The Affiliate Marketing Glossary: Every Term a Program Owner Actually Meets
Referral vs. conversion, EPC, maturity, clawback, cookie window, self-referral — the working vocabulary of running an affiliate program, defined the way practitioners use them.
Affiliate marketing recycles ordinary words into precise meanings, and half the confusion in partner emails and software settings comes from the vocabulary. Here's the working glossary — organized by theme rather than alphabet, because that's how the concepts actually connect.
People and roles
Merchant / advertiser / program owner — you: the store paying commissions. Affiliate / partner / publisher — the person promoting for commission; "partner" is winning as the everyday word, and this blog uses them interchangeably. Referral — used two ways, worth disambiguating: the event of sending a customer, and (in most software, including ours) the record created when a referred order lands, carrying the amount, status, and origin. Sub-affiliate network — a partner who is really an umbrella for many smaller publishers; fine when disclosed, worth a policy line when not.
Money mechanics
Commission — the amount a referral earns, percentage or flat. Base rate vs. custom rate — the program default versus a per-partner override; tiers are rates that change with volume. Recurring commission — earnings on renewals, not just first payments; the subscription structures. Maturity / holding period — the days a commission waits in pending until the refund window passes. Payable balance — matured, unpaid earnings; what the next payout covers. Payout minimum / threshold — the floor a balance must reach to be paid; part of the payout schedule. Reversal / clawback — un-earning a commission after a refund or chargeback; when reversals exceed new earnings you get a negative balance.
Tracking words
Referral link — the partner's parameterized URL (?ref=jane). Cookie window / referral window — how long a click keeps earning credit. First-party tracking — attribution via your own site's cookies and server, the post-third-party-cookie approach. Attribution model — who wins when multiple partners touch a sale; first wins keeps the original cookie, last wins overwrites. Coupon attribution — crediting by personal discount code instead of (or alongside) a link; rescues attribution across devices and cleared cookies. Deep link — a referral link to a specific page rather than the homepage. Cloaked / branded link — a partner's tidy redirect wrapping the referral URL; legitimate with disclosure. Postback / server-to-server — network-world term for server-side conversion notification; in self-hosted WordPress setups the order is on your server, which is why the term rarely appears here.
Performance numbers
Conversion rate — referred visits that become orders. AOV — average order value of referred orders; commission × AOV is the partner's real incentive. EPC — earnings per click, the partner-side yardstick: commissions divided by clicks (often per hundred clicks in network usage). Activation rate — share of approved partners producing a first referral; the onboarding metric. Effective commission cost — everything the channel costs as a share of the revenue it brings; the KPI worth watching most. Incrementality — whether a sale would have happened anyway; the concept behind the coupon-site debate.
Conduct and compliance
Self-referral — a partner buying through their own link; blocked by default everywhere serious. Cookie stuffing — forcing attribution cookies onto visitors who never meaningfully clicked; classic fraud. Brand bidding — running search ads on the merchant's own name; the policy everyone needs. Disclosure — the legally required statement that a link earns commission; the FTC rules. rel="sponsored" — the link attribute telling search engines a link is commercial; the SEO side. Program terms — the agreement binding all of the above; the template walkthrough.
Keep the glossary link handy for partner onboarding — a shared vocabulary is the quiet prerequisite for every policy above, and you can see most of these concepts as concrete screens in the live demo: referrals with statuses, pending versus payable balances, per-partner rates, the audit trail behind a reversal.