Have you recently bumped into affiliate marketing and looking forward to try out your luck in affiliate marketing? If yes, then there are few basic terminologies that you should know as a beginner before you start your journey as an affiliate marketer. In this article, lets discuss about the basic terminologies to enhance your knowledge about affiliate marketing.
1. Affiliate Link
Affiliate link is the most important thing when it comes to affiliate marketing as it helps the vendor or advertiser in tracking through which affiliate a particular sale or lead has been generated. Without affiliate links there would be no affiliate programs at all on the internet. An affiliate link basically helps in tracking the sales or leads, monitoring from where visitors are coming from, monitoring the quality of traffic an affiliate is generating etc.
2. Affiliate Program
Affiliate program is the place where vendors or advertisers display their products for the affiliates to promote them. For every sale or lead generated by the affiliate, vendor or advertiser of that product pays certain amount of commission to the affiliate.
3. Conversions And Commissions
Suppose you are promoting a digital product where the vendor or advertiser wants visitors to sign up for their product using email or phone number. Now whenever the visitor clicks on the affiliate link of that product and signs up, it counts as conversion and you as an affiliate get whatever commission was set for each conversion of that product.
Products that only required sign ups using email comes under SOI (single opt in) and DOI (double opt in) payout model. Similarly if you are promoting a physical product, then whenever a visitor buys that product through your affiliate link that sale is counted as conversion and you get the set commission for it.
4. Cookies And Cookies Expiration
Cookies and cookies expiration is a very important thing especially for affiliates. Lets understand this with an example, suppose you send one visitor to amazon website through your affiliate link, but that visitor leaves the amazon without buying anything. Now here comes the role of cookies, the cookies help the amazon website or for any website you promoting for to remember that particular visitor came through your affiliate link. Cookies operate through the visitors browser.
The duration for which the websites remember the visitor depends on the cookies expiration. If for above amazon example, the cookies expiration is 60 days and the visitor who left without buying the product comes back to amazon within 60 days and buys the product you still get the commission for that sale. Longer the cookies expiration better that chances of an affiliate getting commissions.
5. First Click/Second Click
First click/second click becomes one important concept in affiliate marketing. Lets understand this with an example. Suppose there are two affiliates, affiliate 1 and affiliate 2, then there is a user who goes onto amazon website by clicking on the affiliate link of affiliate 1 but he does not purchase any product. Now the same user again lands on amazon website but this time by clicking on the affiliate link of affiliate 2 and buys the product.
So, ultimately both affiliate links have the role in making the sale. Now, to which affiliate the sale should be affiliated to depends on what model the product’s affiliate link was based on. If it was based on First click model then the sale would be attributed to affiliate 1 and if it was Second click model then the sale would be attributed to affiliate 2.
6. Clickfraud
Clickfraud concept comes into play when affiliates are promoting cpc model based products. Cpc stands for cost per click, in this model the affiliate gets paid for every click the user makes on the affiliate link, it does not matter if the user buys the product or not.
Some affiliates try to misuse this cpc model by sending click bots to the affiliate links to generate revenue. However, in today’s world affiliate networks have become smart enough to easily detect such fraud activities and they will immediately suspend the account of such affiliates.
To know more about affiliate marketing, we recommend you to read our dedicated article explaining the basic concept of affiliate marketing by clicking HERE.
