Common terms used in online advertising and
advertising networks

Ad Network

An advertising company that serves as a broker between publishers and advertisers in exchange for a shared commission.

Affiliate

A person or company that takes part in a merchant's affiliate program by trying to sell their products and/or services. In return, the affiliate earns commissions from leads or purchases made through the links on his site.

CPA (Cost Per Action or Cost Per Acquisition)

The CPA is a payout model that requires the user to perform an action before the publisher receives a commission. An action usually refers to filling out a form (CPL) or making a purchase.

CPC (Cost Per Click)

The cost or payout whenever an ad is clicked. If an ad has a CPC of $0.10 and is clicked 10 times, it would yield a total of $1.00.

CPL (Cost Per Lead)

A payout structure that pays an affiliate a flat rate for every lead generated from the affiliate's site. This differs from a standard affiliate payout strucutre that typically only pays when a product or service is actually purchased.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand)

An alternative to CPC where each click is paid for, CPM is a flat fee per 1000 ad impressions. For example, an ad with a CPM of $0.25 that receives 1000 impressions and 750 clicks will still only receive a $0.25 payout.

CPS (Cost Per Sale)

A payout metric that pays an affiliate based on a successful sale of a product or service. This differs from a CPL (Cost Per Lead)in that an actual transaction, or sale, must take place.

CTR (Click Through Rate)

The percentage of clicks received in comparisson to how many times an ad is displayed. If a banner is displayed 1000 times and gets clicked 50 times that would be a CTR of 5%.

Exit Traffic

A payout model that pays when a visitor leaves a site and then clicks through an advertisement, most often either a popup or popunder.

Impression

An impression is the display of an ad. If a banner ad is displayed on a webpage 1000times, a total of 1000 impressions were shown.

Interstitial

An extremely intrusive advertisement that loads inbetween pages on a website that typically either take up the entire browser or the majority of it.

Pop-under

A pop-up that appears underneath the web browser window, as opposed to a pop-up which appears on top of the window. Pop-unders typically pay less as a result.

Pop-Up

A type of advertisement that is automatically displayed in a second smaller browser window apon loading or unloading a normal web page.

Publisher

A webmaster or owner of a website that distributes advertisements on their website. Publishers seek ad networks to find advertisers, whereas advertisers seek ad networks to find publishers.