In our previous article we’ve covered some of the most basic and necessary terms you need to know to start out in affiliate marketing. And we promised there will be a second part with a bit more words/phrases that will give you a better understanding of how affiliate marketing functions.

Let’s start with one word that encompasses a lot of other need-to-know notions.

Vertical

In affiliate marketing we call ‘verticals’ different markets, niches where the products/services are being provided and sold. Usually the following verticals are singled out:

• E-commerce

• Travel

• Finance & Insurance

• Gambling/betting

• Mobile offers

• Nutra

• Dating

• etc.

Each vertical has its own peculiarities of work, so make sure to familiarize yourself with them before you start traffic. Working with travel offers will mean a completely different experience for those who worked with Finance & Insurance. People used to working with casino offers or Nutra will have to adjust to the requirements of working with e-commerce.

Before starting any affiliate marketing campaign you need to make sure you have/know these things:

Creatives

Creatives are the materials that are used to promote the offer: banners, email kits, newsletters, posts, videos etc. They are crucial in making the campaign profitable: the more it fits with the demand of the target audience, the more leads/sales you’ll get.

Very often the word is used as a synonym to ‘banner’.

Tracking link

A tracking link is a specific type of link that publishers/advertisers use to track the performance. It usually contains certain parameters that help collect data and further analyze it. They are an essential part of any affiliate marketing campaign: any target action through that link will be tracked and later on paid for. 

Landing page

A landing page is generally a page on the website where a potential customer ‘lands’ after clicking on the link from an email newsletter, post, banner etc. This is the page that should attract the customer the most and encourage a purchase/registration/leaving contact info etc. 

Now that you’ve started a campaign here are a few parameters you should take into account to help you analyze your traffic:

Conversion rate 

Conversion rate is a ratio between the amount of clicks on the affiliate link and the number of leads/conversions generated through them. This is an important parameter for both publishers and advertisers that helps determine how well the traffic source is performing with the brand. 

ROI (return of Investment)

ROI (Return Of Investment) is also an important parameter to take into account when working on a campaign - it helps you understand how profitable traffic is. It is easy to calculate: you take the amount of profit you got from the campaign and divide it by the cost of the investment itself.

Approval rate/Rejection rate

These are also parameters you should consider while analyzing traffic. Approval/Rejection rates are calculated very easily: the amount of leads that are approved/rejected by the advertiser divided by the number of total leads/conversions brought by the publisher. 

This is a good indicator of the quality of traffic: if the approval rate is really low, it might mean the quality is also really low. 

Obviously we’ve covered only a fraction of terminology that you will need in your affiliate marketing journey. Our advice would be to read articles or go to forums and try to learn as much as you can (and for any unknown words you always have Google to help you out).

Let us know if it was useful or if you want to have Part 3 of the article with even more words and phrases.