ABCs of Online Marketing
By: Alexandra Wharton
With words entering the lexicon constantly, it's a good idea for performance marketers to study up on some new industry jargon.
Because performance marketing encompasses a variety of different disciplines, including affiliate marketing, search, interactive advertising and lead generation – each with its own terminology – it can be difficult to keep up. Just getting a handle on this ever-changing industry can be a full-time job, never mind the time it takes to decipher cryptic acronyms. Planning an Internet marketing strategy is complicated. Will you get the best ROI from a CPA, CPC, PPL or a hybrid model? And how will you track your CPM and determine your CTR?
You are not alone if this question overwhelms you. Although many people who are new to the online marketing space understand the basic principles, they lack the essential vocabulary. And like any industry, it greatly helps if you can talk the talk and walk the walk.
To excel in online marketing, you have to communicate effectively with your design and development teams, your clients and potential strategic partners.
To assist those who are new to the Internet marketplace, we have compiled a list of essential Internet marketing vocabulary. Although this guide is most helpful to newbies, we think even more advanced affiliate marketers will find some useful information here.
And because this industry includes search and e-commerce, you can find an expanded list of key terms on our website. We will update that list regularly with new words that pop up in this constantly moving space.
A
Abandonment: When a user leaves a shopping cart with an item in it prior to completing the transaction.
Advertiser (also Merchant or Retailer): Any website that markets and sells goods or services. In affiliate marketing programs, advertisers contract with affiliates to get consumers to register for services, purchase products, fill out forms or visit websites.
AdSense: An advertising program run by Google enabling website owners to display text and image advertisements. Revenue is generated on a pay-per-click basis. Google uses its search technology to serve ads based on website content and users' geographical location.
AdWords: Google's text-based advertising system. It is cost-per-click (CPC) advertising and publishers pay only when users click on their ad. It has cost-control features that can set daily budget and limits.
Affiliate: A website owner that earns a commission for referring clicks, leads or sales to a merchant.
Affiliate Fraud: Bogus activity generated by an affiliate in an attempt to generate illegitimate, unearned revenue.
Affiliate Link: A piece of code residing in a graphic image or piece of text that is placed on an affiliate's webpage, notifying the merchant that an affiliate should be credited for the customer or visitor sent to their website.
Affiliate Manager: The manager responsible for overseeing the marketing of a merchant's program including forecasts and budgets, as well as communicating with affiliates regularly, establishing incentives and monitoring industry news and trends.
Affiliate Network: An intermediary between an affiliate and merchant. For merchants, it offers tracking technology, reporting tools, payment processing and access to affiliates. For affiliates, it offers a one-click application to merchants, reporting tools and payment aggregation.
Algorithm: A set of mathematical equations or rules that a search engine uses to rank the content contained within its index in response to a particular search query.
Analytics: Technology that helps to analyze the performance of a website or online marketing campaign.
Arbitrage: A practice through which Web publishers – second-tier search engines, directories and vertical search engines – engage in the buying and reselling of Web traffic.
Auto-Approve: An affiliate application approval process where all applicants are automatically approved for an affiliate program.
B
Backlinks (also Inbound Links): All the links that point at a particular webpage.
Banner Ad: An electronic ad in the form of a graphical image that is available in many sizes and resides on a webpage. Banner ad space is sold to advertisers to earn revenue for the website.
Behavioral Targeting: The practice of targeting and serving ads to groups of users who exhibit similarities in their location, gender or age, and how they act and react in their online environment.
Bid: The maximum amount of money that an advertiser is willing to pay each time a searcher clicks on an ad. Bid prices can vary widely depending on competition from other advertisers and keyword popularity.
Browser Helper Object: A DLL module designed as a plug-in for the Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser to provide added functionality. Some modules enable the display of different file formats not ordinarily interpretable by the browser.
C
Chargeback: An incomplete sales transaction (for example: merchandise is purchased and then returned) that results in an affiliate commission deduction.
Click & Bye: The process in which an affiliate loses a visitor to a merchant's site once they click on a merchant's banner or text link.
Click Bot: A program generally used to artificially click on paid listings within the engines in order to artificially inflate click amounts.
Click Fraud: The deceitful practice of posing as pay-per-click traffic for the purpose of generating false revenue by the affiliates serving the ads. In PPC advertising terms, it generates a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR): The number of clicks an ad receives, divided by the total number of times that ad is displayed or served (represented as: total clicks / total impressions = CTR). For example, if an ad has 100 impressions and 3 clicks, the CTR is 3 percent.
Client: A software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a server software program on another computer. Each client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of server programs and each server requires a specific kind of client.
Cloaking: A deceptive process that sends search engine spiders to alternative pages that are not seen by the end user. Search engines record content for a URL that is different from what the visitor sees in order to obtain more favorable search positions.
Cobranding: A website or page to which affiliates send visitors that includes their own logo and branding.
Commission (also Referral Fee, Finder's Fee, Bounty): The income an affiliate receives for generating a sale, lead or clickthrough to a merchant's website.
Compensation Rate: The rate at which an affiliate receives money in exchange for goods or services. It is how affiliates are paid and should be stated in the affiliate contract.
Contextual Advertising: The term applied to ads appearing on websites or other media where the ads are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user.
Contextual Link: The integration of affiliate links with related text. Continued on Page 2...
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