related to subscription services. Publishers get paid when someone acquires a product or service.

CPC – Cost per Click - You pay per each click on the banner/creative. Sometimes, affiliates can refer to “clicks” as re-directions.

CPL – Cost per Lead - A lead occurs when someone fills a form in which contact details are provided to the offer’s owner. The user does not pay for the lead. This model is usually associated with dating and sweepstakes offers, where the lead is used to send info about other products.

CPM – Cost per One Thousand Impressions - This means you’re setting the price you wanna pay for a thousand impressions of your banner/popunder for the users to view.

CPS – Cost per Sale - A sale is confirmed when a purchase is made. Transactions are normally processed by credit cards. This model is commonly associated with both dating and sweepstakes offers.

CPV – Cost per View - You pay every time your ad is displayed. If you know your revenue, you can then calculate your earnings per each visit (EPV.)

Crawlers - Web crawling involves a number of website URLs which need to be visited, named seeds. Then, the crawler of the search engine visits each web page and identifies all the page’s hyperlinks, adding them to the list of places to be crawled.

Creative - A creative is a promo tool advertisers use to get users to actually click-through and take action. Examples of creatives: text links, badges, banners, pop-ups, email copy, etc. Synonym of “banner.”

CSV File - A CSV file is a type of Excel file.

Currency - The parameter in which the advertiser transmits currency information. The currency must be specified in accordance with the standard provisions of ISO 4217 for currency reductions. Max 3 characters.

Daily Budget - The budget limit you impose on your campaign on a daily basis. If reached, the campaign will stop, restarting on the next day.

Datafeed - A file containing a list of all the products sold by a given advertiser. It usually includes descriptions, images, and prices of the advertised products.

Dayparting - Allows you to target specific days and/or hours according to their performance. Check your stats for a couple of weeks per hour, and see if you can find some golden hours to target.

Deep Linking - Most affiliate networks have a deep linking function. It allows affiliates to send a visitor to a particular page on the advertiser’s website. The affiliate link – by default – redirects to the homepage.

Demand-Side Platforms (DSP) - Interfaces where you can buy digital advertising inventory. You normally have access to multiple ad exchanges. This means you can get traffic from a great range of traffic sources.

Direct Billing Flow - When the billing is made directly from the cell phone’s balance through to the MSISDN detection.

Direct Buy - This means you’ll buy traffic in bulk by contacting website owners directly. In this type of deals, you normally get high and low-quality traffic. Direct buy is characterized by a high level of transparency – you know your position, impressions, expenditures, and dates. However, target optimizations are not an option since you receive the whole traffic. Some ad networks also present this possibility, which means you don’t have to contact the website’s owner directly.

Disclosure - A notice or page on your site which makes sure your visitors are fully aware that you’re actually getting paid for any purchasing suggestions or service endorsements you make on your site. The disclosure is crucial for you to be compliant with FTC laws.

Domain Authority - A score (in a 100-point scale) created by Moz. It manages to predict how well a site is gonna rank on all search engines.

Doorway - Shadow SEO Tool, a website created to redirect users to another Internet resource.

Double opt-in - This term means the subscriber has confirmed the subscription. The user confirms they agree to subscribe to the service. Then, they’ve got to confirm again. Ad -> 1st Confirmation -> 2nd Confirmation -> the user is subscribed.

Duplicate Content - Duplicate content usually refers to huge blocks of content across domains that either match other content completely or are remarkably similar.

Dynamic Tracking - A crucial tool since it allows you to track both your activity and investments. Ad networks and DSPs usually provide you with lots of tracking tokens for you to implement on your offers’ link and get as much data as possible.

EPC – Earnings per Click - EPC shows you the revenue you get for each 100 clicks. It’s the average amount of cash you can earn per every 100 clicks on your affiliate link. How to calculate the EPC? Take the amount generated in revenue from an affiliate link, divide it by the total number of clicks on that link, and multiply the value by 100.

