Affiliate Slang 101: Terms You Pretend to Understand
When we asked one of our partners about his favorite slang words, he just laughed, like, come on – even CPA can mean anything in our niche, depending on what you are doing. However, we still didn’t want to leave you alone, totally lost, wondering what your seasoned affiliate buddy is even talking about:
“I warmed up the account, poured some traffic to the new LP with ripped creos, checked with the AM – pixel fired fine. Just hope there’s no click loss or terminators this time.”
What the hell does he mean?.. No worries, we collected the most popular affiliate slang words and expressions and explained them to you.
Affiliate Slang Glossary: Decode What They Say
Here you are, a short cheat sheet you can quietly bookmark and sneak-peek at during your first affiliate conference. And, we added real examples from chats, forums, and personal conversations to make sure you won’t mess up.
AM
An abbreviation for affiliate manager, a go-to guy in a CPA network. A good AM helps you pick winning offers, fix tracking issues, and share insider tips to boost your profits. Or at least approve your traffic for the offer and clarify what’s going on with the stats.
Usage: The CR fell down hardly, I’ve asked the AM, she replied everything’s fine on their end.
Read more: How Can an Account Manager Help Agencies and Affiliates?
Angles
Angle is a unique hook or spin used to present an offer in a way that grabs attention and boosts conversions. For example, a generic ‘Spin to win’ landing page might bring more conversions if you find another angle, and try something like ‘You are the chosen one’.
Usage: Could you share how you run MVA offers? Your bidding strategy, landing pages, your angle?
Bid war
It’s a type of affiliate competition when you increase your CPC bids to compete for better placements in the ad auction. The point is to outbid others to win more traffic. It’s a common strategy when testing offers or trying to break through in a competitive GEO or vertical.
Usage: I will try bid war and raise to 0.02. But if it doesn’t help in 1-2 days, I will make the bids lower again.
Blackhat
This is how deceptive marketing methods are called. This includes anything that means violating the rules of advertising platforms: creating fake content and links, cloaking, or other methods that you can’t call clean. The opposite is Whitehat.
Usage: My blackhat phase lasted for about 48 hours, then I was blocked. Now I’m going whitehat, or will find a real job, still not sure.
Burning traffic/budget
Spending budget too rapidly, often without any positive results, or even accidentally. In some cases, it means simply spending – on testing, for example.
Usage: You might burn through the budget testing 20 offers just to find one decent prospect.
Camp
This is just lazy marketer slang for ‘campaign’ because who has time for full words when ROI is calling?
Usage: Spent 3 hours crafting the perfect landing and forgot to turn the camp on. Genius-level marketing.
Cap hit
A cap is a limit an advertiser sets on how many conversions, leads, or spending you can deliver per day or per week, or per month. Such caps allow advertisers to take some time to check your traffic quality, and keep them within the budget they set for affiliate marketing. And, hitting the cap means reaching the limit.
Usage: I hit the daily cap in just a couple of hours, so I asked my manager to increase it.
Click loss
This is what is called discrepancy in a more official language, but click loss sounds even more intuitive and clear. It means a situation when different trackers – for example, yours and that of the CPA network – show different numbers. And the numbers say, some clicks are lost and are not displayed in a second tracker. This might mean fewer payouts, so that’s something you need to solve.
Usage: Perfect, also it’s recommended you create the VPS in the GEO of the traffic, if it’s far you gonna lose a lot of clicks.
How? Explained it all here:
Creos
A short conversational form of ‘creatives’.
Usage: Warning: Have you tried AI creos? Shall I expect something “meh” or “what fresh AI hell is this?”
Cut (an offer)
Not all the offers are profitable. Not all the offers suit your traffic well enough. Anyway, sometimes you need to refuse an offer because there’s no chance it will bring you positive ROI. When you do it, it means you cut it and move on.
Usage: You have to make sure your tests are statistically significant before you start cutting anything.
Dep
A short slang form of deposit. Usually, it’s about a user making their first deposit in iGaming of Finance offers – a key conversion event.
Usage: Got 3 regs and 1 dep on the new offer — EPC looks solid so far.
