The most complete glossary of affiliate marketing, lead generation, and CPA on the Russian web. I keep adding terms. If there is a term you do not understand and it has something to do with affiliate marketing, write to me.
Updated August 11, 2026.
By the way, one thing has always surprised me. All these terms, or nearly all of them, are on Wikipedia. So what surprises me is why nobody can bring themselves to look there. Plenty of it is even available in Russian.
Terms are sorted alphabetically in English. The main term, in my opinion—that is, the form I use most often—comes first, and all synonyms, including terms in other languages, are in parentheses. So if you do not find one wording, look for another.
A–F
2-tier PPC — not Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Second-tier PPC. This usually means PPC companies selling search traffic that has passed through an intermediate page. For example, doorway traffic is sold through 2-tier PPC networks such as ndot, evoplus, miva, and so on.
ad creative (creative) — an umbrella name for an ad unit, such as an ad text, banner, or video ad.
advertiser (advert) — generally, the advertiser or final client that supplies an offer to the affiliate network and pays the network, which then pays the publisher. Sometimes an affiliate network can create offers and be its own advertiser.
app installs — a type of offer. Installs are application installations from official app stores. For the user, everything looks very simple. They open an app store—Google Play, Apple App Store, or another one—and tap Install. A fairly common, profitable, and difficult type of offer. Read more →
bid — the bid you set as your maximum cost per click. It will usually differ from the actual cost per click. The price depends on targeting, competition, country, CTR, and so on.
bidding (bidding system) — the system inside a PPC company that calculates how much you pay for a particular click.
bonus hunting — extracting free or almost free traffic from PPC or other systems by using coupons. You can read more in the post about bonus hunting. Read more →
bounce rate in GA4: the share of sessions that were not engaged sessions. An engaged session lasts more than 10 seconds, contains a key event, or has at least two page or screen views. So bounce rate = 100% minus engagement rate. Landing page CTR is a different metric.
churn rate — the percentage of customers who stopped using a product or service over a specific period. The other side of Retention Rate. Read more →
cost per lead (lead cost) — how much you are paid for one lead if that lead passes successfully.
conversion (conversion rate, CR) — an indicator of how well users turn into leads. If 100 visits to an offer page produced 20 leads, conversion is 20%, or 1/5. Pretty good conversion, by the way. Used in phrases such as “the offer converts” or “offer conversion.”
CR (Conversion Rate) — the conversion of site visitors into customers who paid for a product or service. Incomplete transactions are not counted: an abandoned cart, unpaid invoice, and so on. It is the ratio of customers who fully completed a transaction (Customers Completed Transactions, CCT) to total visitors (TV): CR = CCT/TV. Read more →
CPA (Cost Per Action) — payment for an action, and usually the name of the industry as a whole. It often includes CPS and CPL, even though all these terms differ slightly in the narrow sense. But CPA is the term most often used for both CPS and CPL. Actions include registrations, entering a phone number or email address, completing forms—although forms are pure CPL—placing an order, and paying for it. In the narrow sense, the main difference between CPA and CPL is that the result of CPL is an interested customer. More precisely, the contact details of an interested customer. A mobile subscription is CPA, while a completed loan application is CPL. CPA Man also has a more detailed blog post about CPA marketing.
CPC (Cost Per Click) — cost per click, a metric used by every PPC company. It also describes the model where you pay for clicks rather than impressions or something else.
CPL (Cost Per Lead) — payment for a lead. The term is not used very often; when people say CPA, they usually include CPL. See CPA for more.
CPM (Cost Per iMpression, Cost Per Mille) — the cost of one thousand impressions and the name of the model where you buy impressions rather than clicks or something else.
CPM vs PPC: the difference
With CPM, you pay for impressions; with PPC or CPC, you pay for clicks. Compare the models using your own data: CTR, conversion rate, approved conversions, and profit. There is no universal minimum price.
CPO (Cost Per Order) — the cost of an order: advertising spend divided by the number of orders received. Read more →
CPS (Cost Per Sale) — payment for a sale. People often call this CPA too, but that is not quite right. It can be fixed, where the publisher receives the same payout for any sale, or rev. share, where they receive a percentage of the order.
CTR (Click-through rate) — the ratio of clicks to impressions. The more people click, the better the creative. But conversion is not always better. Read more →
dating — a type of offer (vertical, niche) related to dating services. The action for such an offer is usually a registration or topping up the account balance.