Fraud - Fraud called various methods of fraud using information technology.In CPA, this word is used to denote deception by a webmaster or arbitrator.Examples: delivery of poor-quality leads, generation of fake leads, distortion of statistics on leads by an arbitrator, any other attempt to deceive the affiliate or advertiser on the quantity and quality of the result.

Fired Pixel - This is a well-known expression to all CPA marketers. It basically means that the click ID (user’s identification code) was triggered and you should receive that info on your side. A conversion flow can serve as an example: the user purchases your offer, the click ID is activated and you receive that info on your tracking platform.

First Click - When a program sets that the first user to get a visitor to click a given link and purchase within the specific limits of cookie expiration is the one to be rewarded with the sale.

Flat Deal - This means you’ll buy traffic in bulk by contacting website owners directly or by making a deal with an ad network. In this type of deals, you normally get high and low quality traffic. Direct buy is characterized by a high level of transparency – you know your position, impressions, expenditures, and dates. However, target optimizations are not an option since you receive the whole traffic. Some ad networks also present this possibility, which means you don’t have to contact the website’s owner directly.

Frequency Capping - The number of times (impressions) a single user will see each ad within a defined period of time.

GEO Target - Allows you to target a specific country.

Hit - A single request from a unique item on a web server. Imagine you were to load a page with 3 graphics – that would actually count as 4 ‘hits’, one for the page plus one for each of the graphics.

Hold - Frozen funds that are pending advertiser verification. After checking the funds from the hold, either go to the balance or go to fraud.

HTML - This acronym stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. This language is normally used to structure multimedia and text documents. It’s also utilized to set up hypertext links among documents on either different pages or the same page.

Hyperlink - This is a highlighted word or picture in a doc/web page which you’re able to click on to get to another place in either the same or a different doc/web page.

 

Impression - A measure of the number of times a given ad is shown on a specific page.

In-house network - Advertisers who manage their affiliate program by themselves using an affiliate software instead of an affiliate network.

Inbound Link or Backlink - A link from a website out of your website.

Incentivized Affiliates - This is where website traffic is bequeathed with incentives to complete a set action that ultimately results in the affiliate earning a commission. In fact, it could be a prize, discounts, money or even free subscriptions.

Index - It’s the database utilized by a given search engine. It has info on all the sites that search engine is able to find. In case a site is not in the index of a search engine, users won’t be able to find it utilizing that search engine. These indexes are regularly updated by search engines.

Indie Program - Independent Affiliate Program. It’s all about an advertiser who runs his own affiliate program using affiliate software instead of a regular affiliate network.

Internal Linking - These are hyperlinks that target the same domain as the domain in which the link exists on (the source). An internal link points to another page on the exact same site.

Keyword Density - The ratio between the keyword that’s being searched for and the total number of words which show up on a website’s page.

Keyword Research - This is something search engine optimization (SEO) pros use to find search terms people insert into search engines.

Keyword - A specific word a user can type on a search engine so as to find documents associated with that word. SEO experts usually peruse the most important keywords users choose in order to appeal to them, ultimately making them get to their website.

Last Cookie Wins - The principle that the values of tags in a user's cookies should be overwritten each time they switch from a new paid traffic source.

Leadgeneration - This is a general concept of lead collection.

Lifetime Value - The amount of money a given customer will actually spend in a particular company during their lifetime.

Link building - The process of getting hyperlinks from websites other than your own.

Loyalty Affiliates - Similar to incentivized affiliates. However, traffic is rewarded differently. In fact, the reward is actually a longer term commitment to the merchant. These users are required to become full site members, taking part of activities and purchasing products.

LSI Keyword - Latent Semantic Indexing keywords are those which are semantically related to your primordial keyword. For example, synonyms/acronyms.

Manual Approval - The review process of an affiliates. For an affiliate network to actually accept an affiliate as a member, the latter must be subjected to a review. The aspects reviewed are usually the affiliate’s identity, financial status, address, etc. Later, the affiliate can either be approved or rejected.

Maximum Budget - The maximum value you wanna spend on a campaign. Once reached, the campaign will stop until you restart it.

Meta Description - An HTML and XHTML element which describes the page you own to search engines.