Flagged domain
A domain that has been marked by ad platforms or browsers as suspicious or malicious, often leading to poor performance or outright bans.
Usage: Try checking with your AM if you’re able to have a dedicated domain, so there’s a lower chance it gets flagged.
Go green/red
That’s simple: if you are green, it means your campaign is getting positive ROI. If not, you are in red. Why do they call it so? Because the most popular trackers – Voluum, Binom, Google Ads, etc – visually highlight negative ROI in red, and positive – in green.
Usage: I didn’t work much this year, but I’m still in the green almost every month.
Hard ban
Permanent or near-permanent ban with little chance of reversal. You can catch a hard ban for violations at CPA networks, ad networks, social media – actually, anywhere, even a Telegram channel, if you abuse the rules severely.
Usage: Got a hard ban on my FB account — no warnings, just straight cut off.
Hold
The dullest time when you wait for a CPA network or direct advertiser to pay you for the conversions you’ve already brought. So, it’s a holding period when they check your traffic for fraud, bots, or some non-qualifying leads.
Usage: Join our partner program – we pay out quickly, and have a minimum hold.
Kill the campaign
It’s when you don’t pause, but stop a campaign forever. Usually, because it’s way too unprofitable to even optimize anything.
Usage: The ROI kept negative, and nothing helped, so I killed it and started from scratch.
LP
A simple one, just an abbreviation for landing page.
Usage: Are you using Direct Link or LP?
Pixel fired/didn’t fire
It’s when a pixel, a tiny piece of code on your site that tracks user actions, worked properly and both your and the advertiser’s tracker counted the conversion.
Usage: Getting clicks but no conversions — pixel isn’t firing properly.
Pour traffic
Send high traffic volume to a campaign, app, or landing page, often fast and at a large scale.
Usage: Wild times for ASO now, I constantly witness media buyers massively pouring traffic into it.
Pre-lander/lander
A page that appears before the main landing page to warm up or qualify traffic (can include quizzes, fake articles, etc.).
Usage: Hey guys can you tell me which type of a lander I can use for such offers.
Ripped
A creative or landing page which you…let’s call it – borrowed from your competitors to use in your campaigns.
Usage: I just ripped that lander, but honestly, modified it so it’s almost new.
Scrub
Or scrubbing, is a practice of an advertiser or a CPA network ‘scrub’ the data — i.e., manually or automatically remove leads that don’t meet quality standards or appear suspicious.
Usage: They scrubbed 30% of my leads with no explanation.
Shaving
A painful practice of CPA networks or direct advertisers when they cut your payouts, saying a portion of your traffic (or the whole deal) is totally low-quality. Many affiliates refer to shaving as a kind of scam when the traffic is fine, but a network wants to save money on payouts.
Usage: Don’t go for them: this unscrupulous network is well-known for shaving with perfectly normal traffic. Just fraudsters, you know.
Spy
A short conversational form of spy tools, special services that allow affiliates to peek at the competitors’ converting creatives and landing pages.
Usage: Creating a converting LP without spy tools? That’s like fishing in a swimming pool — good luck with that.
T1, T2, T3
Short versions of Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. And what is a Tier? In short, it’s a way to sort countries by the quality, volume, and value of their traffic.
Usage: Perfect, also it’s recommended you create the VPS in the GEO of the traffic, if it’s far you gonna lose a lot of clicks.
Terminator
Simply a bot that pollutes traffic and spoils its quality. This is more of a slang term in non-English-speaking countries of Western Europe, so you might not come across it often somewhere on Reddit.
Usage: I’m not keen on this network; it sent me tons of terminators once and totally spoilt my CR.
Warm up
When you create a new ad account and immediately start running bold campaigns with high budgets or risky verticals, Google might flag it as suspicious or low-trust. To avoid that, marketers ‘warm up’ accounts to make them look more trustworthy.
Usage: It involves gradually warming up your account over time, which helps you build trust with Google.
To Sum Up
We hope we helped you feel more confident in the world of aff marketing sharks. And, we welcome you even if you confuse ‘hold’ and ‘shave’ – and will still supply you with the top quality traffic.
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