At ClickMagick, we work with many people who are new to online marketing and the whole idea of tracking. We’ve found that these new marketers often get thrown by the terminology that their online mentor is using or that we use ourselves when we’re not thinking about it.

We’ve compiled a list of terms you’ll likely run across when learning about online marketing. This list doesn’t include all the terms you’ll need to understand as an online marketer, but it’s a good start.

This list of definitions is also pretty loose in that the definitions give a quick overview of how people use the terms in the context of click-tracking and funnel management. For example, the entry for “CNAME record” could go on for pages, but in terms of ClickMagick, the only use is for creating a custom marketing domain (see the CNAME entry), so that’s all that’s covered here.


“A” Record

An “A” Record is a DNS record that lets you set the hostname of a domain to a specific IP address using the actual IP address. (The hostname would be the something part of a domain like something.mydomain.com. Often, something is simply www, but it could be anything.)

Compare this with a CNAME Record, which lets you set the hostname of a domain to a specific IP address by using the textual name of the target domain, e.g., clkmr.com. The DNS mechanism will automatically convert the textual domain to the actual IP address when necessary. Because the IP address of clkmr.com is 76.223.62.35, these two DNS entries for rotate.yourdomain.com would do the same thing:

  A       rotate   76.223.62.35
  CNAME   rotate   clkmr.com

The one exception to this is when you don’t want a hostname at all, such as just mydomain.com. In this case, you would set the hostname in the A Record to the @ character:

  A   @   76.223.62.35

Setting a CNAME record to the @ character causes subtle problems that may not be obvious at first so you should never do that.


Actions

An “Action” simply means how many times an “Action Tracking Pixel” has recorded a conversion in the “A” column of your tracking stats. See “Tracking Pixel” for more information.


Action Tracking Pixel

Often shortened to just “action pixel.” See “Tracking Pixel” for a complete explanation.


Affiliate Network

An affiliate network is simply an online service that provides products or services for online marketers to sell without having to create those products or services themselves. Affiliate marketers drive traffic to the affiliate offers and collection commissions for what they actually sell. When you hear the term “affiliate link”, that is describing a link to a particular affiliate offer.

You can easily find the most popular affiliate networks at any time by searching online for “Top Affiliate Networks”. The key to being a successful affiliate marketer is being able to maximize the spread between the cost of your traffic and the amount of sales generated. That’s why tracking is so critical to any affiliate marketing effort.


AOV

Average Order Value. This is the average revenue generated by each new Customer in the first 24 hours. If you’re running paid ads this is an extremely useful metric because it tells you exactly how much you can afford to spend to acquire a new customer without going “into the red.”
 

Attribution

When a tracking pixel fires or a postback is generated, the corresponding Action, Engagement, or Sales conversion is “attributed” to the tracking or funnel stats. The “conversion” is what happened; the “attribution” is where it’s recorded. For example, in the Pixel Builder, the attribution setting tells ClickMagick which tracking link should record the conversion.


Autoresponder

The term “autoresponder” is used in a couple of different, but similar ways. In most cases, when somebody says, “autoresponder”, they mean the tool, or piece of software, that will automatically send out a series of pre-written email messages to somebody you put on an email list.

For example, if you’ve ever entered your email on a website and then got a series of email messages over the next few weeks, you were put on an autoresponder and that tool sent you the pre-written emails you got.

Long ago, the word “autoresponder” meant the actual email message, not the tool. That’s because the original autoresponders were always just a single auto-reply message such as, “I’m out of the office until...” You’ll still see this antiquated form used every now and then, but it’s pretty much dead at this point.


Bridge Page

See “Landing Page.”


CAC

Customer Acquisition Cost. This is simply how much you need to spend to get a new customer, typically in advertising costs. Using the CAC, you know exactly how long it takes to break even for each traffic source, campaign or ad, so you can manage your ads accordingly.


Campaign

In general terms, a campaign is how you drive online visitors to your website, but in ClickMagick, when we say “campaign”, we’re talking specifically about a sales funnel that uses ClickMagick Campaigns which is a modern tracking solution that utilizes industry-standard UTM parameters to help you track and optimize paid ads and your entire sales funnel. If you’re doing any type of paid advertising, ClickMagick Campaigns is the tool you’ll want to use to track your results. You can learn all about ClickMagick Campaigns in this article:

What is ClickMagick Campaigns and when should I use it?