Meta Tags - Info placed on an HTML page’s header. This info is not visible to external site visitors.

Meta Title - A title you give a webpage within the meta tags. The aim is simple: when a person sees a link to your page from the search engine, it’s accompanied by a title.

Mobile Affiliates - People who either target consumers via their mobile phones or users interested in mobile products of some sort.

Mobile Billing - It’s the type of user flow (from the moment they see the ad, to the moment of subscription or purchase).

 

Niche Marketing - The process of targeting advertisements to a specific market segment.

Off-Page SEO - Off-page optimization is about factors which have an effect on your site or web page listing on organic search results. These factors are off-site since they’re not controlled by neither you nor the coding on your page. Examples: page rank and link popularity.

Offer - An offer is any type of advertising content produced by advertisers (offer owners) and promoted by publishers (traffic owners). Typically, offers can only be found in affiliate networks. Only a handful of advertisers make them directly available to affiliates.

On-Page SEO - On-page optimization is about those factors that clearly have an effect on your website or web page listing on organic search results. These factors are controlled by you or by simply coding on your page. Examples: HTML code, keyword placement, meta tags and keyword density.

Opt In Email - An email which is requested by the receiver.

Outbound Link - A link to a website out of your own website.

Page Authority - A score (in a 100-point scale) created by Moz. It manages to predict how a given page is gonna rank on all search engines.

PageRank - This is an algorithm used by Google to rank sites on their searches. PageRank rates the importance of a given page analyzing both the quantity and quality of links pointing to it. This isn’t the only algorithm Google uses to rate web pages. However, it’s the most popular.

Paid Search - An advertising model utilized on many search engines, ad networks and content sites. In this type of ad model, advertisers pay their host only if and when their ad is clicked on. Advertisers will normally bid on keyword sentences that are relevant to their target.

Pay Bump - When an affiliate receives a higher payout for a specific offer.

Payment Threshold - The amount of paid commissions you’ve gotta have before being able to withdraw funds gathered with affiliate marketing.

Payout - Revenue received per one conversion. The value/payout, which is decided by the advertiser, can be either fixed or dynamic.

Payout increase - This increase in payments for one of your lead. If you consistently deliver good traffic to the network, you can ask the manager for a bump. The network can raise your payouts by 5-35%. At what point to ask for a "bump"? In any, when you have already proven yourself as a reliable partner.

Pixel - Expression: “the pixel is fired”. This is a well-known expression to all affiliate marketers. It basically means that the click ID (user’s identification code) was triggered and you should receive that info on your side. A conversion flow can serve as an example: the user purchases your offer, the click ID is activated or “the pixel is fired”, and you receive that info on your tracking platform.

Plug-in - A small app which adds certain features to a larger app – an improvement.

Portal - The term that’s utilized to describe a site that’s meant to be used as a crucial point-of-entry to the web or even as a homepage.

Postback URL - URL used on the offer that allows you to be notified — where you buy the traffic — that a given action has happened, such as a conversion, for instance. Also called Server-to-Server or S2S.

PPC Affiliates - Pay Per Click (PPC) affiliates usually send traffic through to an advertiser’s website. They use PPC engines like Google AdWords or Miva. Affiliates will buy relevant keywords on search engines so as to attract important websites that contain an ad offer that’s related to the keyword utilized.

 

PPC - Pay-per-Click. A payment model where an advertiser pays only when the ad’s actually clicked on.

 

PPL - Pay per Lead. In this type of model , affiliates get paid a fee every time a lead is generated. A lead could be a filled-out form or whatever else the advertiser has specifically identified as a possible lead.

 

PPS - Pay per Sale. The affiliate gets a commission once a sale is registered.

Prelander - This lander type is displayed before the typical offer landing page. Prelanders are a great tool to convince users of the need to buy the product that’s being promoted. Landers should be interactive and appealing so that users are driven to purchase the product.

Premium Targeting - Target specific zones or spots of a website.

Profit - The amount of money you actually earn from your sales after having paid all your expenses.