DLS (Downloadable software, adware traffic) — traffic from adware, plain and simple: any software a user installed and now gets to enjoy tons of extra ads from, whether popups and popunders—in which case it is PPV traffic—or a replaced search engine and extra banners.
- eEPC / aEPC (effective earnings per click / average earnings per click): aggregated versions of EPC. The basic calculation is earnings / clicks. If the interface shows revenue per 100 clicks, multiply the result by 100. Check the period and aggregation method in the specific affiliate network.
EPC (Earn Per Click, less often RPC—Revenue Per Click) — earnings per click in a CPA system, a general metric used for comparison with CPC. If CPC is higher, you are sending traffic at a loss, and vice versa.
fraud in mobile traffic is a very broad idea. The basic point is that someone is deceiving someone else. One kind of fraud uses fake SIM cards or subscriber accounts to send fake SMS messages or create subscriptions in order to deceive the affiliate network. Another kind is tied to app installs, where the affiliate network and advertiser are deceived by supplying low-quality incentivized traffic as quality traffic, or simply bots that generate installs. You can read more about that scheme in the post about fraud and the dark side of mobile traffic. Read more →
G–M
impressions — impressions, plain and simple: the number of times your creative was shown to a user.
incentive traffic — a flow of interested visitors who were promised some bonus in the ad in exchange for completing specific actions on the site. This traffic is not considered very valuable because the visitors’ almost sole purpose is to receive the promised reward.
K-factor — the main viral marketing metric: how many new users each existing user brings. Read more →
landing page (landing) — the page a user is sent to, or “lands” on, from an ad. There is “your landing page” and the “offer landing page.” The term is used differently depending on context. Most often, when people say landing page, they mean yours rather than the offer’s. There is also a term monkey page, though I almost never see it used now. It usually means a very simple landing page, such as a page for choosing a mobile operator, where the user should click quickly and leave for the offer.
landing page CTR (LP CTR) — the ratio of clicks through a landing page to visits to that same page. Read more →
launch — launching a new product and bringing it to market. To build the target audience quickly, it is accompanied by a marketing campaign appropriate to the product. The goals are to attract the largest possible target audience, create anticipation for the product, and stimulate sales.
Launch strategies can be presented like this:
- pre-launch — market research, selecting the target audience, identifying its needs, and developing a suitable product.
- re-launch — managing a product or even brand relaunch. This is needed when market conditions change or marketing mistakes need to be fixed. A timely and correct relaunch can substantially improve profit.
- soft launch — releasing a product in a limited mode to study the response of a small group of users while recording the main business metrics, such as ARPU and total installs. This reduces campaign risk by testing and improving the product’s business logic and its fit with the target audience.
lead generation — people use the term for all kinds of things. In the narrow and proper sense, it means obtaining the contact details of an interested customer and nothing more. Read more →
LTV (customer lifetime value) means calculating the net profit from a customer relationship over the entire time the customer interacts with the company. The calculation model can vary in precision, from a rough heuristic to complex predictive-analysis methods. LTV can also be defined as the monetary value of a customer relationship based on the present value of projected future cash flows from that relationship. Read more →
What LTV is for
- calculating the cost of acquiring new customers
- determining the minimum customer conversion
- structuring the customer base by customer profitability
First, you need to choose a time period for the LTV calculation: a year, month, or quarter, for example. You should also account for the time value of money when evaluating investment in customers, because money is supposed to generate income over time. The minimum acceptable conversion is determined from the estimated LTV of one customer, the campaign cost, and the number of customers reached.
LTV lets you structure the customer base because there is no reason to spend the same resources retaining profitable and unprofitable customers.
Historical term. A Midlet is an application that uses the MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) for Java ME. These applications usually include games for mobile devices and cell phones and work on most mobile devices, including ones with small displays, simple keyboards, and limited HTTP network access. “Midlet” is analogous to the terms “applet” and “servlet.” A Midlet can charge the customer’s phone using SMS after they accept the proposed application terms. Payment can occur when the application is installed, when a premium version is activated, or periodically.
