Affiliate Glossary

Glossary of Terms

Below is a glossary of terms that you'll find used in RevenueGateway.

• Earnings per click (EPC): This statistic will give you an idea of the quality of traffic going to the advertiser so you know approximately how much you might make per click.
• Cost per click (CPC): You earn commissions with CPC campaigns simply by providing a link that visitors to your web site or readers of your newsletter click on and get redirected to the campaign's landing page.
• Cost per Action/Aquisition (CPA): With CPA campaigns, you earn commissions based upon visitors to your website clicking on an ad, arriving at the campaigns landing page and completing the signup form. For you to receive credit for these visitors they must complete the entire signup process and arrive at the finishing thank-you page.
• Cost per lead (CPL): The cost an advertiser pays per lead. This is a very common method of selling advertising. A lead can be anything from an e-mail address for a newsletter to a complete survey that needs to be completely filled out and verified in order to get credit. CPL prices can range greatly depending on the program.
• Cost per sale (CPS): CPS campaigns are very similar to CPA campaigns, except that instead of simply signing up for something, your visitor must complete a sale. These campaigns pay you based on the total amount of completed sales.
• Cost per visitor (CPV): CPV is calculating the cost of advertising for every visitor.
• Cookie: Information stored on a user's computer by a Web site so preferences are remembered on future requests.
• Impression: A single instance of an online advertisement being displayed.
• Unique IP: A unique IP address is not shared by other domain names; it is unique to your domain name and your space on the server.
• Unique User: Unique individual or browser which has either accessed a site (see unique visitor) or which has been served unique content and/or ads such as e-mail, newsletters, interstitials and pop-unde ads. Unique users can be identified by user registration or cookies. Reported unique users should filter out robots. See iab.net for ad campaign measurement guidelines.

Content building
Listed below are some simple ways to build content for your site. Content is what brings people back to your website, and it’s these visitors who are potentially your next sale, so give them something to be interested in.

1. Create a Blog
With easy software such as “WordPress” or “Blogger”, you are able to add easily and fast, new content published directly to your website. Publishing to a blog once it is setup is as easy as typing in what you want, then pressing ‘publish’. Blogs are an easy way to make a visitor feel at home at your website and to get user feedback as well!

2. Newsletters
Add a newsletter link on your website and send out newsletters. You can let your users know about the latest offers you have to advertise.

3. Free Content Feeds
We’ve seen a lot of our advertisers/affiliates start to include RSS feeds into their websites. These are dynamically generated content feeds that will fill out your website with continuous fresh content.

Tell the user what to do!
You’ve chosen your creatives from an advertiser you think will do really well, put the banners on your website, but your click through rate isn’t as good as you like. What should you do?

Look at the content you have on the page which surrounds your advertisement you’ve placed for this particular advertiser. Is there good content surrounding it that perhaps speaks a little bit about the product and why they should buy it, or at least be interested in clicking on the advertisement to find out more?

Add statements in your content like, click here now, or create links telling the user to click on the advertiser. You will see an improvement in your click through rate if you do tell the user what action to take.

Which creatives will work best for me?
It’s impossible for anybody to say what will work best for your website until you test yourself which gets your users attention the best. Some websites might have a younger userbase that a flash animation banner might appeal more to than a website that has, for example, an older crowd who might be more likely to click on a text link. Or vice versa. You never really know the behaviour of your user base until you test which creative type works best for your website.

An example might be if you were advertising diet pills, make a text link that states “Buying diet pills online is way cheaper than buying them at your local pharmacy”. Place these throughout your page, and see how well it does.

• Move your banners around the page
• Place them all positions around your text, to the center, left, right, etc
• Try placing one on your main page
• Try different sizes of banners and again try different positions.
• Place text links throughout your page

You must remember, you have to track the results if you are testing different creatives and different positions. This is important. Record the details of each test, be it one week or three and at the end of your testing you will have found the best positioning/combination of creatives to advertise for your website.