Checkout Page

Generally speaking, a “Checkout Page” is a page in a funnel where the visitor is asked to make some sort of payment. If the payment is processed successfully, the visitor is redirected to a “Thank You” page. See “Order Page” for a similar term.
 

Click ID

Every time a click comes into ClickMagick, it is given a unique ID number. This is the “click ID”. Normally, you wouldn’t care about the click ID, except when you’re tracking sales with an affiliate network such as MaxBounty, ClickBank, and so on.

Affiliate networks generally allow you to track sales using either a tracking pixel or a Postback URL. Setting up a tracking pixel is really easy and if someone is new to tracking is probably what they should do initially.

Once someone is more experienced, setting up a Postback URL is the way to go because it’s more accurate if you’re working with slow loading pages or flaky connections. (For a tracking pixel to work, the page it’s on has to load or it won’t fire and record the sale. Postback URLs work whether the page loads or not since the affiliate network server and the ClickMagick server are talking directly to each other in server-to-server fashion.)

You can learn more about Postback URLs here:

How do I track sales using Postback URLs?


CNAME record

A CNAME Record is a DNS record that lets you set the hostname of a domain to a specific IP address using the textual name of the target domain, e.g., www.clkmg.com. Compare this to an “A Record” which lets you set the hostname of a domain to a specific IP address using the actual IP address. The DNS mechanism will automatically convert the textual domain to the actual IP address when necessary. These two DNS entries for rotate.yourdomain.com would do exactly the same thing:

  CNAME   rotate   www.clkmr.com
  A       rotate   76.223.62.35

These behave identically because the IP address of www.clkmr.com is 76.223.62.35. The one exception to this is when you don’t want a hostname at all, such as just yourdomain.com. In this case, you would set the hostname in the A Record to the @ character:

  A   @   76.223.62.35

Setting a CNAME record to the @ character causes subtle problems so you should never do that.


Conversion

When a pixel fires or a postback is made, that triggers a “conversion” which simply tells ClickMagick exactly what just happened. ClickMagick then needs to take that conversion event and record it in the stats of a tracking link. The exact place where the new stat is recorded is called an “attribution” because the conversion is attributed to it.


Cookie

The word “cookie” is just a silly way of saying “data stored inside the browser” so the website can work better as you move from page to page. For example, a cookie might contain your username or account name. A cookie might contain your current preference settings for the website you’re on.

Think of a cookie jar full of sale receipts or other notes. You can add notes to the cookie jar, or take them out to review. Those notes are “cookies” even though they aren’t. In this case, the browser is the cookie jar and the cookies are just little pieces of data—like your username—stored in the browser. To some people “cookie” just sounds more sophisticated than “browser data”...


CPA

Cost per Action. This is how much you’ve paid for each Action. You’ll only see something here if you are tracking actions and you’ve entered cost data. See “Actions”.


CPC

Cost per Click. This is how much you’re paying for your traffic, expressed in terms of Cost Per Click. If you’re using tracking links and not Campaigns, you’ll only see a CPC value in your stats if you’ve entered cost data in the Cost tab of your tracking link.


CPI

Cost per Install. ClickMagick doesn’t explicitly report a Click per Install stat, but you will see it referenced in discussions about tracking stats.


CPL

Cost per Lead.


CPM

Cost per Thousand. This is the cost per 1,000 ad impressions on a website. Just note that one web page might have more than one banner or ad so the number of page views can be different from the number of impressions.


CPS

Cost per Sale. This is how much you’ve paid for each sale. You’ll only see something here if you are tracking sales and you’ve entered cost data. Note the the sale is the total amount for each Unique Click or Unique Visitor. For example, if one Unique Visitor bought 3 upsells in addition to the primary offer, that would be one total sale in the stats with a total sales amount of all 4 purchases.


CPV

Cost per View. “Pay-per-view” (PPV) is an advertising form where advertisers pay for how many times their ad is viewed, versus how many times the ad is clicked on (pay-per-click). The cost-per-view is simply how much it costs the advertiser each time an ad is shown, which is significantly lower than pay-per-click advertising because there is little guarantee that the ad will generate any actual traffic.


