Affiliate marketing grew up on forums and in chats, and its language shows it: half the words are borrowed from ad tech, a quarter are abbreviations, and the rest is slang that changes faster than new courses come out. This affiliate marketing glossary will help you make sense of the core vocabulary: what approval rate and hold mean, how a white page differs from a pre-lander, what a Tier-1 geo is and why everyone keeps talking about sub IDs. Terms are sorted alphabetically, with abbreviations filed under their first letter.
If you are just starting out, read affiliate marketing for beginners alongside it: that article puts these words into one picture.
A
A/B test: the same as a split test, a comparison of two or more variants.
Account: an ad account or profile on a platform you run ads from. «The account got burned» means it was banned.
Account manager: an affiliate network employee who looks after a partner: suggests offers, negotiates higher payouts, resolves disputes.
Ad set: a campaign level in Facebook and some other platforms where you set the audience, budget and placements.
Adult: a vertical with adult content. Prohibited on most major platforms.
Advertiser: the company that pays for customers.
Agency account: an ad account issued through an official platform partner (an agency). It usually has higher limits and friendlier support than a regular personal account.
Antidetect browser: a browser that lets you run many profiles with different fingerprints so that ad accounts are not linked to each other. A standard part of a media buyer's infrastructure.
API: a programming interface services use to exchange data without manual work.
Approval (approve): the advertiser's confirmation of a conversion. Approval rate is the share of confirmed leads out of all leads. Example: 60 out of 100 leads are approved, so the approval rate is 60%. It strongly affects real income: a high payout with a low approval rate can earn less than a modest payout with a high one. Poor-quality leads, wrong phone numbers, the wrong geo and bots all drag it down.
ASN: autonomous system number, that is, the network of an ISP or hosting provider. The ASN tells you whether an address belongs to a data center.
Audience: the group of people your ad is shown to, by geo, gender, age, interests, devices.
Auto-launch: launching ad campaigns with a program or script through the platform's API; handy when you need many similar ads.
B
Ban: a platform blocking an ad account, Business Manager, domain or page. The reasons vary: ad policy violations, suspicious account activity, user complaints, a «bad» domain or payment method. Platform policies also explicitly name showing their review a different page from what users see as grounds for a ban. A ban issued by mistake can be appealed; see ad disapproval and account suspension.
Betting: the sports betting vertical.
Black page: the offer page that a targeted visitor sees. The opposite of a white page.
Blacklist: a list of blocked IP addresses, placements or domains.
Bot: a program that imitates a visitor: a scanner, scraper, clicker or platform robot.
Brand traffic: searches containing a company or product name. Many advertisers forbid bidding on their brand.
Budget: the money set aside for ads: daily, per campaign, per test.
Burnout: the moment a combo stops making money: the creatives have gone stale, the audience is exhausted, competitors have copied it.
Business Manager (BM): in the Meta ecosystem, the dashboard for managing several ad accounts, pages and pixels.
Buyer (media buyer): the specialist who buys traffic and runs campaigns.
C
Call center: the advertiser's team that phones leads, confirms orders and drives the approval rate.
Campaign: a set of ads with shared budget, geo and objective settings.
Cap: a limit on the number of conversions an advertiser will accept per day or period. Leads above the cap may go unpaid.
CAPI (Conversions API): server-side sending of conversions to the Meta ad account.
Case study: a breakdown of a successful or failed campaign with numbers.
Click: one visit by a person following an ad link. In a tracker or cloaker, the click is the basic unit of accounting: it has an ID, time, country, device, source and a decision on where the visitor was sent. Quick repeat visits by the same person are usually merged into one click.
Click ID: the unique number of a click that lets the tracker and the network know which visit a conversion belongs to. More in click ID and sub ID.
Cloaker: a service or script that splits visitors and shows them different pages: targeted visitors get the offer, while bots, scanners and spy tools get a white page. More in what is cloaking.
Cloaking: the technique of showing different pages to different visitors based on the result of a check.
