C

Call-to-action (or CTA); an urging message or instruction – text link, image, button, etc – used in marketing to generate an immediate action.

CAPTCHA; stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Is a feature used as an additional security layer in order to avoid automated actions generated with robot programs. Usually are various small “challenges” or tasks that can be completed only by humans.

Chatbots; tiny computer programs integrated in popular messaging apps (e. g. Facebook Messenger) used to simulate conversations with human users.

Churn rate; a metric used to measure how many customers you retain (and at what value). If you have 100 customers at the beginning of the month and 75 customers at the end of the month, your churn rate is 25%.

Clickbait; an eye-catching hyperlink, a sensationalist headline or a misleading content piece which encourages people to click through to the full content. Usually has only one goal: to generate page views or advertising revenue.

Click-through rate ( or CTR); a metric used to measure the level of interest; if a link displayed 100 times has received 2 clicks, it means a CTR of 2%.

Cloaking; hiding certain content on webpages or in affiliate links. The former method is considered to be a black hat technique that will damage your SEO efforts; the latter is a useful, widely accepted and used practice in affiliate marketing.

Content channel; a distinctive delivery platform used for content distribution. Every brand or company uses a large variety of distribution channels to reach the potential customers, including company websites, social media platforms, email marketing, paid advertisements, etc.

Content syndication; presenting content – full articles, excerpts, thumbnails, links, etc – on third party websites via contextual integration in order to generate traffic or increase brand awareness.

Contextual link; a link which is literally included, incorporated in the main content of a web page as a usual underlined textual link. The opposite is some sort of traditional advertisement displayed within various secondary structural elements (header, sidebar, etc) in form of textual or image links.

Conversion path; a series of steps used by a marketer in order to lead a visitor towards a desired point or outcome. A classic three-step conversion path: a CTA leading to a landing page with a lead capture form, which redirects the user to a content offer presented on a so-called thank you page.

Conversion rate (or CR); a metric used to measure the efficiency level; if a link displayed 100 times has generated 3 sales (or other pre-defined actions), it means a CR of 3%.

Conversion rate optimization (or CRO); the sum of all the efforts and practices that are used to increase the number of those visitors who will take a specific decision or desired action once they have arrived on a website.

Cookies; a text file sent from the merchant’s website to the customer’s web browser. Is used to assign an ID to a given customer who landed on the merchant’s site after clicking on your affiliate link. If the actions of the given customer will produce the desired outcome in a precisely defined period of time – even later and without clicking again on your affiliate link -, you will receive a commission.

Cookieless tracking; a new, emerging tracking method that not relies upon cookies. The negative impact of the widely spread spyware programs and the quite common practice of routinely deleted browser cookies are real problems for advertisers.

Cookie expiration; an amount of time predefined by the merchant. You are going to receive your commission only if the customer referred by you will produce the desired outcome before the given period expires; the average cookie time is between 30-60 days.

Cookie stuffing; an unethical method that will try to send and deposit multiple cookies from different merchant websites onto customers computers in the hopes that these customers who actually has never seen the advertiser’s website before, eventually will visit the merchant’s site generating a sale. Usually is strictly prohibited by affiliate agreements.

Copywriting; the act of writing compelling and engaging textual content that will be used as a marketing asset in order to generate a certain customer behavior.

Cost per action (or CPA); the amount paid to generate one qualified action (e. g one sale).

Cost per click (or CPC); the amount paid to generate one click one one link; with $100 spent and 40 clicks received, your CPC would be 40 cents.

Cost per thousand (or CPM); the amount paid in order to display an advertisement 1,000 times; if an advertiser has a $5 CPM offer, you’ll have to pay $15 to have your ads displayed 3,000 times.

Crawler (or spider); a piece of software utilized by search engines to discover and analyze the content of a given website.

Creatives; textual or graphical marketing aids or materials provided by the merchant. They are used by affiliates on their own websites to generate the desired actions (e. g. banners).

CSS (or cascading style sheets); coding language used to define formatting rules – position, dimensions, color, alignment, etc – that will tell a web browser how to display a given web page element.

Customer acquisition cost (or CAC); the price paid to acquire one new customer; the total acquisition costs divided with the total number of new customers within a given time period. With $200 spent and 10 new customers your CAC is $20.

Customer lifetime value (or CLV); a quite important metric which is trying to “predict” the total amount a given customer may spend with a merchant during his lifetime.

Customer retention; strategies and tactics used to reduce the number of customer defections.

D

Data feed (or product feed); an organized list (a CSV, XLS, etc file) with certain products or attributes that can be advertised and compared in a unique way.

Deep linking; linking technique used to send a visitor to a given specific offer or second-, third-level category webpages (not the homepage) on the advertiser’s website.

Domain age; it is what it is: a measure of how old a domain is. Usually older domains are considered to be more trustworthy by search engines.

Drip campaign; pre-written ongoing email series used to nurture and steer leads towards a desired conversion point.

Dynamic content; the email content changes from one subscriber to the next according to different pre-decided variables or user preferences.

Dynamic URL; a URL created, generated as a result of a database query on a database-driven website. In these URLs the domain name is followed by an unreadable script-generated character string (the result of the query). A dynamic URL is user-unfriendly, therefore is bad for SEO and must be rewritten into a static URL.