Affiliate marketing glossary: 276 terms explained

Term	Definition
CC submit	A payout model where the conversion counts once the user has entered card details, with no charge yet taken.
COD	Cash on delivery: the buyer pays the courier, and the affiliate is paid for a confirmed order rather than a completed payment.
CPA	Cost per action: a fixed fee for one defined user action — a registration, a deposit, a completed sale.
CPC	Cost per click: what one click on an ad costs the advertiser.
CPE	Cost per engagement: payment for one interaction with the ad or the product — a video watched through, a level completed, a form started.
CPI	Cost per install: payment for one mobile app install.
CPL	Cost per lead: payment for a lead — a phone number, an email, a submitted form.
CPM	Cost per mille: the price of a thousand ad impressions, regardless of what anyone does with them.
CPS	Cost per sale: a fixed amount or a percentage of order value, paid when the purchase completes.
CPV	Cost per view: payment for one view of a video ad, counted at a threshold the platform defines.
First bill	The user's first actual payment on a subscription or trial offer, after which rebills take over.
Hybrid	A fixed payout for the first action plus a share of what the user generates afterwards.
PPC	Pay per click: buying ads where the advertiser pays only when someone clicks.
PPL	Pay per lead: the advertiser pays for each lead delivered.
Rebill	An automatic recurring charge on the user's card for a subscription.
Revenue share	A percentage of the revenue the referred users generate, usually 20–50%, paid for as long as they keep playing or buying.

Term	Definition
Ad cost ratio	Advertising spend as a percentage of the revenue it produced — the inverse of ROAS.
AOV	Average order value: revenue divided by the number of orders.
Approval rate	The share of delivered leads or orders the advertiser confirms and pays for.
ARPDAU	Average revenue per daily active user: daily revenue divided by daily active users.
ARPPU	Average revenue per paying user: revenue divided by the number of users who actually paid.
ARPU	Average revenue per user over a period, paying and non-paying together.
Back-end revenue	Everything earned after the first conversion: rebills, upsells, repeat deposits.
CAC	Customer acquisition cost: everything spent to win one new customer, not only the media.
Cap	A limit on how many conversions an advertiser will accept and pay for in a period.
Churn rate	The share of users or subscribers who stop using a product in a given period.
Click to registration	The conversion rate from a click on the ad to a completed registration.
Conversion rate	The share of visitors who complete the target action.
CTR	Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions.
Double opt-in	A lead that is only counted once the user confirms it, usually through an emailed or texted link.
eCPM	Effective cost per thousand impressions: actual revenue or spend normalised to a thousand impressions.
Engagement rate	The share of an audience that interacts with content rather than just seeing it.
EPC	Earnings per click: total affiliate earnings divided by clicks sent.
EPL	Earnings per lead: average revenue from one delivered lead, approved or not.
FTD	First time deposit: a new player's first funded deposit, the standard conversion event in iGaming.
GGR	Gross gaming revenue: total stakes minus winnings paid out, before any costs.
Install to deposit	The conversion rate from app install to first deposit.
Installs	The count of mobile app installations attributed to a campaign.
KPI	The agreed numbers a campaign or a role is judged on.
LTV	Lifetime value: total profit expected from one user over the whole relationship.
NGR	Net gaming revenue: GGR minus bonuses, jackpot contributions, payment fees and licence costs.
Qualification	Checking a lead against the advertiser's requirements — age, geo, solvency, intent — before it counts.
Reach	The number of unique people who saw an ad or a piece of content in a period.
Registration to deposit	The share of registered users who go on to make a first deposit.
Retention rate	The share of users still active after a given period — day 1, day 7, day 30.
ROAS	Return on ad spend: revenue divided by advertising cost.
ROI	Return on investment: profit as a percentage of what was spent.
ROMI	Return on marketing investment: the same ratio as ROI, measured on marketing cost specifically.
RPM	Revenue per thousand impressions or pageviews — the publisher's side of eCPM.
Single opt-in	A lead counted as soon as the form is submitted, with no confirmation step.
Spend	Total money put into advertising over a period.
Spend limit	The ceiling an ad account will not spend past — the platform's daily cap or an internally set one.
Target action	The specific user action the advertiser pays for — registration, deposit, purchase, call.
Unique visitors	The number of distinct people who visited, however many times each of them came.
Unit economics	Profitability worked out per single unit — one customer, one order, one lead.
Win rate	The share of bets or hands a player or the house wins.