COD (cash on delivery): payment on receipt; the typical model for physical product offers.
Cold traffic: people who have not yet thought about the product. Compare with hot traffic.
Combo (funnel, bundle): a working combination of source, geo, offer, creative, landing page and settings. You find it through tests, scale it while it is profitable and hide it carefully from competitors and spy tools, because a copied combo burns out fast.
Conversion: a target action by a visitor: a lead, sign-up, purchase, deposit. Also the share of such actions (see CR).
Conversion statuses: lead, hold, approved, rejected, trash. More in conversion statuses.
CPA (cost per action): payment per action; also a common name for performance-based affiliate marketing.
CPC (cost per click): the price of one click.
CPI (cost per install): the price of one app install.
CPL (cost per lead): the price of one lead.
CPM (cost per mille): the price of a thousand impressions.
CPS (cost per sale): payment per sale.
CR (conversion rate): the share of visitors who complete the target action. 1,000 clicks and 20 leads means a 2% CR. CR is measured at different stages (click to lead, pre-lander to landing page, lead to approval), and each one shows its own bottleneck.
Creative (creo): the ad material: an image, video, text or banner. The creative decides whether people click the ad and whether it passes review. Creatives burn out quickly as the audience gets used to them and CTR drops, so buyers test new ones all the time.
Crypto: a vertical of offers related to cryptocurrencies and investing.
CTR (click-through rate): the share of clicks out of impressions. 20,000 impressions and 300 clicks means a 1.5% CTR.
D
Dashboard: the main analytics screen with the key numbers: clicks, conversions, revenue, spend.
Data center (DC): the networks of hosting and cloud providers. Visits from data center addresses are a common sign of bots and scanners.
Dating: the vertical of dating sites and apps.
Deeplink: a link that opens a specific screen of an app or a page in an app store.
Delivery rate (buyout rate): in physical product offers, the share of orders that customers actually paid for and picked up.
Deposit: a player topping up their account in gambling or betting. The first deposit is a common CPA target action.
Domain: a site's address. A «burned domain» is one flagged as dangerous by a platform or browsers.
Doorway: a site built for search traffic that is then redirected elsewhere. Rare in modern affiliate marketing.
Duplicate (dupe): a repeat lead from the same person. Networks usually do not pay for duplicates.
E
EPC (earnings per click): revenue per click, total revenue divided by the number of clicks. EPC is easy to compare with the price of a click: if EPC is above CPC, the campaign is profitable. Networks often show an offer's average EPC, but yours can differ many times over.
Exclusive: an offer available only in one network or on special terms.
F
Farming: growing ad accounts: creating them, filling them with activity and warming them up before running ads. A farmer is the person who does it.
fbclid: the parameter Facebook adds to a link when someone clicks an ad.
Finance: the vertical of microloans, credit, bank cards and insurance.
Fingerprint: the set of browser and device traits that tells them apart from one another.
Frame: a way to show one page inside another.
Fraud: fraudulent traffic or conversions: bots, fake clicks, fake leads. Networks reject fraudulent leads and can ban the partner. For a buyer, fraud hurts twice: it wastes budget on bots and damages your reputation with the network.
FTD (first time deposit): a player's first deposit; a common target action in gambling and betting.
G
Gambling: the vertical of online casinos and games of chance.
gclid: the Google Ads click parameter.
Geo: the country or region a campaign targets and the offer accepts. Geo drives the payout, traffic cost, the language of creatives and landing page, and the ad rules. Sending traffic to a geo the offer does not accept is pointless: those leads will not count.
GIVT / SIVT: general and sophisticated invalid traffic: simple bots and bots that disguise themselves as people.
H
Headless browser: a browser without a graphical interface, driven by a program. A common bot tool.
Hold: the period while the advertiser checks a conversion and the payout is frozen. Its length depends on the offer and vertical. Money on hold is not money yet: some of it may end up rejected, so budgeting on held amounts is risky.