N–Z
offer — what an offer is. If you cannot be bothered to read. An offer is either a campaign in an affiliate network, with all its parameters such as the landing page and rules, or simply the offer landing page: the page where the user eventually ends up. How to understand it depends on context. Read more →
post-click — a set of practices aimed at improving sales by analyzing user actions connected with online advertising in general, and PPC and lead generation advertising in particular. It is a broad term and therefore rather vague. It can include any analysis more detailed than Google Analytics or your tracker. Matching an IP address to a specific company or person, matching user behavior across different sites. Or, for example, buying several marketing databases and merging them to obtain new information. More data collection and analysis than lead generation itself.
postback (pingback, S2S pixel) — a mechanism for passing data from an affiliate network, or from the advertiser, to a tracking solution. Here is a post about setting up postback using prosper202 and a HasOffers network. Read more →
PPC (Pay Per Click) — both a traffic sales model where you pay per click and a company that sells traffic that way, and sometimes even a company that buys the traffic. Facebook and Google Ads are 1-tier PPC. Evoplus and ndot are 2-tier PPC, usually with doorway traffic.
PPL (Pay Per Lead) — payment for a lead, roughly the same as CPL but from the advertiser’s point of view.
PPV (Pay Per View) — payment for a view, a model where a user is shown a popup or popunder. This traffic usually comes from adware. Read more about what PPV is. And even more detail. Read more →
Quality Score: a Google Ads diagnostic score from 1 to 10 at the keyword level. Quality Score itself is not an auction signal; for diagnosis, look at expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Read more →
Retention Rate (RR) — the percentage of users who launch an app after a certain period following installation. For example, RR-2 50% and RR-7 30% mean that 50% of users launched the app on Day 2 and 30% launched it on Day 7 after installation. Read more →
ROI (return on investment): return on investment. ROI = (revenue minus costs) / costs * 100%.
RPU / ARPU (average revenue per user): average revenue per user over a selected period. ARPU = revenue for the period / average number of users over the same period. This is not average order value: that measures revenue per order. Read more →
seed keyword — patient zero, the keyword—or list of keywords—from which you start finding the rest, either for buying traffic or for SEO. I am not sure what the correct Russian translation is. Initial keywords?
Historical term. SMS alarms are special applications for mobile phones and smartphones that send SMS messages to mobile operators’ short codes. Such programs were usually distributed as various Java applications, games, and so on. During installation, an SMS alarm would typically show a menu asking the user to answer a question, such as whether they accepted the application’s terms or were over 18. Tapping “Yes” or “No” sent an SMS to a special short code and charged the phone account.
SubID — a subaccount in an affiliate system that lets you set a tracking label, usually in a format such as http://[affiliate network URL]/[referrer]/SUBID. It is very convenient for testing different advertising methods. For example, suppose we have a dozen different ads sending traffic from one source, such as a VK group. We mark each of the ten ads with a separate SubID and track each one’s metrics—CTR, conversion, ROI—collect enough data, draw conclusions from the test, and run the most effective ads.
Some affiliate networks also support a dynamic SubID, which creates unique ways to segment traffic that cannot be targeted normally. For example, you can obtain information about teaser or display traffic—country, city, referrer source URL, keywords—compare conversion, and manage traffic.
tracker — a server-side script that, at a minimum, records traffic movement statistics. It is usually used because a CPA campaign tracker does not provide enough statistics. More about what a tracker is and what to record in it. Besides recording statistics and providing reports, a tracker can cloak, route traffic to different offers by country, or rotate offers.
trigger email campaigns, or triggered emails, differ from ordinary email campaigns because they are not meant for mass delivery. They are a response to one person’s actions, tied to a specific event or action performed by a site visitor.
vertical (niche, offer type) — the focus of an offer. The vertical usually makes the offer’s basic point and required action clear. For example: dating means registration or topping up a balance; finance means a completed form or approved loan; mobile means a subscription or SMS, and so on.
Historical term. Wap-click technology lets a user subscribe to mobile content. On the site, content is viewed by tapping an OK button that activates the subscription. Choosing and loading content is simple, convenient, and faster, and does not require sending an SMS. This method also provides high conversion and a daily subscription charge from customers. The mobile operator must support WAP subscriptions.
W-8BEN: an IRS form used by a foreign individual to certify foreign beneficial-owner status and, where applicable, eligibility for a tax-treaty rate. The form is given to the payer, not the IRS, and can be signed electronically. It generally remains valid through the end of the third following calendar year unless the information changes. Foreign entities use W-8BEN-E. IRS instructions.