Term	Definition
Adult	The vertical built on adult content: dating, cams, subscription sites.
Betting	Sports and esports betting traffic.
Binary options	Traffic for binary options — a fixed-payout instrument banned for retail investors in much of Europe.
Crypto	Crypto traffic: exchanges, wallets, token sales, trading platforms.
Dating	Dating sites and apps, paid on registration, on a confirmed profile or on a subscription.
Finance	Financial products: loans, cards, brokers, investment platforms, insurance.
Finance comparison site	A site that compares loans, cards and accounts and monetises the applications it sends on.
Gambling	Online casino traffic — the highest-paying and most tightly regulated vertical in affiliate marketing.
Microloans	Small short-term loans from non-bank lenders, promoted as lead-generation offers.
mVAS	Mobile value-added services: paid mobile subscriptions billed by the carrier.
Nutra	Health and beauty products: weight loss, joints, potency, skin, supplements.
Payday loan offers	Lead offers for short-term lenders, paid per approved loan application.
Physical goods	Selling physical products — gadgets, household items, accessories — usually on cash on delivery.
Sweepstakes	Prize-draw offers: the user leaves contact details for a chance to win.
Weight loss	The weight-loss subcategory of nutra: pills, teas, supplements, devices.

Term	Definition
Ad network	An intermediary that aggregates publisher inventory and sells it to advertisers.
Banner ads	Graphic or HTML5 display ads placed on sites and in apps.
Brand traffic	Users searching for the advertiser by name.
Clickunder	Pop traffic where the ad page opens on any click anywhere on the host page.
Facebook Ads	Meta's ad platform, reaching users across Facebook and Instagram.
Geo targeting	Restricting who sees an ad by country, region or city.
Google App campaigns	Google's automated campaign type for app installs, serving across Search, Play, YouTube and the display network.
In-page push	An ad shaped like a push notification but rendered inside the web page.
Incentivised traffic	Users who perform the target action because they were paid or rewarded for it.
Native ads	Ads formatted to look like the content of the site they sit on.
Offerwall	A wall of tasks inside an app — install this, register there — that rewards the user with in-app currency.
Pop traffic	Traffic from windows that open on top of or behind the page the user was reading.
Popunder	An ad page that opens in a window behind the current one and is noticed when the user closes the tab.
Popup	An ad window that opens over the page content.
Programmatic advertising	Buying and selling ad impressions automatically through platforms and auctions rather than by negotiation.
PTC sites	Paid-to-click sites where users complete small tasks — clicks, views, registrations — for money.
Push ads	Advertising delivered as browser or device push notifications to subscribed users.
Push notifications	Messages delivered to a device or desktop to bring a user back.
Retargeting	Showing ads again to users who already interacted with the site or app.
RTB	Real-time bidding: each impression is auctioned in the milliseconds before the page renders.
Search ads	Ads in search results, matched to what the user typed.
Targeting	The settings that decide who sees an ad: geo, age, interests, device, behaviour.
Teaser ads	Small blocks of intriguing headline plus image, placed on low-cost sites.
Teaser network	An ad network specialising in teaser blocks on long-tail content sites.
Telegram ads	Placements in Telegram channels and groups, bought either from the official platform or directly from channel owners.
TikTok Ads	TikTok's ad platform, reaching a younger audience with video-first creatives.
Traffic source	The channel or platform a campaign buys users from.
Video ads	Ads shown before, during or after video content, or in-feed as video.

