Skip to the content 
Affiliate marketing has more than its fair share of complicated terminology, but don’t let that put you off entering this profitable field.
Take a look at some of the most common terms you may come across below, and don’t forget to bookmark this page for future reference!
1 Above the fold
This is simply the content you see when you first land on a website, before you scroll anywhere. Given a name of its own because of its importance – If the content shown above the fold doesn’t capture your visitors attention within 2 seconds, you’ve lost them! (Probably forever).
2 Advertiser
The company which an affiliate recommends is called an advertiser. Some affiliate networks use the term ‘merchant’ instead.
3 Affiliate
That’s you! As an affiliate, you add affiliate product mentions to your website and refer visitors to an advertisers website in order to generate a commission for each sale made.
4 Affiliate Agreement
These are simply the agreed terms between yourself as an affiliate, and the affiliate network. The terms will usually be based around how you promote the brand and the commission you will be rewarded in return for generating sales.
5 Affiliate Link
This is the unique link given to you to allow you to refer your visitors to the advertiser’s site. The unique affiliate ID included in the link allows the affiliate network to track the visit, and hopefully the sale!
6 Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the practise of recommending a company’s product via your own website, in return for a earning a commission when a sale is made.
7 Affiliate Network
The affiliate network is the glue which makes affiliate marketing possible. An affiliate network creates a campaign with the advertiser, and sets up the tracking which the affiliates use to ensure they’re awarded commission on any sales they help generate.
8 Banner Ad
These are clickable, visual ads which you can display on your own site to send the visitor from your site to the advertisers.
9 Chargeback
With the majority of affiliate networks, an advertiser will claw back any commission earned on a sale which falls through for whatever reason. At MoreNiche, we offer chargeback protection to affiliates who make over 50 sales per month.
10 Click through rate
The click through rate is simply the number of clicks through to an advertisers website in relation to how many times the link is displayed to a visitor (impressions)
11 Commission
The official term used for the money you will be awarded in return for a referral which results in a sale.
12 Conversion
This is simply a fancy word for a sale being made as a result of your referral.
13 Cookies
These are small text files which are stored on someone’s PC once they are referred from your site to the advertisers. Within the text file, the website url and the unique user ID is stored, which allows the affiliate network to track the commission owed to the affiliate.
14 Cookie Expiration Date
Most affiliate networks will set a date for their cookies to expire – usually 30 days after being placed on the visitors computer. However, MoreNiche has lifetime cookies. This means our cookies will only ever expire if the visitor clears their cookies in their browser.
15 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%.
16 Cost per action (CPA)
This is how much it costs you to get that conversion. It’s relevant when you pay for advertising such as Google Adwords to drive traffic to your pre-selling page, as you’ll want your CPA to be as low as possible to ensure your profits remain high.
17 Cost per click (CPC)
Pretty much what it says on the tin. The price you pay per click, usually on an advertising platform such as Google Adwords.
18 Cost per thousand (CPM or CPT)
The cost per one thousand impressions or clicks of a banner or link in paid advertising. When used as CPM, this stands for cost per mille – in Latin, French and Italian mille means one thousand.
19 Direct Linking
This is the practise of using an affiliate link to directly send traffic to the advertisers website, without first pre-selling the product – for instance, with PPC advertising. At MoreNiche, we don’t allow this as we require our affiliates to add value to the customers journey. This is to ensure only pre-qualified traffic reaches the advertisers website, as large quantities of poor quality traffic can seriously affect an advertiser’s website performance.
20 Impressions
This is simply the amount of times a visitor has viewed the affiliate link on your website.
21 Landing page
This is just another word for the sales page on the advertisers site which you’re directing your affiliate traffic to.
22 Offer
The offer covers the fine details of what you can expect from the advertiser (such as commission percentage and cookie length), and also details what they expect from you in return. If an advertiser doesn’t want you to bid on their brand terms for instance, this is where you’ll find details of this. Take a look at our current offers here.
23 Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
This relates to any kind of paid advertising whereby you pay for each click a visitor makes. The most common PPC platform is Google Adwords. With MoreNiche, it’s important to note that affiliates using PPC advertising must direct this type of traffic to a landing page in order to ‘pre-sell’ the product, and not send PPC traffic directly to the advertiser’s website.
24 Performance Based Marketing
This relates to the practise of an affiliate being paid a commission only based on the sales they generate for an advertiser.
25 Poor Quality Traffic
Affiliates sending poor quality traffic risk their account with their affiliate network being closed down. In affiliate marketing, good quality traffic is far more important than large quantities of it. A high volume of poor quality traffic landing on an advertisers website may cause it to struggle and become slow, so it’s important to comply with this rule. Poor quality traffic can be caused by using PPC advertising directly to a landing page or by using black hat ‘paid to surf’ traffic platforms.
26 Pre-sell
The pre-sell is the very essence of what an affiliate should do. As an affiliate, your job is to convince a potential buyer of why they should want the product the advertiser is selling. The most successful affiliates master the ability to pre-sell a product to the point they have it down to a fine art.
27 Publisher
The affiliate marketer is known as the ‘publisher’. That’s you!
28 Resources
Everything you’ll need to promote an advertisers products is usually listed within the resources section of your affiliate account. With MoreNiche, this includes promotion guides, keyword lists, images and banners.
29 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The practise of working in a way which will cause your website to rank in a better position in the Google search results.
30 SERPS
Search engine results page. It’s just a quick way of saying it!
Do you think we missed any important affiliate marketing terms? Let us know in the comments below!
Or, why not take a look at our offers?