UK Affiliate Networks

Independent UK Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Glossary

This glossary has been created to help affiliates understand the huge variety of abbreviations, acronyms and other terms that are associated with affiliate marketing, web site design and advertising in general.

A   B  C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U  V  W   X Y Z

Above the Fold - Top half of the web page that can be seen without having to scroll down. This area is worth more to advertisers than the lower parts of the web page. The term originally referred to pages in newspapers.
Action - What activates a commission, eg a sale, click through or lead.
Affiliate - An affiliate, often called a publisher, is a person or company who advertises a merchants product or website, and earns a commission when a specified action takes place. This action can be a click, lead or sale depending upon the program.
Affiliate Agreement - The contract between the merchant and the affiliate that lay down the terms of the relationship.
Affiliate Link - A link to a merchant's website containing tracking code that uniquely identifies the affiliate, which notifies the merchant that the affiliate should receive credit for any actions taken by the visitor.
Affiliate Manager - The point of contact between the merchant and the affiliate.
Affiliate Marketing - Using affiliates to promote your website and / or your products.
Affiliate Program (Also known as an Associate Program or a Revenue Sharing Program) - An agreement whereby the merchant agrees to pay the affiliate for generating clicks, leads or sales from links either located on the affiliate's web site(s), or in emails.
Affiliate Solution Provider - A company that provides the network, software, and services needed to create and track an affiliate program.
Associate - Another name for an affiliate.
Auto Approval - An affiliate program that automatically approves affiliates without manually checking their websites.
Auto-Responder - An email that is sent automatically to acknowledge receipt of an email.


Backlink - A link from another web site to your site. These are thought to be helpful in obtaining good placement in the search engines, dependent upon the source of the link.
Banner Ad - A link to an advertisers website in the form of an image. Banner ads can be of any size, but the most popular format is of size 468 x 60 pixels.
Browser - A program used to view pages on the Internet, including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape and Opera.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - Used to define formats on a website, stored separately from the webpage itself. The style sheet file has the extension .css.
Charge Back - Commission earned may be pending eg. whilst a credit card transaction is validated or during seven days after purchase to ensure that the customer does not return the item ordered. If the pending commission, for whatever reason, cannot be validated, the sale is incomplete and the commission is removed from your account.
Click Fraud - Artificially increasing your click through rate on pay per click programs such as Google Adsense.
Click Through - When a viewer clicks a link on your site to the merchant's site..
Click Through Rate (CTR) - This is calculated as the number of times the ad has clicked divided by the number of times it has been displayed on your page (impressions).
Client - A software program which interacts with a server software program on another computer, to access data. A browser is a type of client.
Co-branding - This is where affiliates can place their own logos etc on special sales pages, usually hosted on the merchant's server. Eg, "Affiliate Programs Directory in Association with Merchant Goods Inc".
Cookie - A text file stored on a user's computer when they visit a web site, often used to track the original point of entry to a site (so the affiliate can be awarded the commission days or months after the original click through).
Cookie Length - The amount of time a tracking cookie remains active on a visitor's computer. For example, if the cookie length is 30 days, you will receive credit for a visitor's purchase for up to 30 days from the original click through.
Commission - The money an affiliate receives for referring an action.
Contextual Link - The integration of affiliate links within the text of a page, such as used by Miva.
Conversion Ratio/Rate (CR) - This is calculated as the number of orders made divided by the total number of click throughs.
Cost Per Action/Acquisition (CPA) - This is the amount that the merchant pays for a specific action - eg sale, lead or click through.
Cost Per Click (CPC) - This is the amount that the merchant pays the affiliate for each click on merchant's advertisement.
Cost Per Impression (CPM) - Cost per thousand impressions - usually applied to the purchase of banner ads.

