The Affiliate Marketing glossary
Find out the meaning of the terms used in your affiliate program
Affiliates (publishers)
Affiliates are the users who sign up to the affiliate program to advertise your products and services online. Affiliates register to your affiliate program because they are interested in reselling your products/services and earning the respective commission in return.
Subaffiliates (referrals)
Subaffiliates are the users who sign up to the affiliate program through another affiliate. If referral commissions are set, they are assigned to the “sponsor” affiliate, immediately when the affiliate signs up. If multilevel commissions are set, they are assigned to the “sponsor” affiliate each time the sub-affiliate referr a sale or a lead.
Merchants (advertisers)
Merchants are the users who invest to advertise their site with affiliate marketing. In the Professional version of AffiliationSoftware it is you, as administrator. In the Business and Network versions, merchants can access thier panel to monitor statistics in real time and/or manage their campaigns.
Click
Indicates the number of times a user has clicked on a banner or link of an affiliate. This metric is divided into “unique” and “total”. It is considered “unique” a user that clicks on a banner/link for the first time, “total” if the same user clicks multiple times within 24 hours.
Impression
Indicates the number of times a banner on the affiliate’s website has been viewed by the user. This metric is available for all banners, except for the links. Such as clicks, impressions are divided between “unique” and “total”. You can enable or disable impressions from the plugins page.
Pageview
Literally “page views”. After clicking on the affiliate’s banner/link, AffiliationSoftware can monitor how many pages are actually viewed by the user who enter your website. To see this metric it is necessary to enable the appropriate plugin.
Conversion
Shows how many times the action (sale or lead) was performed by the users. If an affiliate brings 10 sales, the number of his conversions will be 10, regardless the value of the sales or the value of the commissions.
Commission
Can be a fixed amount or a percentage, that should be paid to the affiliate for every action he brings to your website. With AffiliationSoftware you can choose to remunerate affiliates based on multiple types of actions. The best known are: clicks, sales and leads.
Transactions
Each sale or lead referred by an affiliate generates a transaction. Each transaction shows all the details of the action, including the exact commission that the affiliate has earned. Each transaction can be easily approved and paid to the affiliate, or declined if it is not valid.
Tracking
Technical term that indicates the procedure used by AffiliationSoftware to recognize which affiliate has led the user to purchase (or register) on your website. To automatically assign commissions to affiliates place your tracking code in the “thank you page” of your site. AffiliationSoftware tracking system can recognize the user even days after the initial click on the affiliate’s banner/link.
CR (conversion rate)
The conversions rate shows the percentage of visitors who have performed a specific action (sale or lead) on your website. If an affiliate brings 100 users and 3 purchases, the conversion rate will be 3%.
CTR (click-through rate)
The CTR also refers to a percentage, but in this case the ratio is calculated between the banner views and the clicks. If 100 users see an affiliates’s banner and you get 3 clicks, the CTR will be 3%.
EPC (earn per click)
This is an important metric that shows an average value for a single click, based on the total commissions generated. If an affiliate brings 100 clicks and 3 purchases for 10€ each, the EPC will be 0.30€ per click.
ECPM
Literally “estimated cost per mille”. This metric shows how much 1000 impressions (views) worth based on the total commissions generated. If an affiliate’s banner is viewed 1000 times and bring 3 sales of 10€ each, the ECPM will be 30€.
To view certain metrics, you need to enable the “advanced statistics” plugin.
