Terminology

Advertiser: Also known as merchants. Produces saleable product and pays affiliate or network for delivering traffic that generates a sale or lead.

Affiliate: Also known as publishers. Promotes product or service in exchange for paid commission when a defined saleable action is recorded.

Affiliate Group: System or manually created grouping of affiliates. Affiliate Groups allow various pieces of functionality to target the entire collection of affiliates within the groups e.g. reporting filters, campaign approvals, payout overrides, affiliate notices. Affiliate Notices: Mass e-mail communication sent by the system to affiliates. Includes scheduling logic to target subsets of affiliates, and conditional logic to target communications to affiliates with a min/max number of clicks/sales on an offer. Use affiliate notices to broadcast information. Affiliates may be opted out at affiliate level. See also Campaign Status Alerts.

Affiliate Universal Pixel: "Pixel" placed in HitPath under an affiliate account and used to report sales back to the affiliate's own tracking system in real time for all campaigns that the affiliate is running. Can be called server side or as conversion page HTML.

API: Interface allowing communication between two systems. HitPath offers four main APIs; reporting, admin, publisher and approvals. Reporting API enables admins and affiliates to generate clicks and sales. Admin API allows data like campaign and affiliate account information to be exported from the admin panel. Publisher API allows campaign links, suppression data and creatives to be exported by affiliates. These three APIs allow the automated transfer of data from HitPath to an external system. The fourth, the Approvals API, allows locking of affiliate approvals to approved campaigns or advertisers only.

Approval: Approval may refer to accepting an application from a prospective affiliate to the network, or to giving marketing permission to run a campaign an affiliate or group thereof.

Bonus: Single line item payout to an affiliate for a specific campaign. Paid on current date. No earned revenue associated.

Campaign Icon: Image that is displayed on the affiliate interface in the campaign list screen. This is controlled at campaign level and can be disabled. Used to lend a splash of color to a campaign and help affiliates quickly differentiate between campaigns.

Campaign Status Alerts: Configurable automated alerts sent to affiliates by the system when the status of a campaign is changed. Controlled at campaign level where users can opt in the type of alert they would like to send out for the campaign. Affiliates may be opted out at affiliate level.

Cap: Campaign caps allow a network to set a limit to the number of sales that can be generated for an offer based on advertiser’s preferred max spend. Residual traffic attempting to reach a campaign once capped is monetized and re-routed to and tracked under a separate campaign.

Categories: Define verticals for your offers. Categories can be published to affiliates in the affiliate logged area so they can browse campaigns by vertical. Also used to filter reporting results.

Compliance: Usually refers to mailing practices regarding the respect of opt out submissions and adhering to the requirements of CAN-SPAM legislation. A compliant affiliate is an e-mailer who regularly downloads suppression data and scrubs his mailing lists to remove those addresses found in the suppression data download.

Cookie: Small file that is added to a browser by a site or redirector domain, allowing the site to recognize the user when s/he returns. Stores campaign ID and hit ID tracking reference for HitPath software.

Cookie Persistence: After a user requests a campaign link, HitPath attempts to drop a cookie on the user's browser. Define cookie lifetime beyond session using persistence. For as long as that cookie is alive, when the same user requests the campaign link at a future date, a new hit ID will not be issued, but redirect to landing page will be allowed. This is controlled at campaign level on an individual campaign basis. Session lifespan is default setting.

Cookie Tracking: In comparison to "hit ID" tracking where the advertiser fires a pixel with the hit ID present, sales may be tracked through a cookie lookup, provided the cookie is still present when the saleable action occurs and is reported.

Country Groups: Create groupings of countries or a single country for simple traffic routing purposes. Uses accept and deny logic to route end users based on their IP address to your choice of campaign or dead page. Apply groupings at campaign level using the single route option.

Crosspub®: Offer sharing module that allows HitPath-powered networks to connect with each other. Crosspub® speeds up the process of campaign creation, correct configuration, pixel placement, as well as creative and suppression data transfer.

Device Targeting: Tool that allows you to re-route end users by mobile device identification to an offer whose landing page is optimized for the device. Improves browsing experience and generates higher conversion rates. "Fire" a pixel: Load or call pixel on a confirm page to initiate automated report of a sale in real time to your HitPath system.

Groups: Can be set up for affiliates or campaigns. Useful to manage affiliate approvals, overrides for a group of affiliates, send notices for a group of affiliates, and run reports based on affiliates or campaigns groups.

Hit ID: 9 digit tracking variable, aka reference number, unique to respondent. Associated with a single affiliate and date/time stamp, IP, referring URL and sub ID combination.