Publisher - An alternative term to “affiliate.”

Raw Clicks - It allows you to check how many overall clicks have occurred in your affiliate link. Raw Clicks will basically showcase each click which has occurred, even if it happens to be the exact same user clicking 5 times.

Reciprocal Links - An agreement between a couple of webmasters to give a hyperlink within their own site to each other’s site.

Redirection - The process of forwarding a URL to a different URL. 301, 302, and meta refresh are the three main kinds of redirections.

Referring Domain - Ref domain is a site with a backlink pointing to either a page or link to the website you’re looking at.

Referring URL - The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) a given user came from to reach your website.

Return on Investment (ROI) - Amount derived by actually subtracting your net revenue from the total amount of costs. This is a calculation used to ascertain the profitability of a PPC campaign.

Revenue - The total amount of sales calculated before expenses are actually subtracted.

Robots.txt - A Robots.txt file is used by webmasters to give instructions about a specific website to web robots.

ROI - See Return On Investment.

RON – Run of Network - A campaign type. When you want to target all the websites from a network.

Root Domain - Shortest domain form (without particularly specifying any subdomains.)

RTB: Real-time bidding - It’s a method where bids are made for each and every impression in real-time auctions that occur while a web page is loading (unlike static bidding, where the bid is produced in groups of up to several thousand impressions).

Search Engine Optimization - The process of carefully picking keywords and keyword sentences relevant to your specific website or site page. The general idea is to place these chosen words inside the content of web pages. The objective is to rank highly on search engines so as to appeal to a great number of potential website visitors.

Search Engine - A search engine is a software application that’s designed to find digital resources such as web pages, texts, news, images, videos, etc. using keywords.

Search Term - This refers to what users insert on a search engine at the time they’re wishing to find a particular thing. A term can be just a single keyword and can also be a combination of several.

Segment - A group of elements that define a user’s path. This term combines such elements as Country, Operating System (OS), and mobile Carriers/Operators. An example of a segment can be UK – Android – Vodafone.

SEO affiliates - SEO is the action of optimizing the content and code of a given website so as to improve that website’s ranking on search engines for particular keywords. SEO affiliates are sometimes referred to as “search affiliates.”

SERP - This is the acronym for Search Engine Results Page. It’s the group of results a search engine returns as a response to a certain word or sentence query.

Single Offer - Concrete offer designed for a specific target (e.g. FR – Orange – iOS; UK – Orange/Vodafone/Three – Android). They usually have static payouts.

Single opt-in - This refers to the most simple conversion flow. One confirmation and the conversion is done.

Site map - It’s a visually organized model of the content of a website. It lets users navigate the site to find the info they’re searching for.

Smartlink - Offer rotator, normally connected to an algorithm that ranks offers based on their performance.

SMS Billing Flow - Users need to send or insert their mobile phone number in order to be subscribed.

Social Marketers - Affiliates who expand the social element of their incentivized websites into other social media-related tools.

Spiders - Web crawling involves a number of website URLs which need to be visited named seeds. Then, the crawler of the search engine visits each web page and identifies all the page’s hyperlinks, adding them to the list of places to be crawled.

Split Testing - A/ B testing. The practice of testing two (or more) different versions of content, copy, sales or ads one against the other to understand which one gets a better performance.

Spot - It’s the ad format you’ll use to promote your offers. Depending on the ad network, you’ll have different options to promote your offers.

Subdomain - A domain that’s part of a primary domain. Instead of registering a whole new domain name, you can create a subdomain. The latter will be a sort of complementary website.

Super Affiliates - The elite. The group of select affiliates who generate close to 90% of most affiliate programs’ profits.

Supply-Side Platforms (SSP) - Interfaces that connect publishers/webmasters and ad exchanges. Here, publishers manage, sell and optimize their advertising space inventory.

Sweepstakes - Lead Generation offers for which users compete to earn a big prize, in exchange for some contact details sharing.

Targeted Marketing - Having the ability to distinguish the various groups that a market is comprised of, later developing specific products and marketing campaigns targeted at those chosen groups.

