Affiliate Marketing Glossary

For those of you that might be newer to Facebook Ads here is a list of all the commonly
used online advertising terms to help get you up to speed!

Ad

An advertisement created by an affiliate or a business on Facebook that’s served up to Facebook

users. The audience who sees the ad depends on the users’ activity, demographic information,
what device they’re using, information provided to Facebook by Facebook partners, and by off-
Facebook activity which Facebook tracks from many of its users.

Ad Account

In order to create an ad on Facebook for the first time, you must open an advertising account.

Ad Campaign

An ad campaign is a series of ads sharing a single idea and theme.

Ad Copy

Ad copy is a term that refers to the main text of a clickable advertisement

Ad Funnel

Your marketing funnel is made up of several stages throughout which would-be customers move
from first awareness of your brand to post-sale evangelism. It’s the process of converting a
visitor or browser into a paying customer.

Ad Spend

The amount of money spent on advertising a product.

Advertorial

An Advertorial is an advertisement disguised as an non-commercial editorial article or blog post.

Sometimes an advertiser pays a popular website to have their advertorial placed on a website. It
appears to be a regular article but, in fact it’s an advertisement. Other times the advertorial would
similarly be an advertisement disguised as an article posted on your own domain and you run
paid traffic to it (e.g. Facebook ads pointing to your advertorial article).

Affiliate

An affiliate is an individual or company who earns a commission by promoting other people’s

(or other company’s) products.

Affiliate Manager

Someone hired or assigned to dealing directly with affiliates to an offer. A vendor may hire an
affiliate manager to manage their affiliate program, to speak on behalf of the vendor to the
affiliates, to negotiate payouts, to provide the affiliates with marketing materials, helpful
information or to speak directly to the affiliates.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or
company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the
profit for each sale that you make.

Avatar

A Facebook Avatar is the small square photo or image on the upper-left hand portion of a post.
This thumbnail image (e.g. avatar) represents the person posting the content. Your Avatar
generally will be a photo a person (not a logo or inanimate object, pet, etc)… and the photo
should be of the most attractive character to the niche audience that you are attempting to appeal
to. If your audience is older women in good health, you would want that image to be of an older
woman in good health smiling. This will make your post or your ad appeal to your target
audience.
Business Manager “BM”

Business Manager is a tool designed by Facebook for managing your Facebook Pages and ad
accounts. With it, you can have multiple ad accounts and users all combined under your Business
Manager account.

Convert/Conversion

An action that’s counted when someone interacts with your ad (for example, clicks a text ad or
views of a video ad) and then takes an action that you’ve defined as valuable to your business,
such as an online purchase or entering their email address.

Copywriting

Copywriting is the process of writing text-based promotional content. Copywriters are

responsible for the text on sales websites, emails, advertisements, catalogs, and more. This text is
known as “copy.”

CPA

Cost per acquisition (CPA), also known as cost per action, pay per acquisition (PPA) and cost
per conversion, is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for a specified
acquisition – for example a sale, click, or form submit (e.g., contact request, newsletter sign up,
registration etc.)

CPC

Cost Per Click (CPC) refers to the actual price you pay for each click in your pay-per-click
(PPC) marketing campaign.

CTA

A Call to Action Cost Per Click (CTA) is a brief statement designed to get an immediate
response, such as a “Learn More” button on your ad.
CTR

A Click Through Rate (CTR) measures how many people are clicking through from your ad to
your presell page. You can calculate it by dividing link clicks by impressions. You can also see
this is your Facebook Ads Manager. Click Columns, Customize Columns, and type in Unique
CTR (Link Click-Through Rate). Check that box off, click Apply and it will be added to your
performance columns.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses email as a means of communicating
commercial messages to an audience – including offering items for sale as well as sending
emails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous
customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.

Funnel Hacking

Researching and discovering a successful marketing funnel (ad + pre-sale page + offer) and
emulate that funnel to save yourself time and increase your chances for success.

Hop

A hop is an instance of a person who has clicked on the link on your presell page to get to the
vendor’s sales page.

Joint Venture

A joint venture (JV) is a business arrangement in which two or more parties agree to pool their
resources for the purpose of accomplishing a specific task. This task can be a new project or any
other business activity.

Niche

Products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.
Offer

An offer in marketing is the product being offered (either physical item or virtual item like an e-
book, audio course or video course, software, etc.) plus elements that represent additional value
to your customers, such as availability, convenient delivery, technical support or quality of
service.