Hosting: the server a site lives on.
Hot traffic: visitors already ready to act, for example from searches like «buy». Compare with cold traffic.
Hybrid: a payment model with a fixed payout plus a share of revenue.
I
Install: an app installation as the target action.
IP address: a device's network address; it reveals the country, ISP and network type.
K
KPI: key performance indicators the advertiser requires, for example a minimum deposit rate or delivery rate.
L
Landing page (lander): the page where the visitor completes the target action.
Lead: a sign-up with contact details. Also a conversion before the advertiser has checked it. Not every lead turns into money: some will be rejected or trashed, so counting income by the number of leads without the approval rate is a classic beginner's mistake.
Lead generation (lead gen): collecting contact sign-ups for an advertiser.
Lookalike: an audience similar to a given one, for example to people who have already bought.
LTV (lifetime value): how much money a customer brings in over their whole lifetime. Important in RevShare.
M
Macro: a variable in a link that the platform or tracker replaces with a real value at the moment of the click: {click_id}, {campaign_id}.
Media buying: professional ad buying; in essence, the buyer's job.
Mobile subscriptions: a vertical where the payout is for a user subscribing to a paid mobile service.
Moderation (ad review): the platform checking an ad and its page. It is done by both robots and people, and not only at launch: an ad can be re-reviewed at any time, especially after complaints or edits. That is why changing the page of a live campaign often triggers another review.
N
Native ads: ads styled as part of a site's content: article recommendations, teasers.
Nutra: the vertical of health and beauty products.
O
Offer: an advertiser's deal with its terms: what to promote, where, for which action and how much it pays. An offer page in a CPA network usually lists the geos, payout, hold, allowed and prohibited traffic sources, sample landing pages and quality requirements.
Optimization: switching off unprofitable placements, creatives and audiences and moving the budget to profitable ones.
Owner: the owner of a media buying team or business.
P
Partner network (affiliate network, CPA network): the middleman between the advertiser and the affiliate. More in CPA networks.
Payout: the amount the network pays for one conversion.
Pixel: a platform's code on your site that sends it visit and conversion data for optimization and reporting.
Placement: where an ad is shown: feed, stories, search, partner sites.
Popunder (pop): an ad format that opens a page in a new window beneath the current one.
Postback: a server notification from the network to the tracker saying «this click converted». More in postback URL in affiliate marketing.
Pre-lander (pre-landing page, bridge page): an intermediate page before the offer: an article, quiz, review or comparison. Its job is to warm up interest and weed out casual visitors so that the offer gets people ready to act. A good pre-lander lifts the landing page's conversion rate and the approval rate.
Profit / loss (in the green, in the red): whether a campaign makes or loses money. «Went green» means it paid off.
Proxy: an intermediate server the connection runs through. Used to change the IP and country.
Push: browser or phone notifications used as an ad format.
PWA: a web app that installs on a phone like a regular app. Popular in gambling.
Q
Quiz: an interactive survey used as a pre-lander: the person answers questions and gets a «personal» offer.
R
Referrer: the address of the page the visitor came from. Often lost in social media in-app browsers.
Rejected (declined): a conversion the advertiser did not confirm.
Resting period: the time a purchased account sits idle before ads are launched on it.
Retargeting: showing ads to people who have already interacted with the site or an ad.
RevShare: a payment model where you get a percentage of the revenue the referred customer brings.
ROAS (return on ad spend): revenue divided by ad spend.
ROI (return on investment): profit divided by spend, as a percentage. More in how to calculate ROI.
Rotation: showing several variants (offers, landing pages, creatives) in turn by set shares.
S
S2S (server-to-server): passing data directly between servers, without a browser. An S2S postback is the main way to receive conversions from networks.
Scaling: increasing the budget and volume of a profitable combo.
Search ads: ads in search results, for example in Google Ads.
Setup: the set of tools and settings for a launch: accounts, proxies, domains, tracker, cloaker.
