Acronyms in Adult Affiliate Marketing

TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is extremely popular in the online marketing industry. I’ll put here everything that comes to my mind, without a specific order. I hope in time all important ones will find the way here.



Besides acronym meaning, the context and related concepts will also be presented.

CPM – Cost Per Mille – This model refers to paying ads according to the number of impressions. Value is equal to the price paid per 1000 impressions. So if CPM is $0.5 you’ll earn $1 for 2.000 impressions.

CPV – Cost Per View – See CPM.

PPV – Pay Per View – See CPM.

CPC – Cost Per Click – No matter how many visitors see the ad, just clicks count. So the value is equal to the price paid per a click. For example, if CPC is $0.2 for 10 clicks you get $2.



PPC – Pay Per Click – See CPC. Meaning is actually slightly different but most of the time it just doesn’t matter.



CTR – Click Through Rate – Ratio of the number of visitors that clicked on the ad to the number of impressions. If CTR is 3% that means for 100 impressions there will be (on average) 3 clicks. CTR is the easiest way to measure which banner is more successful. If the content of the banner is bad on not relevant for visitors, or design is bad, it will have lower CTR than some other (better) banner put in the same place.



LP – Landing page – Page where a visitor “lands” after a click on the ad, link, banner… Click on a banner was a victory for its designer, but in order for the user to do the action that really counts (registration, leaving email…) it’s not enough. Link in banner leads to a landing page and its job is to keep visitor’s attention and persuade him/her to do desired action (conversion).



Conversion – Visitor’s desired action (registration, confirmed email address, credit card data…) on a landing page. If the visitor does it, we have a conversion.



CR – Conversion Rate – Used for example for a landing page, represents the ratio of conversions to the number of visitors. So CR of 15% means out of 1.000 visitors 150 of them will actually leave data/register/buy/… Conversion Rate is the easiest way to measure how much some landing page is more successful compared to some other page.



CPA – Cost Per Action – In this model, you get money in the case of conversion on the landing page. It works this way:

1. Visitor clicks on a banner on your site

2. On the landing page visitor does whatever is defined as conversion (registration, paying…)

3. You earn money.

If CPA is $50, for 2 conversions you get $100. CPA model is often different for different classes of traffic you are “sending” to the advertiser’s landing page, and “traffic class” is usually defined by the visitor’s country of origin. So most of the time you’ll get much more money for traffic from the USA than from some African country, for example.



CTA – Call To Action – It’s those loud buttons with big letters “Buy Now!” and the like. Usually on landing pages, but can be on banners too.



EPC – Earnings Per Click – How much money a click on a selected link/banner brings. It’s calculated for a period time, by dividing total earning with number of clicks.

For example if some offer brought $100 during last month, and in the same month it was clicked 50 times, it has EPC of $2.

This is measure of profitability of an offer, and is used for comparing two offers. Inside enters everything that happens after click on your site: landing page quality (CR), payment model (CPA or CPM…) …



CMS – Content Management System – Content (of a website) is kept in a database and on request web page is dynamically formed. The oldest sites were static, server was serving ready web pages. Example of CMS is WordPress.



WP – WordPress



CPL – Cost Per Lead – see PPL.



PPL – Pay Per Lead – It’s advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying leads. And a “qualifying lead” is generally a signup involving contact information and perhaps some demographic information; it is typically a non-cash conversion event. A lead may consist of as little as an email address, or it may involve a detailed form covering multiple pages.



CPS – Cost Per Sale – see PPS.



PPS – Pay Per Sale – Advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying sales. So you get money when visitor not just registers but actually pays, not before. PPL payments are much more often but PPS payments are much higher.



ROI – Return On Investment – That’s the ratio of profits (or losses) to the amount invested. For example if you entered some project with $10.000 (investment) and earned (profit) $1.500, you have ROI of 15%.

ROI is the easiest way to measure profitability of some project and to compare two projects.



SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – Such a wide subject! It includes EVERYTHING you do, or don’t, both on your website and its pages and out of it, both technical and non-technical subjects…

That ends with your site (or some pages) placing well on the result page of a search engine when user is searching for something and with some intent that is relevant to your pages.



SERP – Search Engine Results Page – Page of search engine listings, typically the first page of organic results. Why stress on “the first page”? Because it almost doesn’t matter if your page is ranked on the third or 56th page of results, almost all visitors click on first 3 results on the top of the first page, all the others don’t get much attention.



Organic – In SEO “organic” means everything (traffic, results) obtained without paying for it.

Organic traffic – All traffic coming from SERP, after visitor’s clicking on organic search results links.

Paid traffic – SERP traffic that is not organic 🙂

Organic search results – All results on SERP except paid search results.

Direct traffic – Visitor came to your site directly, not from some other page. So he/she probably typed the address directly or selected in Bookmarks.

Referral traffic – All traffic that is not from SERP and not direct. It usually means visitor clicked on link to your site on some other web page.

Social (media) traffic – Visitor clicked on a link to your site on some social network.



TLD – Top Level Domain – For example .com, .net, .org…



UV – Unique Visitor – That’s a visitor that have visited a site at least once in a fixed time frame. Second and any later visit don’t count as unique. Sites typically use cookies to follow this.

So why is this important? Well, you usually won’t sell the same thing to the same guy again and again, especially in a short time. So when calculating statistics, almost always it’s better to use UV instead of total number of visits.

SOI – Single Opt-In – For registration (on landing page) to be accepted and you to get money, user just needs to leave email address.



DOI – Double Opt-In – Visitor’s email address is not enough, it must be also verified. It’s usually done by replying to email sent to that address.

