Terms & Definitions
Advertising metrics - click-through, click-through rate (CTR), conversions rate, cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per action (CPA), cost-per thousand (CPM), pay per click (PPC), pay per lead (PPL), pay per sale (PPS)
Affiliate - the publisher/salesperson in an affiliate marketing relationship.
Affiliate marketing - revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby compensation is based on performance measures typically in the form of leads, sales, clicks, etc.
Autoresponder - program that sends an automatic form response to incoming emails.
Bandwidth - how much data can be transmitted in a time period over a communications channel, often expressed in kilobits per second (kbps).
CPA (Cost per action) - Cost per action. This refers to the commission in dollars per sale or other revenue-generating action. This refers to both the actual value (e.g. a 5 dollar CPA) and the pricing model (e.g. running a CPA offer).
Click-through - the process of clicking through an online advertisement to the advertiser's destination, generally called "landing page".
CPM (Cost per mailing) – Cost per thousand impressions. Refers to the cost in dollars for every thousand delivered emails. A $300 CPM means that the list owner/manager is charging $.30 per email address.
CTR (Click-through rate) – Percentage (number of unique clicks divided by number of emails that were opened) of recipients that click on a URL in the email.
Conversion rate – The number/percentage of recipients who respond to the action option of a given email marketing creative, campaign. This measures the overall email campaign’s success. It can be measured by conversion of sales, phone calls, clicks.
Cookie - Information stored on a user's computer by a Web site so preferences are remembered on future requests.
Data transfer - The total amount of outbound traffic from a website, usually measured in gigabytes.
Dedicated IP - an IP address dedicated to a single website.
Domain name - location of an entity of the Internet
Email blacklist – A common practice of ISPs to determine which emails should be blocked. These lists contain domains or IP addresses of known and suspected spammers. Unfortunately, many blacklists also contain legitimate email service providers. All it takes is a few spam complaints to land on the list despite the ratio of complaints to volume of email sent is minimal.
Email blocking – Email blocking typically refers to blocking by ISPs. This happens when the receiving email server i.e. Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo!, prevents an inbound email from reaching the inbox of the recipient. This generally produces a “bounce” message to notify the sender that their email has been blocked. ISPs work to actively block email coming from suspected spammers.
Email marketing - The promotion of products or services via email.
Email spam - Unwanted, unsolicited (un opted-in) email.
Hit - Request a file from a Web server.
Home page - The main page of a Web site.
Impression - A single instance of an online advertisement being displayed.
Inbound link - A link from a site outside of your site.
Incentivized traffic - Visitors who have received a form of compensation for visiting.
HTML email - email that is formatted using Hypertext Markup Language, as opposed to plain text email.
