Affiliate program / Affiliate link

Affiliate programs allow other people to sell your products on a commission basis. All your affiliates really do is place link to your site. When a visitor arrives at your site, your affiliate program “makes a note” of the site that referred him. If a visitor buys something and the referring site belongs to one of your affiliates, you pay that affiliate either a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount - according to your agreement.

CPA

Cost per action. Total cost per sale, calculated by dividing the total cost of an advertising campaign by the number of resulting sales. For example, if $1000 is spent on an advertising campaign and that campaign results in 20 sales, the conversion cost per sale is $50 ($1000 / 20). That means it costs $50 to generate one sale.

CPC

Cost per click. The total cost of an advertising campaign divided by the resulting number of unique visitors. Sometimes also used as a synonym for PPC.

CPM

Cost per thousand impressions (M= Roman numeral for 1000). A pricing system often used in the banner advertising industry. Typically a fixed price is offered for 1000 impressions of a banner. The price is usually influenced by the topic of the site (how targeted the audience is) rather than the popularity of the site.

CTR

Often used in Internet marketing to describe the percentage of users who click on a link or advertisement. The CTR is used as a measure to determine the effectiveness of a link / advertisement. It is most effective if used in conjunction with other measurements like conversion rate.

EPC

Earnings Per Click. A unit of measure used to determine a site’s ability to convert visitors into customers. Calculated by dividing total sales amount by total page views.

PPC

Pay-Per-Click. An advertising payment model where the advertiser pays only when the advertisement is actually clicked. In other words, the advertiser literally pays only for visitors rather than per advertisement impression. The term CPC (cost per click) is sometimes used in the place of PPC and the plural PPCs is sometimes used to refer to PPC search engines.

ROI

Return On Investment. In the context of SEO, the term refers to sales generated as the direct result of a search engine marketing campaign.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization. This term is widely used in the search engine industry as a collective name for those activities that are directly or indirectly aimed at improving a page’s search engine ranking. Sometimes the term SEO is also used to refer to providers of SEO services - in other words it’s used in the place of terms like “SEO provider” and “SEO specialist”.

Unique visitor

Used to describe one person visiting a site. That one person may generate multiple visits over a period of time, therefore log files normally show more visits than unique visitors. The shortened version “uniques” is sometimes used to refer to unique visitors.