Glossary of Affiliate Marketing Terminologies

Every business has a peculiar vocabulary and terminology, so is affiliate marketing.  For a newbie, some of this lingo may be confusing at first. Not to worry! As you get along in the business, you no doubt become familiar with these terms, clichés, and concepts.

Here are some of such terms you just have to know:

Customer: The name for the end user or purchaser of the merchant’s product or service.

Merchant: The owner or creator of a product or service.

Affiliate: The partner who promotes the merchant’s products for a commission.

Publisher: The name an affiliate is also called if he runs his business from a website or blog.

Affiliate program: A program set up by merchants to pay commissions when affiliates refer people to their products.

Commission: An agreed percentage of the total sale that is paid to the affiliate for referring the sale.

Cookie: A smart web instrument used to assign a unique ID to the buyer in order to tag the purchase as being referred by an affiliate. Cookies usually have a predetermined lifespan. So, even if the buyer doesn’t purchase right away, the affiliate will still get credit for the sale if it occurs within the set time frame, say 24 hours, 7 days or even 60 days or more.

Referral: Credit for a click or a sale that occurs when the affiliate sends traffic to the merchant’s site.

Affiliate agreement: A contract that merchants and affiliates agree on specifying the rules, responsibilities, rates to be paid and other legalities.

Affiliate link: A trackable URL that identifies the affiliate as the source of targeted traffic to a merchant’s site.

Referral: A click on an affiliate link counts as a referral.

Affiliate network: An online marketplace where merchants list their products and where affiliates can find products to sell.