Shaving: an affiliate network or advertiser dishonestly under-reporting the number of approved conversions.
Solo: an affiliate who works alone, without a team.
Spend: the money that has gone into ads. «Burned the budget» means spent it at a loss.
Spend limit: the daily spending cap of an ad account. It grows as the platform comes to «trust» the account.
Split test: a comparison of several variants (offers, landing pages, creatives) on the same audience.
Spy tool: a service that collects other people's ads, creatives and landing pages.
SSL: a certificate for a secure (https) connection. Without one, browsers mark the site as not secure.
Sub ID (subs): extra tags in a link: creative, placement, audience, buyer. They show what exactly brought the conversion. Example: sub1={campaign_id}&sub2={adset_id}&sub3=creo_12, and the report shows the profit of every campaign, ad set and creative.
Sweepstakes: a vertical of prize draws and lotteries where the user leaves their details for a chance to win.
T
Target action: what the advertiser pays for: a lead, sign-up, purchase, install, deposit.
Target audience: the people who are interested in the offer and most likely to complete the target action.
Targeting: setting up ads to show to a specific audience.
Team lead: the head of a group of media buyers.
Teaser network: a network that shows short teaser ads with an image and a headline.
Test: a launch on a small budget to collect data on a combo before scaling.
Tier: a geo level by purchasing power: Tier-1, Tier-2, Tier-3.
Traffic: the stream of visitors coming to a site.
Traffic source: the ad platform where you buy traffic. See the catalog on the traffic sources page.
Trash: a conversion the network did not count: fraud, a duplicate, invalid data.
Tracker: a system for recording clicks and conversions that shows which ads make money. A tracker assigns every click an ID, accepts postbacks from networks and calculates spend, revenue, profit and ROI for any slice: campaign, geo, creative, landing page.
ttclid: the TikTok Ads click parameter.
U
Unique visitor (unique): a visitor who came for the first time within the selected period. Repeat visits are not counted as unique.
UTM parameters: standard link parameters (utm_source, utm_campaign and others) that identify the traffic source.
V
Verification: confirming an account on a platform with documents, a phone number or a payment method.
Vertical: the niche of offers: nutra, gambling, finance, dating, e-commerce and so on.
Volume: the amount of traffic or conversions a combo can handle.
VPN: a service that encrypts the connection and replaces the user's IP address and country.
W
Warm-up: 1) gradually preparing an account or domain for advertising so that it raises fewer flags; 2) in a cloaker, the first clicks of a flow that are sent to the white page without a check.
Webmaster (publisher): an affiliate network partner who brings traffic. The term is broader than media buyer: a webmaster may also work with their own sites.
WebView: an in-app browser, for example inside Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. It behaves differently from a regular browser and often drops the referrer.
White page: the neutral page a filter shows to screened-out visits: bots, scanners, spy tools and untargeted traffic. Why a particular click ended up on the white page is explained in why a click went to the White Page.
Whitelist: a list of allowed values: IP addresses, placements, countries. The opposite of a blacklist.
Z
Zone: a specific placement in a native, push or pop network. The zone ID is passed into a tag so that you can switch off the ones that do not perform.
How to use this glossary
Affiliate slang is not standardized: one word can mean slightly different things in different teams. «Warm-up», for instance, is both preparing an account and the first clicks of a cloaker flow, and «burn» can refer to a banned account, a stale creative or a lost budget. When in doubt, ask the other person for context.
Many terms in this glossary describe what you see in the ArtisanClo dashboard: clicks and uniques, leads and hold, the reasons a visitor got the white page, EPC and ROI for every tag. See what the service can do on the features page, and the common questions in the FAQ.
Bottom line
An affiliate marketing glossary is not a word list to memorize but a tool for understanding case studies, talking to network account managers and reading tracker reports. The terms that matter most at the start: offer, geo, vertical, lead, hold, approval rate, payout, click ID, postback, CR, EPC and ROI. Get those down, and the rest will fall into place with practice.
