The Affiliate Marketing Glossary: Every Term Beginner Affiliates Need to Know

There are several steps that individuals need to take to become successful affiliates, but they all revolve around learning something new. At ActiveRevenue, we’ve worked with thousands of affiliates of all levels, so we are familiar with some of the challenges that beginners face when developing their first campaigns. 

Learning strategies and analyzing competitors are both crucial activities, but all new marketers need to start with the most basic and find a reliable affiliate marketing glossary to learn all the relevant industry terms.

Below, we’ll go over some of the most important affiliate marketing terms that beginner marketers need to understand.

The Importance of Learning the Affiliate Lingo

Before going into the different terms you need to know, let’s go over the importance of learning about the right affiliate terms. Affiliates need to work with a huge variety of platforms when developing, launching, and monitoring their campaigns. 

In order to understand all the features, updates, and potential deals, marketers need to know what the most popular industry terms mean. If not, you run the risk of implementing the wrong features or opting for a platform that’s not entirely adequate for your specific case.

Every Relevant Term Beginner Affiliates Need to Know

Below, we’ve put together a list of some of the most important affiliate marketing terms you need to know.

• A/B Testing: the process of testing one or more variables in an ad, landing page, or campaign to determine which combination yields the best results.
• Ad Formats: the different types of digital adverts that affiliates can opt for, including native ads, push notifications, pop ads, banners, and many more.
• Ad: a piece of user-facing promotional content designed to advertise a product or service
• Advertiser: the company, individual, or organization that wants to promote its products or services through a partnership with one or more affiliates.
• Affiliate: independent marketing experts that specialize in promoting products through paid campaigns, SEO content, social media, and other channels.
• Affiliate Country Tier: the categorization of regions based on their marketing profitability, listed from most to least profitable, these are tier-1, tier-2, tier-3, and tier-4 areas.
• Affiliate Program: also known as the affiliate offer, this is the agreement that advertisers create when trying to advertise their products and services, this includes specifics about the goods being promoted as well as the promotion methods allowed. 
• Affiliate Verticals: the different industries and niches that affiliates can work with, like dating, health and wellness, gaming, and finance, just to name a few.
• Anchor Text: the visible words that link to another area or piece of content in a hyperlink

• Campaign: the strategy, content, and other elements of an organized marketing plan to promote a product, service, or brand.
• Click-Through Rate: also known as CTR, this value measures the percentage of people that clicked on an ad versus the number of users that saw the advert
• Conversion Rate: sometimes referred to as CR, this value measures the percentage of users that completed a conversion after viewing an ad.
• Conversion: refers to an action that affiliates want users to complete, like completing a contact form or making a purchase, the exact action is usually described in the offer.
• Creative Elements: the images, text, and other variables that users see in an ad. 
• Daily Budget: the maximum amount of money an affiliate is willing to spend every day on adverts
• Demand-Side Platform (DSP): a digital platform that allows affiliates to purchase advertising inventory, like ActiveRevenue.
• Evergreen Industries: affiliate verticals that can be promoted year-round and still deliver great results.
• Frequency Capping: the number of ad impressions a user is allowed to see within a specific timeframe.
• Impression: statistic that measures when an ad is displayed to a user.
• Keywords: a single word or phrase that consumers use to search for information online, usually through a search engine or similar platform. 
• Landing Page: the page that users are directed to after clicking on an ad.
• Lifetime Value: the amount of money an individual will spend making purchases from a particular company throughout his or her lifetime as a customer.
• Manual Approval: refers to instances where the affiliate application process is reviewed by an individual, rather than an automated algorithm. Usually requires more time than automatic approvals.
• Media Buyer: a type of affiliate that doesn’t run his or her own site, but purchases traffic from DSPs, publishers, and other traffic sources.
• Metadata: pieces of code used to describe the content in a page, include meta title, meta description, and other meta tags.
• Mobile Affiliate Marketing: type of advertising that focuses on promoting services and products exclusively on tablets, smartphones, and other internet-capable mobile devices.
• Native Ads: type of ad that appears to be part of the content of a page, but it’s actually a piece of advertising strategically placed.
• Niche Market: specific market segment that’s interested in a specific product or service, often more profitable than a mainstream market.
• Nutra Offer: affiliate offers designed by an advertiser in the nutraceuticals industry.

• Payout: amount of money an affiliate generates per conversion.
• Pre-Lander: mini-pages that appear before offer landing pages, which are designed to tell users what to expect if they continue viewing the content and improve conversion rates.
• Pricing Model: the type of advertising structure that affiliates agree to when buying traffic, includes cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-install (CPI), and cost-per-mile or 1000 impressions (CPM), just to name a few.
• Programmatic Marketing: type of digital advertising that relies on complex, instant calculations to assess, purchase, and sell ads online,
• Publisher: website owners, app developers, and affiliates that specialize in creating entertaining platforms that attract users in order to sell this traffic to media buyers, ad networks, and other stakeholders.
• Real-Time Bidding: type of programmatic advertising that allows publishers, advertisers, media buyers, and networks to exchange ads for money in a safe and fair environment.
• Return-on-Investment (ROI): metric that measures the amount of revenue generated for each dollar invested.
• Search Engine Optimization: digital marketing strategy that focuses on getting high search engine rankings in order to drive more organic traffic to a site or app.
• Seasonality: the phenomenon that influences how popular a product or service is depending on the time of the year.
• Supply-Side Platform: also known as an SSP, this tool allows publishers to sell their inventory in a fast, safe, and effective programmatic environment.
• Targeting Settings: a feature that’s present in ad networks, DSPs, and other traffic sources, which allows affiliates to choose which users see their ads based on age, location, interest, connection type, device, carrier, and other variables.
• Targeting Strategy: the plan that affiliates develop to ensure that their content is only viewed by the right audience.
• Tracker: a tool that allows affiliates to measure the number of impressions, clicks, conversions, and other variables in their campaigns.
• Tracker Type: described the specific technique that a tracking tool uses to measure performance, including tracking pixels and other methods.
• Traffic: number of visitors that enter a site.
• Traffic Type: describes visitors on a site or platform that are using a specific device or viewing a specific type of content, for example, mobile traffic and push notification traffic.
• Web Hosting: service that allows publishers to store their content.

Check out also our affiliate glossary for seasoned marketers

Ready to Get Started? Contact ActiveRevenue Today

Ready to find out more about starting your first affiliate campaign? Contact ActiveRevenue and we’ll be glad to help.