A Brief Affiliate Marketing Glossary

Have you come across various terms and acronyms in your affiliate marketing
business, but not understood what many of them mean? Well here is a brief
glossary of commonly used terms that should help

CPA - CPA stands for "Cost Per Action". This usually refers to lead based
affiliate programs. In other words: Instead of having to make a sale before
you get paid, you instead only have to generate a specific action. Actions
could include getting your visitors to fill in their email address, request
a free CD, or fill out a credit card application. Once the action
requirements are fulfilled, you are paid... whether the visitor actually
buys something or qualifies for something doesn't matter. You're still paid
because you generated the desired action.

CPC/EPC - CPC stands for "Cost Per Click", and EPC is "Earnings Per Click".
You'll find the CPC version of this term used most when you're paying to
advertise something, but it's actually used in affiliate program statistics
as well. Why? Because it can help you determine how much to spend if you
decide to start advertising a given affiliate program, and it can also help
you determine if you make more with the affiliate program that you do with a
pay per click affiliate setup such as Google AdSense.

EPM/CPM - EPM is sometimes reffered to as CPM: Earnings per million and Cost
per million respectively. The "Million" part of this term is a hold over
from the more traditional offline advertising industry. In reality, this
term is referring to thousands. If for instance, an affiliate program shows
you're earning $3 EPM/CPM, that means you're earning - or paying - $3 for
every 1000 views you've had on a given ad.

Many affiliates feel this statistic isn't very useful anymore, because not
many affiliate programs pay you for the number of views generated on an
advertisement. It can be more useful than you might think though. If you
have an affiliate program that shows an EPM of $100, you can do the math to
figure out how much more traffic you'll need to generate in order to reach a
specific goal you've set.

You can also use this metric for comparing two or more affiliate products
against each other. If one pays $10 commission for instance, and another
pays $50 commission, most affiliates would want to promote the higher
commissioned product. If however, your EPM stats show that the $10
commission product makes $100 EPM, whereas the $50 product only generates
$25 EPM, you have concrete evidence that you can make much more money with
the lower paying product.

CR or C/R - This acronym stands for "conversion ratio". It tells you how
well a given affiliate product or program converts visitors into sales. If
you send 100 visitors to an affiliate product, and one of them buys, that's
a 1% conversion ratio. If however, 10 of those 100 buy something, then
you've got a 10% CR.

CTR - This stands for "Click Through Ratio". If you've generated 100,000
visitors to your website, and they've all seen the affiliate advertisement
you have there but none of them click through... you've got a zero percent
(0%) click through ratio. And that's of course bad.
Your goal as an affiliate is to get the traffic to the affiliate product so
they'll buy it. So if you're advertising something but it's not getting any
clicks - either the ad is bad, or the product you're advertising is not of
interest to your traffic.

&copy; 2006, Kathy Burns-Millyard. Want to learn more about <A
HREF="http://www.easysidemoney.com/affiliate-project-x.html">affiliate
marketing</A> now? Check out these excellent affiliate marketing resources
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