Term	Definition
Account farmer	A specialist who creates and warms up advertising accounts in bulk so campaigns have something to run on.
Advertiser	The company paying for user acquisition through affiliate programmes.
Affiliate	Someone who buys traffic and resells it to advertisers through offers, earning the difference.
Affiliate manager	The person on the advertiser's or network's side who recruits affiliates and manages their portfolio.
Affiliate team	A group that buys traffic together: buyers, a lead, designers, a farmer, often an analyst.
BizDev	Business development: signing the large partners, direct advertisers and platform deals.
Direct advertiser	An advertiser that works with affiliates directly, with no network between them.
Gambling operator	The company that runs a casino or sportsbook and holds the licence.
iGaming creative designer	A designer producing ad material for gambling traffic: banners, video, landers, app store assets.
In-house buying	An operator or product company buying its own traffic instead of paying affiliates for it.
Media buyer	The specialist who buys paid traffic — Facebook, Google, TikTok, ad networks — and runs it against offers.
Media buying team lead	The person running a team of buyers: strategy, budget allocation, hiring, and the numbers the owner sees.
Owner	The owner of the business — a casino, a network, an affiliate team.
Webmaster	The owner of a site, blog or channel who monetises their own audience through affiliate programmes.

Term	Definition
Affiliate link	A tracking URL carrying the affiliate's identifier, through which the advertiser credits conversions.
Anonymiser	A web service or program that fetches pages on your behalf to hide who asked.
Antidetect browser	A browser that substitutes the device fingerprint so separate profiles look like separate machines.
ASO	App store optimisation: making a mobile app findable and installable from store search and browse.
Attribution	Deciding which channel or partner gets credit for a conversion.
Auto-registration	Software that registers accounts on ad platforms in bulk.
Auto-upload	Software that creates and launches ad campaigns in bulk across many accounts.
BIN	The first six to eight digits of a card number, identifying the issuing bank, country and card type.
Cloaker	The service or script that decides who sees the white page and who sees the real one.
Consumables	Everything a buyer burns through to keep campaigns live: accounts, proxies, cards, domains, phone numbers.
Conversion window	How long after a click a conversion still counts.
Datacenter proxy	A proxy on addresses belonging to hosting providers.
Device ID	A mobile device's advertising identifier — IDFA on iOS, GAID on Android — used to tie installs and events to a click.
DMP	Data management platform: collects and segments audience data from many sources for targeting.
DSP	Demand-side platform: where advertisers buy impressions programmatically across many exchanges.
Fingerprint	A device or browser identity assembled from dozens of technical details — fonts, canvas, screen, time zone, hardware.
Issuer	The bank or licensed institution that issued a card and decides whether to approve each payment.
Lookback window	The period before a conversion in which a click can still be credited for it.
Macros	Dynamic placeholders in a tracking URL that the traffic source fills in at click time — placement, device, campaign, click ID.
Manager account	A Google Ads container account that holds and administers client ad accounts.
MMP	Mobile measurement partner: the independent platform that attributes installs and in-app events.
Mobile proxy	A proxy that routes through mobile carrier IP addresses.
Pixel	A snippet on the advertiser's page that reports user actions back to the ad platform.
Postback	A server-to-server call that reports a conversion from the advertiser's system to the affiliate's tracker.
Prepaid card	A card not tied to a bank account: it spends only what has been loaded onto it.
Proxy	An intermediate server that passes traffic on and replaces the visible IP address.
PWA	A web app installable to the home screen that behaves like a native app.
Residential proxy	A proxy using IP addresses belonging to real home internet connections.
Rotating proxy	A proxy that changes IP address on a timer or on every request.
Rotator	A script that splits incoming traffic between several offers or landers by set rules.
SKAdNetwork	Apple's framework for attributing iOS install campaigns without identifying the user.
Smartlink	One link that routes each visitor to whichever offer should perform best for their geo, device and source.
Spy tool	A service that collects and catalogues competitors' live ads, landers and funnels.
SSP	Supply-side platform: the publisher's side of programmatic, selling inventory into auctions.
Sub ID	Extra parameters in an affiliate link that let the affiliate label and later split their own traffic.
Tracking	Recording a user's path from click to conversion through a unique identifier.
Traffic back	The URL that traffic is redirected to when it does not fit the main offer — wrong geo, wrong device, cap reached.
UTM tags	Standard URL parameters — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign — that label traffic for analytics.
Virtual card	A card that exists only digitally, issued instantly and often one per campaign or account.
VPN	An encrypted tunnel through a remote server, which also replaces the user's visible IP address.
WebView app	A thin native wrapper that loads a website inside an embedded browser.