Open Loop

An open loop is a marketing tactic where you draw your viewers in, present the problem, and
tease the answer, creating a compelling them to click in order to consume more information.

Optimization

The process of improving your marketing efforts to maximize your desired outcome.

Pay Bump

When a vendor agrees to extend an affiliate a higher commission payout usually based on the
affiliate’s exceptional performance.

Payout

The amount paid in cash from the vendor to the affiliate in exchange for the affiliate achieving
an action such as a sale or an email submit.

Presell Page

Your presell page is disguised content, be it an article, advertorial, video, quiz or any other
number of possible pages. This page leads readers to your actual sales page or lead generating
page. The Presell page is crucial in certain situations because it is the content that inspires
readers to click through to your conversion page.
Promotion

In marketing, promotion refers to any type of communication used to inform or persuade target
audiences to buy a product or service or to take some other action.

Rebill

A rebill means to charge someone again. Some sites offer payment plans that re-bill your credit
card automatically. The benefit of a rebill (aka, recurring payment) is that you can get paid say
$27 today and $27 again each month… so your earnings can sometimes increase over time and
you can still be paid sometimes months or years into the future for a sale made in the past.

Reinvest

Reinvestment is using the profits earned from your ad to fund additional ads, rather than
receiving the distributions in cash.

E.g. to put the profits from previous ad earnings back into the same place.

ROI

Return on Investment. To calculate ROI, the earnings are divided by the ad spend. The result is
expressed as a percentage or a ratio. E.g. If you spend $100 and earn $200, you just experienced
a 100% ROI. If you spend $100 and earn $300, you just experienced a 200% ROI.

Scale

An ad that scales well means its level of performance increases to high volume of sales when
tested to a larger audience.

Split Test

A split test is a strategy where two elements of an ad campaign are tested against each other to
get insight on which one can deliver the best results.
Super Affiliate

A super affiliate is generally referred to as the top 1% of all online affiliates. They earn the title
by excelling at marketing. Often times, though a vendor may have hundreds or even thousands of
affiliates promoting their offer online, it may be that only a handful of top super affiliates are
generating as much as 90% or more of the entire sales of the offer.

Swipe File

A swipe file is a collection of writing examples, images or other inspirational examples, from
powerful headlines, to well crafted sales emails to impressive landing pages, to ads, ad copy, ad
images or videos or even full marketing funnels… anything that we may want to emulate or
copy. Marketers use swipe files to inspire their content and improve their skills.

Targeting

Audience targeting means you are setting up your ad campaign to reach the people who are most
likely to be interested in your ad. Your target audience is the demographic of people who are
likely to purchase the product you are promoting based on their personal needs, characteristics,
and concerns.

Top Offer

A product offering from a vendor that is performing very well, converts well has a good payout
and low refunds.

TOS

Terms of Service

Upsell

Terms of Service An upsell is an add-on, upgraded or premium version of the product the
customer as already added to their cart.
Vendor

A person or company offering something for sale.

Volume

The measurable number of sales or actions you are able to achieve through an effort.

VSL

Video Sales Letter

Whitelist

In affiliate marketing, a whitelist refers to the vendor’s list of affiliates that are allowed to
promote the vendor’s products. Affiliates on a whitelist may also be approved for higher
commission levels.

Acronyms

PPE: Page Post Engagement

WC: Website Conversion
ATC: Add To Cart
IC: Initiate Checkout
CA: Custom Audience
LAL or LAA or LLA: Lookalike Audience
ROI: Return on Investment
ROAS: Revenue on ad spend
CPM: Cost Per Thousand Impressions
CPC: Cost Per Click
CTR: Click Through Rate
CPE: Cost Per Engagement
DPA: Dynamic Product Ads
RT: Retargeting
CPP: Cost per purchase
CPA: Cost per acquisition
TOF: Top of Funnel
MOF: Middle of Funnel
BOF: Bottom of Funnel
LPV: Landing Page Views
LP: Landing Page
CBO: Campaign Budget Optimization
OCU: One click upsell
OTO: One time offer
US: Upsell
DS: Downsell
XS: Cross Sell
CVR: Conversion rate
CRO: Conversion rate optimization
VV: Video Views
VC: View Content
AOV: Average Order Value
LTV: Lifetime Value
CLTV: Customer Lifetime Value