Datafeed - a data file provided by the merchant, usually in CSV format, that contains detailed information about the merchant's products, such as a description, links to images, affiliate links, prices, categories and more.
Duplicate Content - Identical content that appears on more than one website, such as web pages that are written from the same datafeed, or content that is plagiarised from another web site.
Duplicate Content Penalty - Removal of your web page or web site from search engine results because it is too similar to website(s) already in existence and does not contain sufficient "unique content".

Earnings Per Click (EPC) - The average amount earned per hundred clicks.
Email Link - An affiliate link to a merchant site containted in an email - perhaps a newsletter or a targetted marketing campaign.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) - A document that answers many of the most commonly asked questions to help newbies or noobs (people new to the subject area).

HTML - The formatting code used to construct web pages. Affiliates can paste HTML code provided by the merchants into their websites to link to the merchant.

Impression - The displaying of a banner or text link to a real site visitor (not a robot).
In-house - An affiliate program provided by the merchant and not a third party affiliate network.

Manual Approval - An affiliate program that only approves affiliates after manually checking their websites.
Merchant - Online vendor of goods and services that offers an affiliate program.
Mini-site - An HTML page designed by the merchant for the affiliate for inclusion as part of their web site, which displays the merchants products with the tracking links already integrated.

Paid Inclusion (PI) - A fee based guaranteed search engine listing
Pay For Performance (PFP) - Merchant pays affiliate based on a predetermined action.
Pay Per Click (PPC) - An affiliate program whereby affiliates are paid for each click to the merchant's website. These are increasingly rare these days, with the exception of Google Adsense and other similar search engine programs.
Pay Per Click Search Engine - Paid rankings in the search engines using Google's Adwords, Yahoo's sponsored search or other similar programs. Paid listings and displayed on the opposite side of the free listings.
Pay-Per-Lead - A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sales lead that they generate for a merchant website. Examples would include completed surveys, contest or sweepstakes entries, downloaded software demos, or free trials. Pay-per-lead generally offers midrange commissions and midrange to high conversion ratios.
Pay-Per-Sale - A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sale of a product or service that they refer to a merchant's website. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions and the lowest conversion ratio.
Payment Threshold - The minimum amount of commission an affiliate needs to earn before payment is made.

Return Days - Number of days after the click through that the affiliate still earns a commission. This is the same as the cookie length.
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) - This is calculated as money made divided by spending on advertising. It should be greater than 100% or you are losing money!
Return On Investment (ROI) - This is calculated as money made divided by the total amount invested.
Residual Earnings - Programs which offer residual earnings offer a percentage of the sale a visitor makes from each and every visit, not just the first.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - Using search engines to advertise your website, both by search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Using a variety of techniques to improve the ranking of your page for certain search terms with the search engines.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) - The result of searching on a specified term or phrase.
Spam (or Spamming) - Unsolicitored email advertising sent randomly to email addresses found over the internet. Typically these emails advertise pharmaceuticals, penis enlargement pills and internet scams. Using spam to advertise affiliate programs is frowned upon by merchants and will be against the terms of the Affiliate Agreement. Storefront - A premade website template made for affiliates, that displays products with integrated affiliate links. Affiliate Window produce an excellent Storefront called Shop Window.
Super Affiliates - These are the elite top tier of affiliates that generate most of the money for your affiliate program. Super Affiliates can be successful individuals or big companies.

Targeted Marketing - Displaying relevant advertisements to site visitors.
Terms and Conditions (T&C) - See Affiliate Agreement.
Terms of Service (TOS) - See Affiliate Agreement.
Text Link - A link using text and not graphics.
Tracking Method - The way that a program tracks referred actions. This is usually done by embedding an affiliate id into the web address, and writing a cookie onto the visitor's computer.
Two-tier - An affiliate program that encourages primary affiliates to sign up additional secondary affiliates. When the secondary affiliate earns a commission, the primary affiliate also receives a commission.

Unique Content - Content written by yourself or a third party that only appears on your website and nowhere else.

Viral Marketing - A way of marketing by passing a message from one computer in a similar way to a virus, without causing harm. This could be something as simple as an affiliate link in your email signature.