Term	Definition
Black page	The aggressive version of a lander, the one the buyer actually wants users to see: urgency, countdowns, stacked claims.
Cloaking	Serving one page to the ad platform or search crawler and a different page to the user who clicks.
Creative	The ad itself — the banner, video or copy a user sees in the traffic source before any landing page.
Landing page	A single page built for one offer and one action, with everything else stripped out.
Pre-lander	A page between the ad and the offer that warms the user up — a quiz, a news-style story, a comparison table.
White page	The compliant page shown to ad reviewers and crawlers: thin, plain, with nothing in it that would fail moderation.

Term	Definition
Acquiring	The service that lets a merchant accept card payments — the account, the gateway and the risk assessment behind them.
Billing	The side of the business that invoices and takes money: charging the card, retrying failures, handling refunds.
Chargeback	A payment forcibly reversed through the card scheme at the cardholder's request.
Commission	The cut an intermediary keeps — a CPA network, a payment provider, an agency reselling ad accounts.
Crypto	Cryptocurrency used as a payment rail in affiliate work — most of it USDT rather than Bitcoin.
Decline	A card payment refused by the issuing bank or the payment system.
Fiat	State-issued currency — dollars, euros, rubles — as opposed to crypto.
FX conversion	The spread and fee applied when the currency of a transaction differs from the currency of the card or account.
Hold	The waiting period between a conversion and the payout, while the advertiser checks the traffic.
Moneyback	A refund the seller gives back voluntarily at the buyer's request.
Reconciliation	Matching the affiliate's numbers against the advertiser's or the network's, conversion by conversion, before a payout is agreed.
Risk payment	A transaction with an elevated chance of being reversed — high-risk vertical, mismatched geo, a card and billing country that disagree.

Term	Definition
Big win	A slot payout far above the stake, from roughly x100 upwards.
Bonus hunter	A player who registers specifically to extract value from bonuses rather than to gamble.
Bonus hunting	Systematically clearing casino bonuses for expected profit, using the wagering terms rather than the games.
Bonuses	Incentives casinos and bookmakers give players to register, deposit and come back.
Bookmaker	A licensed operator that takes bets on sports and esports events and sets the odds.
Cashback	A share of a player's losses returned to them, used to keep them playing.
Crash game	A gambling format where a multiplier climbs in real time and can collapse at any moment — cash out before it does, or lose the stake.
Crypto casino	An online casino that takes deposits and pays winnings in cryptocurrency.
Deposit	Real money added to a gambling account — the action most iGaming payouts are priced on.
Free spin	A free slot round given as a bonus for registering, depositing or as a retention gift.
Game aggregator	A platform that gives casino operators access to games from many providers through one integration.
High roller	A player who stakes large amounts and deposits heavily and often.
Lobby	The casino's game screen: everything available, sorted by provider, category and promotion.
Minimum deposit	The smallest amount an operator will accept into a player account.
Problem gambler	A person with a gambling addiction who cannot control how much they play or lose.
Slot	An online reel game with paylines and bonus features — the core of casino revenue.
Social casino	Casino games played with virtual currency and no cash stakes, monetised by selling more currency.
Telegram casino	A casino that runs inside Telegram as a bot or mini app rather than on a website.
Volatility	How a slot pays: low volatility means frequent small wins, high volatility means rare large ones.
Wagering requirement	How many times a bonus must be staked before anything can be withdrawn — x30 and x40 are common.

