Understand some basic terminology used across the platform. If you don't find a term you need to understand, please use a search box at the top of this page.
Metrics
Clicks
Clicks refer to the number of times potential customers or visitors click a tracking link associated with an affiliate offer. Clicks are essential metrics that help measure the effectiveness of an affiliate campaign.
Conversions
Conversions represent the successful actions taken by potential customers after clicking on an affiliate tracking link. It signifies the desired outcome, such as completing a purchase, signing up for a service, or filling out a form. Via the conversions, you also specify how much the affiliates are paid for the given action performed by the customer.
Conversion Type
A conversion type defines the goals of your website. If you are an eCommerce brand, your conversion type, for example, might be “Cart” (when goods are placed into a shopping cart) and “Sale” (a purchase from the website). Perhaps you are a SaaS company selling monthly subscriptions for an accounting software; your goal could be “Subscription”.
The conversion type setup depends on what you wish to track with your Trackdesk account. Trackdesk has three default conversion types: Lead, Sale and Free trial. You can use these default types or customise them.
Conversion status
Statuses of conversions that conversion can be present in. Conversion statuses identify if conversion can be included in the billing (when in Approved status), or cannot be included (when in all other statuses then Approved).
Available statuses
All available statuse are following, with thier names and codes
Conversion status | Conversion status code |
Approved | CONVERSION_STATUS_APPROVED |
Pending | CONVERSION_STATUS_PENDING |
On-hold | CONVERSION_STATUS_ON_HOLD |
Refunded | CONVERSION_STATUS_REFUNDED |
Test | CONVERSION_STATUS_TEST |
Fraud | CONVERSION_STATUS_FRAUD |
Blocked | CONVERSION_STATUS_BLOCKED |
Not allowed | CONVERSION_STATUS_NOT_ALLOWED |
Rejected | CONVERSION_STATUS_REJECTED |
Revenue
Revenue is the gross income generated by a specific conversion. This value is used to calculate affiliate payouts.
Sale amount
Sale amount is the total value of purchase made by the end customer. This is useful if you want to include some overhead for your revenue if you're e.g. an affiliate network who takes a share from the total order value before a payout is calculated for an affiliate.
Payout
Payout is the amount paid by you to an affiliate for a given conversion. It can be either calculated dynamically by percentage from revenue (e.g. affiliate gets 10% from every e-commerce order), or can have fixed value (e.g. 1$ for each user registration).
Conversion rate
Conversion rate denotes the percentage of successful conversions made against the number of clicks. E.g. if you make 1 conversion from 10 clicks, you will have a conversion rate of 10%.
Profit
Profit is the amount left after payouts are subtracted from revenue.
Average conversion value (ACV)
ACV calculates the revenue sum of conversions and divides it by the number of conversions.
Revenue per click (RPC)
RPC calculates the sum of revenue and divides it by the number of clicks.
Earning per click (EPC)
EPC calculates the sum of payouts and divides it by the number of clicks.
MLM commission
MLM commission is the amount paid to parent affiliates on top of affiliate payout for each successful conversion.
General terms
Affiliate
Affiliate is a type of user that can generate traffic (and thus clicks/conversions) for a given landing page. System wise they are assigned to a specific tenant (a single affiliate may be a assigned to multiple tenants) and have their own specific system view.
Affiliate Tier
Defined how you will pay affiliates using the affiliate tiers. It’s up to you to decide how to customize your tiers. You can have one tier for all your affiliates or specify a tier for a particular affiliate.
Using our Tiers is going to make your affiliate management easier! You can define how each tier is paid and move affiliates between different tiers to adjust the payouts per group.
Affiliate postback
Affiliate postback allow affiliates to create a 'tracking event' and forward it to their own systems or databases to track individual conversions outside of the platform.
Settlement
Settlement is the bulk of payouts for a specific affiliate for a given timeframe. Once generated it provides a total sum of payout and commissions to be paid out for an affiliate for approved conversions/commissions. Please note that creating a settlement does no direct payment in and of itself, payments have to be processed either manually or using the integrated automated payout feature.
Offer
Offers are a system that manages revenue and payouts on your affiliate platform. With offers, you can use fixed and dynamic payouts, set recurrence to receive one conversion or more conversions, manage payouts of your products differently for visitors from different countries (or a set of countries), share creative assets for your affiliates, and much more. You can treat each offer as a campaign with its separate conditions.
Creative
Creative is an asset (an image, video, piece of code, link) provided for affiliates in an offer to help them in promotion efforts.
Advertiser
Advertiser is an entity that is designated as origin of revenue for incoming traffic in the affiliate network variant of the product. (In laymen term, they are a customer of affiliate networks that have a specific product the network promotes via their affiliates.)
Tenant
Tenant be understood as workspace/project. The unique tenant ID generated during registration is used as an identifier for interacting with other systems and APIs.
Webhook
Webhooks enable seamless communication between our platform and other web applications, ensuring instant notifications are sent from Trackdesk whenever specific events occur.