Target audience - term used in marketing or advertising to refer to a group of people united by common characteristics, or united for the sake of any goal or task. Common signs can be understood as any characteristics required by the organizers (for example, working married women from 25 to 35 years old who wear glasses). The main property of the target audience in terms of advertising is that it is these people who are more likely to buy the product. Therefore, it is to this group of persons that the advertising message and promotional activities are directed.

Text Link - A link to an advertiser’s website not accompanied by an image.

Token - A tracking token is a dynamically generated variable provided by a paid traffic network (ExoClick, Traffic Junky, Ero-Advertising, etc.) In offers’ URLs, tokens are used to track specific info in an ad campaign. Normally, you can add multiple tokens to your tracking software in order to help you optimize your campaigns.
Top-level domain (TLD) - The last segment of a domain name. The “TLD” letters normally follow the final dot of a web address.

Tracking Method - The method used by affiliate programs to track sales, clicks or leads.

Tracking Platform - This type of platforms allows you to track your activity in a simple and reliable way. Normally, you’ve got different filters available to analyze your data.

Tracking Software - Software that’s located on a server that’s not your own. This software records and tracks visits to your site.

Tracking URL - The URL of a website with a specific code attached to it. All visitors that arrive at the website will be tracked through this code.

Traffic - Number of visits and visitors a site gets.

Unique Clicks - The number of unique persons who have clicked the affiliate link/banner instead of the number of raw clicks (since the same person can click an ad 100 times). If you click a banner ad 7 times, only one of these will be counted as a unique click.

Unique User - A unique visitor that reaches your website. In affiliate marketing, it refers to someone who’s been tagged or identified.

URL - URL is an acronym which stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It’s basically a website’s address.

UX - Interaction experience, a term describing the degree of satisfaction with the use of a product or service, interaction with the service and the company. The term comes from a combination of English words user experience - experience of interaction. This is a combination of the user's perception of their own feelings and various characteristics of the object of use, such as utility, ease of use and efficiency.

Valid lead - This is the lead that meets the selected quality criteria by the Advertiser. A poor-quality lead is one that does not meet the previously specified criteria.

Viral Marketing - A type of marketing technique which galvanizes website users to pass on a marketing text to either other sites or users.

Web Host - A webmaster which basically provides storage and services needed to serve website files and pages.
Webmasters - Someone who manages the content and organization of a website. They’ll also be responsible for the technical programs and aspects of a site.

White Hat SEO - The opposite of Black Hat SEO. It refers to any method that improves search performance on a search engine results page (SERP). People who use these approved methods are obviously never going to risk being banned since they respect the search engine’s terms of service.

White Label - A product created by a company that other companies will later rebrand so as to make the original product fit their own brand. It’s basically a product sold without labeling. The term itself implies the labeling is blank for the marketer to fill as they feel like. Producers usually customize white label types of software according to a specific marketer’s needs.

Whitelists - Target only the best websites.

XML - Extensible Markup Language. It’s used to brand documents with a standardized format which can be read by an app that’s compatible with XML. This language can be used on HTML pages.

Ad Agency - Ad agencies or advertising agencies are media buying companies or even full-service creative companies which partner with marketers and advertisers to produce ad media buys or ad creatives.

Ad Tech - Ad tech – advertising technology – actually refers to software which is built for the advertising industry and which helps to improve the efficiency of media as well as increase operational effectiveness. This term can refer to numerous platforms such as DSPs (Demand-Side Platforms), or DMPs (data management platforms).

ASVOD - ASVOD or ad-supported streaming video on demand is configured to allow for ad-supported streaming. In general, these services tend to use a subscription model in which users (subscribers) are charged a monthly fee in order to access programming. HBO, Netflix and Hulu Plus are examples of ASVOD.

301 redirect - An eternal 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.

302 redirect - A temporary redirect from a URL to another. Search engines will decide whether or not to keep the old page or simply replace it with the one they find on the new location. In case the wrong kind of redirect has been set up, search engines can become confused which means there’ll be traffic loss.