Affiliate marketing Glossary
Confused by the jargon surrounding affiliate marketing? If you’d like to start making money online as a Sky affiliate but are unsure of some of the language you’ve come across, this table should help.
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Commission Payout | Income received by a publisher for selling an advertiser’s product. |
| Content Sites | Content site publishers work with advertisers to deliver promotions to users to help sell products or subscriptions. Many publishers have or can create specialised web sites that tailor to a certain niche of consumers. Content sites focused on the internet, broadband and telephony will achieve the best sales performance for Sky products. |
| Conversion rate | The percentage of visitors to a site who take a desired action set out by the advertiser such as buying a product, clicking through on a banner or filling in a form. |
| CTR (Click-through ratio) | This is a metric which measures the proportion of visitors that view a page against the number that actually click on a banner to visit an advertiser’s (i.e. www.sky.com) site. It is calculated as (clicks/impressions)x100. |
| CPA (Cost per Acquisition) | This is a metric used by advertisers to evaluate how much it costs to acquire each customer. Since affiliates are only paid for customers that sign up to a product, the CPA is generally simply the commission rate plus any fee the networks may charge. |
| Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) | A metric for online advertising where a rate is set for every thousand impressions. |
| EPC (Earnings Per Click) | This is a useful way of measuring the performance of your Sky links, and is calculated as follows: (total commission earned/total clicks)x100. A high EPC indicates that a large proportion of people who click through from your site are signing up to Sky products. |
| Impression | The viewing of an advertising banner, link, or product. |
| Loyalty/Coupon Sites | Loyalty sites are special sites that reward members with points, cash or miles for shopping through their sites or reading emails. They typically have higher conversion rates due to more targeted communication with visitors. A loyalty site requires a higher commitment both in time, resources and skills than a traditional content site. |
| Natural Search/Organic Search | When Internet users look for information or products online, they go to search engines like MSN, AOL, Google or Yahoo. A successful website will be created and designed to rank highly in search results using content, structure, key words, meta tags and title tags. An effective natural search strategy has an advantage in that there are no ongoing costs associated with it – unlike PPC search. |
| On-site Conversion Rate | The percentage of users that click through from your site and buy a Sky product. For example if 10 people click on your Sky website links in a month, and 1 sale is made your on-site conversion rate is 1/10 = 10%. |
| Paid Search (PPC Search) | With Paid search you can bid on ‘keywords’ relevant to your site so that you will appear in the sponsored listings area of a search engine’s results. Sky has a strict PPC policy relating to affiliates bitding on brand terms. View our T&C's for details. |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | The higher your site appears in the search results of search engines, the more traffic you will receive. If you don’t want to pay to appear in sponsored listings, you need to use effective SEO techniques to promote your site in the natural listings. While it is more difficult to achieve prominence in the natural listings, they have a far higher click-through rate than paid search. |
| Shopping Comparison/Search Sites | These are website ‘portals’ where people can compare a number of other sites and products all in one place. A successful comparison site takes a lot of maintenance and attention to detail to provide an effective service for site visitors. |
| Tracking Link | Each banner or text link that you use on your site has an associated Tracking Link that ensures any sales generated will be recorded against your site. The correct tracking links are generated automatically when you request them from the networks, and all you have to do is decide where you would like the banner or text link to be displayed on your site. |