Term	Definition
2FA	Two-factor authentication: access requires a password plus a second independent factor.
3-D Secure	An extra authentication step on card payments, confirming the payer with the issuing bank.
Ad labelling	A legal requirement to mark advertising as advertising and report it to a registry; in Russia, through the ORD system.
AML	Anti-money-laundering: the rules and procedures operators must run to stop illicit funds passing through them.
ATT	Apple's App Tracking Transparency: an app must ask permission before tracking a user across other companies' apps and sites.
Black hat	Promotion methods that break platform rules outright and risk bans or legal action.
Grey hat	Methods in the gap between permitted and banned — not written into the rules, not defensible if read strictly.
KYC	Know your customer: identity verification through documents, selfies and address proof.
LAT	Limit Ad Tracking: the older iOS setting with which a user withheld their advertising identifier.
Licence	A regulator's permission to run gambling, defining which markets, products and payment methods are allowed.
Moderation	The ad platform's or programme's review of creatives and landing pages before they go live.
Pre-moderation	A review of creatives and landers by the agency account provider, before the platform ever sees them.
Prohibited traffic	Traffic sources an offer forbids outright — brand bidding, incentivised traffic, adult placements, email spam.
Responsible gambling	The measures operators must offer to limit harm: deposit limits, self-exclusion, reality checks, age controls.
TsUPIS	The Russian clearing system through which all legal betting payments must pass.
Verification	Confirming an identity by submitting documents to an operator, network or payment provider.
White hat	Marketing that complies with the law and with platform rules as written.

Term	Definition
Abuse	Exploiting the rules of a programme, promotion or service to extract value they were not meant to give.
Affiliate laundering	Passing fraudulent traffic through a chain of intermediaries so its origin cannot be traced back.
Anti-fraud	The systems that detect and block fraudulent traffic and conversions before they are paid for.
Bot	A program that performs actions automatically: clicks, registrations, views, form fills.
Botnet	A network of infected devices controlled remotely and used, among other things, to generate ad traffic.
Click farm	An operation that pays real people to click ads, install apps, leave reviews or follow accounts.
Click flooding	Firing huge volumes of clicks at tracking links in the hope of being credited for conversions that would have happened anyway.
Click fraud	Generating clicks artificially — by bots, farms or scripts — to drain a budget or to earn click-based payouts.
Click hijacking	Intercepting another advertiser's click and substituting your own tracking so the conversion is attributed to you.
Click injection	Android fraud where a malicious app detects an install in progress and fires a click just before it finishes, claiming the attribution.
Cookie stuffing	Dropping affiliate cookies on users who never clicked an affiliate link, so later purchases pay out.
Device ID reset fraud	Resetting a device identifier again and again so the same phone can be sold repeatedly as a new install.
Fake metrics	Inflating counts — clicks, installs, subscribers, reviews — with bots or paid workers.
Fraud	Any falsification of conversions, traffic or identity in affiliate marketing.
Mislead	A creative that converts by promising something the offer does not deliver — a fake endorsement, an invented prize, a made-up news story.
Phishing	Obtaining credentials or card details through fake sites, emails or messages that impersonate a real service.
Scam centre	An organised call-centre operation that defrauds victims over the phone or through messengers, often using trafficked workers.
SDK spoofing	Forging the requests a tracking SDK sends, so installs and events are recorded for devices that never installed anything.
Shaving	A network or advertiser quietly not counting part of the conversions an affiliate actually delivered.