Hit ID Tracking: Compare to cookie tracking. Reporting sales from an advertiser site with a pixel that references the hit ID.

Host and Post: Campaign class offered by HitPath. Allows you to set up form HTML and lead posting rules in order to sell lead information collected by your affiliates to lead buyers.

Insertion Order: Additional terms and conditions agreement to enforce affiliate compliance at campaign level. Approved affiliates must submit their acceptance to the agreement before allowing them access to campaign assets.

IP Block: Set the system to disallow access to the affiliate interface login or a redirect attempt or from a specific IP for all redirector domains.

Landers: Define multiple landing pages for one campaign. Use a rotational weight to drive traffic to landing pages proportionately or call the lander directly from a specific creative. This can be used for A/B testing to see relative performance between landing pages by using a 1:1 ratio.

Month End: Period closure for billing and invoicing for payees and vendors on a monthly schedule.

multi-sales Campaign: Campaign designated to accept multiple sales against a single hit ID, ie a single redirect action. A unique transaction ID must be passed by the advertiser to record each additional sub-sale under the original hit ID.

Opt out: aka unsubscribe. Opting out from receiving future communications about an offer or from an advertiser involves submitting your e-mail address for removal from a mailing list. The e-mail address should then be added to a "do not mail" or "suppression" list. HitPath offers opt out and suppression management.

Override: HitPath terminology for an affiliate-specific commission setting.

Passthrough: This tool allows you to pre-populate the advertiser's landing page with field data collected by your affiliates. This is controlled at campaign level.

Passthrough Fields: Define possible incoming field names as collected by affiliates against a nametag you recognize.

Passthrough Templates: Add passthrough fields to a template to map out incoming field names to advertiser-specific field names for the landing page form in order to allow pre-popped content.

Payin: The standard earned dollar amount on a CPA campaign. Payin may be overridden at the affiliate level.

Payout: The standard paid dollar amount on a CPA campaign. Payout may be overridden at the affiliate level.

Pixel: HTML Element on a confirmation page that will report sales when saleable action has occurred. A "reporting method."

PPC/ Pay Per Click Campaign: Also known as CPC or Cost Per Click Campaign. Set this campaign configuration item in order to reward affiliates with a commission payment for every individual clickthrough automatically. No campaign pixel is required.

Privacy Policy: Statement that discloses some or all of the ways a company gathers, stores, uses, and discloses personal information about its clients. HitPath allows privacy policy configuration.

Redirect To: Field name for the target URL within a HitPath campaign.

Reject Sales: Invalidate a sale that was previously reported or multiples thereof.

Request: HitPath offers "request" type campaigns so that offers can be showcased to affiliates who may use the affiliate logged area to make a request to run the campaign.

Retropay: Tool used to change past sales commission structure.

Routing: Traffic may be routed according to IP location or mobile device.

Routing Groups: Set up a routing tree to redirect incoming traffic based on country. This tool is controlled on a campaign basis via the multi route option. Allows for greater optimization of traffic routing than simple, single route option.

Static Pay: When the value of a saleable action is known ahead of its occurrence a set payout may be defined. Compare to Variable Pay.

Strict IP: HitPath will check to see whether a user from the same IP address has already passed through the system. If the IP address is a duplicate, the user is redirected to an alternate campaign or URL. Known AOL proxies may be whitelisted.

Sub ID: Additional piece of data included by affiliates with a redirect request and tracked as c1, c2 or c3 in HitPath reporting. May be passed to landing page or returned to an affiliate in an affiliate pixel.

Suppression: E-mail address data to be suppressed or removed from a mailing list. Suppression data is collected from parties opting out or unsubscribing from future mailings. See also Compliance.

Terms and Conditions: Affiliate or advertiser facing agreement that must be accepted prior to creating a pending account in your system. HitPath offers logic to allow updates to terms and conditions agreement to be required for existing affiliates upon next login to the affiliate area.

Vanity Domains: Your choice of additional tracking domain can be put in place to function in the same way as http://affiliate.yourdomain/rd/r.php

Variable Pay: Value of saleable action cannot be determined ahead of time as it varies e.g. e-commerce site selling differently priced items. HitPath offers variable pay campaigns.

Unsubscribe: aka Optout. Unsubscribing from receiving future communications about an offer or from an advertiser, involves submitting your e-mail address for removal from a mailing list. The e-mail address should then be added to a "do not mail" or "suppression" list. HitPath offers unsubscribe and suppression management.

Week-End: Period closure for billing and invoicing for payees and vendors on a weekly schedule.