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This guest blogging post was submitted by Patrick from Piggy Bank Pie.

If you are not yet very familiar with affiliate marketing, you may have noticed that bloggers are constantly using acronyms and terms, assuming their readers are all up to speed with the lingo. While you may have figured out the most common ones, some may still be unclear. The following article is a glossary of affiliate marketing acronyms related to pay per click ad campaigns for the Upcoming Super Affiliate in you.

PPC: Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click represents an advertising model where advertisers are charged only when ads get clicked by users. Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter are all based on the Pay Per Click model, and allow you to bid on keywords to advertise content related ads. As a matter of fact, displaying ads on sites such as Google or MSN is absolutely free, even if displayed at the top of the very first page. It’s when a user actually clicks the ad that an advertiser gets charged. Obviously, some keywords or phrases are pricier than others based on search popularity. Google sells keywords by auction; the more you are willing to “pay per click”, the higher your ad will be displayed.

CPC: Cost Per Click

This is the actual amount of money advertisers are charged each time users click their ads. This amount often fluctuates because of competition between advertisers (affiliate marketers).

Pay Per Lead

In affiliate marketing, companies will pay you for every lead or sale that you bring them. A lead is where you provide an interested customers information (whether it be their name, email, phone, address, etc). The company would then pay you a bit of money just for referring that potential client to them. That company would then contact that potential client and do their best to sell their expensive product to them. With Pay Per Lead, it doesn’t matter if the potential client later decides that he doesn’t want the product, because by then you would have already been paid. Due to this, pay per lead offers generally pay you less than if you were to sell the product.

Pay Per Sale

Pay per sale is the opposite of pay per lead. With pay per sale, you get paid a commission for when you bring an interested customer to buy a product. Lets say you get someone to buy a $30 product, the affiliate company would pay you $5-20 for bringing them that customer. These offers generally have the highest payouts, but also require the most talent and knowing how to advertise correctly so that you stay far above profitable.

Cost Per Lead and Earnings Per Lead

The amount of money advertisers will pay affiliate marketers for leads. Earnings per lead represents the money affiliate marketers will earn when referring a lead.

Cost Per Sale and Earnings Per Sale

The amount of money advertisers will pay affiliate marketers for sales. Earnings per sale represents the payout to affiliate marketers for actual sales.

Impressions

Impessions are how many views your images/advertisements/searches receive. It does not matter if anyone reads, clicks, or visits them. If the advertisement loads on your browser, it counts as an impression. Impressions are used to see your click-through rate, so if you have 100 impressions and 1 click, you have a 1% CTR and you can use this to scale your campaigns. The total number of impressions is influenced by different factors: keyword popularity, keyword relevance, cost per click, daily and monthly budgets set by advertisers and host web site traffic.

CTR: Click-Through Rate

This is a neat value that tells how well a campaign is attracting attention. The click-through rate is obtained by dividing the number of clicks an ad has received, by the total number of impressions. A high click-through rate indicates you’ve created an ad that’s appealing. Now the conversion rate value will tell you how well it’s doing.

Conversion and Conversion Rate

This value represents the ultimate goal for Internet marketers. The conversion rate is obtained by dividing the total number of leads and sales, by the number of clicks received. A high conversion rate is often reached by choosing quality keywords combined with a very effective ad or landing page.

Landing Page

Sometimes known as pitch page, or even lead capture page, a landing page is simply a web page where users are redirected after clicking an ad. It is the very last step before making either a lead or a sale. By combining proven marketing strategies, effective keywords and attractive design, Internet marketers rely on landing pages to maximize their conversion rate. Landing pages can be hosted on blogs, personal or company websites or on specialized sites such as Squidoo.

Direct Link

This is the opposite of a landing page. While a landing page is the customized and optimized page for increasing the chance of your visitor buying a product, direct linking is where you take out that step. This is where you would link directly to the offer/URL through your search or web campaigns, and hope that the offer you are directly linking to is optimized enough to bring you enough sales. Direct linking is a lot faster, although most of the big time super affiliates use landing pages to optimize their sales.

Affiliate Link

The last but not the least is your personal affiliate link. Let’s use Amazon as an example. When users click links either from a landing page or even Google AdWords Sponsored links, the target URL contains a portion that identifies the affiliate marketer. This is how Amazon can pay the commission to your affiliate account. You should always make sure your affiliate id is correctly entered in affiliate links, otherwise you could end up getting billed for pay per click advertising and your conversion rate would flatline at 0% since you are not identified when making sales. Or worse, someone else would receive your commissions!

Affiliate Manager

An affiliate manager is a person who you can ask questions to. It is someone who works at the affiliate network (definition below), who is trained to help you make money with affiliate marketing. They have all the statistics of other marketers, and can tell you what offers are making a lot of money through search, web, email, etc. They want you to make money because the more money you make, the more the affiliate network makes, so the more they make. At the end of the day, you can ask your affiliate manager any question you want about optimizing your campaigns to make you more money. They are an incredible help to affiliate marketers small and large.

EPC: Earnings Per Click

Earnings per click is a statistic used mostly for search engine marketers. It takes your total amount of clicks divided by your total amount of sales. This number allows you to see that for every click your affiliate link gets, this is how much money you would make. Using this number, search engine marketers would know that they can spend a little less than that number on search advertising, and if the statistics stay the same, they would earn the different between them. If you make $0.80 per click on an offer, then you can spend $0.50 per click on Google Adwords and be profitable.

Creative

A creative is generally something that was made for the offer you are promoting. It can be a pre-written email for you to send out, a picture to use for your buttons, or an optimized search title campaign. I have seen many different definitions for what creatives are, but in simple terms its something that the company made for you to use to bring sales to them. Creatives will make sense when you start your affiliate marketing journey.

Affiliate Networks

While I am certainly no super affiliate expert, I have experience with Market Leverage and NeverBlue Ads, both of which I have made a profit the very first day I used them. I recommend you give them a shot and see if affiliate marketing is right for you. You never know, you may just be the next super affiliate making $100,000+ per month from it.

Summary

This is just the very basic terms of affiliate marketing, but it was something I wished someone had told me when I started, because I wasted a little bit of time getting to know what everything was. Hopefully this post will save you some time so that you can develop effective and lucrative campaigns faster.  I got the original inspiration for this idea from Jonathan Ryan on the Top Affiliate Challenge.   Speaking to someone who knows so little about affiliate marketing really helps you to realize how something as simple as this post may be to you, is incredibly benefitial to at least one person reading it.