Term	Definition
A/B testing	Comparing two or more versions — creative, lander, offer — by splitting traffic between them.
Account rental	Paying to use someone else's ad account for a period instead of buying or farming one.
Ad set	The Meta campaign level that holds targeting, budget and schedule for a group of ads.
AdTech	The stack that buys, sells and serves digital advertising: platforms, exchanges, trackers, measurement.
Affiliate marketing	Paying external partners for the customers they bring, rather than for advertising.
Agency accounts	Ad accounts issued through an official platform agency, with higher limits and a human to appeal to.
API offers	Offers pulled through an API so the catalogue, links and statistics stay in sync automatically.
Approve	The advertiser's confirmation that a conversion is valid and payable.
Auto-approve	Conversions confirmed automatically, with no manual check.
Ban	An account, campaign or service access blocked for breaking the rules.
Banner blindness	Users ignoring anything that looks like an ad without consciously deciding to.
Bid	What an advertiser is willing to pay for an impression or a click in the auction.
Blacklist	A list of placements, accounts, IPs or partners whose traffic is blocked.
Bundle	A working combination of offer, traffic source, creative, lander and targeting that converts.
Business Manager	Meta's container for ad accounts, pages, pixels and user access.
Case study	A written breakdown of a campaign with numbers: source, offer, creatives, spend, result.
Country tiers	An informal ranking of markets by purchasing power: Tier 1 developed, Tier 2 middle, Tier 3 cheap traffic.
CPA network	The intermediary between affiliates and advertisers: aggregates offers, counts conversions, pays out.
DACH	The German-speaking markets: Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Doorway page	A page built only to catch search traffic and pass it on somewhere else.
Farmed account	An ad account deliberately created and warmed up before any real campaign runs on it.
Flow	A separate traffic stream inside one offer, identified so its results can be read apart from the rest.
Funnel	The sequence from ad to target action: creative, pre-lander, lander, form, payment.
Guaranteed approval	An offer term promising a minimum approval rate for delivered leads.
Lead	A potential customer who has left contact details or taken a first step.
Lead approval	The share of delivered leads the advertiser accepts as payable.
Lead generation	Collecting contact details of potential customers through advertising.
Monetisation	Turning traffic or an audience into revenue.
Offer	The advertiser's proposition with fixed terms: target action, payout, geos, permitted sources, caps.
Offer page	The page in a network where an offer's terms are published: payout, geo, target action, allowed sources.
Performance marketing	Marketing paid for by measurable result — a click, a lead, a sale — rather than by exposure.
Private offer	An offer available only to selected affiliates, usually on better terms.
Profit	What is left after ad spend and costs are taken off approved revenue.
Promo materials	The creative set supplied with an offer: banners, videos, copy, landers.
Referral	A partner brought in on another partner's recommendation, who then earns them a share.
Referral programme	A network's scheme paying a percentage of what referred affiliates earn.
Shadow ban	A quiet reduction in reach with no notification — content is still posted and almost nobody sees it.
Traffic	The flow of users arriving on an advertised page.
Traffic arbitrage	Buying traffic in order to resell it to advertisers at a margin.
Traffic remonetisation	Earning a second time from traffic that did not convert on the main offer.
Trash offer	A low-quality offer: unreliable advertiser, poor conversion, late or missing payouts.
Trial offer	An offer where the user gets the product free or nearly free, then is charged on a subscription.
Trusted account	An ad account with spend history and good standing, so it carries high limits and clears moderation easily.
Valid lead	A lead that passes the quality check: reachable contact details, right geo, matching the offer's criteria.
Vertical	A thematic niche of offers: gambling, nutra, dating, crypto, sweepstakes, finance.
White label	A casino or bookmaker running on another operator's platform and licence, under its own brand.
Whitelist	A list of placements or partners that are approved, with everything else excluded.
Wow offer	An offer with an unusually high payout or unusual terms, used by networks to attract attention.

Affiliate marketing glossary

Payout models

Metrics

Verticals

Traffic sources

Roles

Tracking and tech

Creatives and landers

Money and payouts

iGaming

Law and compliance

Fraud

Jargon