And we mean Basic… if you come from the world of online marketing then this dictionary will be about 1st grade for you.

However, having said that it is always good to have a glossary to hand of the basic concepts in digital marketing, and of course, the abbreviations that seem to inundate us every day and in every way. So, whether you’re an expert or a newcomer to performance marketing, here are the basics you should know from memory:

Advertiser: also known as the Merchant, is any business that sells goods or services online.

Affiliate: also known as the Publisher, is the person or company that has the website which promotes the products or services of a brand in exchange for economic benefits.

Affiliate Networks: are platforms that act as the middleman between publishers and advertisers, offering different services to both parties they also facilitate the initiation and development of Performance Marketing campaigns.

Affiliate Program: is a system that defines in detail the product or service that merchants seek to promote through affiliates, providing an economic reward such as a commission on every validated sale.

Affiliation: is a branch of the Digital Marketing based on previously established objectives. It is a process whereby an advertiser or merchant advertises through the websites or blogs of thousands of affiliates and pays a commission for each validated sale.

Attribution: the method used to track the sale process whereby a certain value is assigned to each channel or event through which the user has passed through prior to conversion.

Banner: an online advert of various sizes in which a product or service is sold. It can be an animated or static image.

Cashback: is when websites return to the user a pre-set percentage for each purchase that is completed and verified.

Commission: is the remuneration that the affiliate receives on each verified sale.

Conversion: this is the completion of certain action made by the user. It is an action that has been previously defined by the company and can vary: filling a form, generating a sale…

Cookies: are files that contain the history of the sites that the user has visited. The life of a cookie is variable, but in the Performance Marketing, it generally tends to be 30 days.

CPA: Cost Per Acquisition, is a payment model where an advertiser pays for each qualifying action made by the end user in response to an advert. The aim is to ensure a profitable ROI (see later) for advertisers.

CPC: Cost Per Click is the model where a payment is paid whenever the user clicks on the ad, regardless of whether there is a conversion or not.

CPM: or Cost Per Mille. It is the cost per thousand impressions. This may imply anything from the amount charged per 1.000 banner impressions across multiple sites to a copy of a newsletter sent to 1.000 subscribers.

CTR: Click Through Rate is a metric used to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign online (usually with banners). The commonly agreed formula is to divide the clicks an advert receives between the number of times it has been seen then multiply by 100.

Email marketing: is a tactical communication used to contact the target audience of interest via email. It can be both an informative email or a promotion sale…

Lead: a lead is basically someone who has registered interest in a company or product, for example, anyone who fills out a form then becomes part of the database.

Political PPC for affiliates: is a legal document created by the advertiser to regulate the practices of the affiliates.

Product Feed: it is a file in Excel, XML or txt that contains all the information of the products promoted by the merchant.

Program Directory: the list of the merchant’s affiliate programs. You can see our directory sorted by alphabetical order located at AffiliRed programs directory.

Promotional codes: these are codes which offer special discounts. They are used at the end of the online purchase but before the final payment is made so that users can see the discounted benefit gained from the code.

Remarketing: it is a marketing technique which consists of retargeting those users who have already visited your website and reminding them of the product they looked at on one of your webpages and this is often done so whilst they browse elsewhere on the web.

ROI: the acronym for return on investment, the profit obtained after investing in different marketing actions. Its formula

Its formula is: profit-investment / investment.

SEM: stands for Search Engine Marketing. They are paid adverts in search engines result pages increasing visibility with the intention of getting quality short-term traffic and to generate conversions.

Tracking Code: is a tracking tool that allows you to verify the affiliate conversions. It allows you to know from where your sales originate and which campaigns are successful and which are not.

These are the terms that we use in AffiliRed, but maybe you would like to see some other terms. Let know us what want you in to be included in the next edition of the dictionary. ?