Affiliate arbitrage has grown its own slang — a mix of English terms and jargon. We've gathered the essentials into a single glossary, grouped by topic so it's easier to find your way around.
Money and payout models
- Offer — an advertiser's deal you get paid for (a registration, a deposit, a sale).
- Payout — how much the affiliate network pays for a single target action.
- CPA — pay per action (Cost Per Action). CPL — per lead, CPS — per sale, CPI — per install.
- RevShare — a % of the long-term turnover from a player/customer you brought in (popular in gambling).
- Cap — the limit of conversions a network is willing to accept per day. Go over the cap and you stop getting paid.
- Hold — the period while the network checks your traffic quality before paying out (from days to weeks).
- Shave — when a network "shaves off" part of your conversions (refuses to count them). It can be technical or fraudulent — the main risk when choosing an affiliate network.
- ROI — return on investment. Details and formulas are in the guide on metrics.
- Profit — net earnings. Burj (foreign) — non-CIS geos with higher payouts.
Accounts and Facebook
- BM — Business Manager, the Facebook hub for managing ad accounts.
- Campaign / ad account — an advertising campaign / advertising account.
- ZRD — Facebook's "advertising activity request": it asks you to confirm your identity/documents. Often means the account is at risk.
- Autoregs — mass-registered accounts (cheap, weak).
- King / aged — old accounts with a history (expensive, trusted).
- Farming — warming up an account to working condition (see the warm-up guide).
- Ban / reject — account block / ad disapproval.
- Antidetect — a browser for isolating accounts (more on this).
Traffic and the funnel
- Creative — an ad banner/video.
- Pre-lander — an intermediate page before the offer that "warms up" the user.
- White page — the page shown to the moderator (what it is).
- Cloaking — a system that shows the moderator the white page and the user the black one (the difference).
- Bundle (combo) — a working combination of creative + landing page + offer + geo.
- Running traffic — launching traffic to an offer.
- Spy — a service for peeking at other people's bundles (how to use it).
- A "burned-out" creative — one that stopped converting (the audience got tired of it).
Metrics and tech
- CR — conversion rate (% of actions per click). CTR — an ad's click-through rate.
- EPC — earnings per click. CPC / CPM — cost per click / per 1000 impressions.
- Approve — % of confirmed leads (relevant for e-commerce/COD).
- Postback (S2S) — a signal from the network to the tracker about a conversion.
- Tracker — a traffic-tracking system (Keitaro, Binom).
- Sub id — a tag for labeling traffic sources in the tracker.
- Proxy — IP/geo substitution (types).
- Footprint — traces that link your landers/accounts into one cluster (how to remove them).
- Geo / tier — the country you run traffic to and its "level" of purchasing power.
- Bump — raising the bid/budget to exit the learning phase.
- Test / split — checking several variants (A/B).
Wrap-up
This is the foundation that will keep you from getting lost in chats and case studies. The slang keeps growing, but these 45 terms cover 90% of the conversations. Ready to move from theory to practice — start with the beginner's guide, and grab the white pages for your first bundle ready-made from the pool.