CTR

Click Through Rate. The CTR is the percentage of people who click on a link, either on a web page or in an email message. For example, if you send an email with a link to your offer and nobody clicks on that link, your CTR for that link would be 0%, which is really bad... If you have a low CTR for a link, that’s an opportunity to improve something someplace. This is where split-testing can help you out by allowing you to test a modified version of your web page or email against your current one to see which version produces a higher CTR.


Custom Domain

In ClickMagick, a “custom domain” is a personalized domain that you would buy from a domain registrar and then configure to work with ClickMagick. For instance, if you marketed skateboards for kids, you could register a domain like kidzskateboards.com and use that instead of ClickMagick’s generic clkmg.com or clkmr.com domain in your tracking links. For online marketers, it’s considered a Best Practice to always use custom domains with the online services that you use. That includes your tracking service, your autoresponder, your Page Builder, and so on. If you use the generic domains for these services, those domains are shared with thousands of other marketers and any number of them can get the generic domain blocklisted for a short time while things get sorted out. You avoid that possibility by using your own custom domains.


Deprecated

In computer software, the word “deprecated” means that a feature is no longer officially supported and is likely to be removed in the future. In other words, if you discover that you’re using a deprecated feature, you should stop using it as soon as possible and use the suggested replacement instead.

Basically, marking something as “deprecated” is rather like marking it as “obsolete”, “discontinued”, or “unsupported”.


Destination URL

See “Primary URL”.


Direct Linking

Direct Linking describes the practice of sending your visitors directly from an advertiser such as Google Ads or Microsoft Ads to your affiliate link without any pages in between. Google Ads and Microsoft Ads hate this practice because you don’t provide any additional, unique value to the affiliate offer compared to the thousands of other affiliate marketers promoting the same link. You would not be Direct Linking if you first sent the visitor to a pre-sell page or opt-in page before sending them on to the affiliate offer.


Domain

See “Custom Domain”.


Domain Registrar

A Domain Registrar is a service where you can search for unused domains, buy them, and set them up for use in any way you want. GoDaddy is one of the best-known domain registrars, but there are literally thousands of companies that provide this service. With ClickMagick, you would use a Domain Registrar to buy a domain that you could use as a Custom Tracking Domain. See “Custom Domain”.


Downsell

A Downsell is typically a lower-priced offer that is made when a visitor rejects a higher-priced offer. For example, if the visitor was offered a $997 ticket to a live event and that offer was rejected, then a downsell offer could be a $197 audio recording of the previous time the live event was held.


Engagements (Engaged)

An “Engagement” simply means how many times an “Engagement Tracking Pixel” has recorded a conversion in the “E” column of your tracking stats. See “Tracking Pixel” for more information.
 

Engagement Tracking Pixel

Often shortened to just “engagement pixel”. See “Tracking Pixel” for a complete explanation.


Final URL

See “Primary URL”.


Flagged Click

In ClickMagick, a “flagged” click is a click that ClickMagick has determined is probably not a click that you want to include in your tracking stats. Typically, these clicks would be coming from bots or other automated computer programs and not coming from actual people who have clicked on your link. Flagged clicks are recorded in the FC column of your stats and then redirected to the Primary URL of your tracking link as usual. By keeping these clicks out of the stats for Total Clicks (“TC”) and Unique Clicks (“UC”), the rest of your stats that are computed using the TC and UC values are much more accurate and meaningful. Also note that flagged clicks do not go through normal processing, so any tokens ([clickid], [s1], etc.) that you use in the Primary URL of the link will not be replaced with actual values.


FOMO

“FOMO” is an acronym that stands for “Fear Of Missing Out”. It’s a marketing term used to describe ways to make prospects sense a fear-of-loss if they don’t act quickly on something.


Funnel

A funnel is a series of web pages that takes a visitor through a pre-designed, controlled, exposure process, usually ending in a purchase.


HTML

HTML stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language”. HTML is the formatting language used on web pages. It’s the formatting language (along with CSS) that makes characters bold or italic on the screen, gives characters their size and color. HTML positions text and images properly on the page, and so on.

As an online marketer, you’ll find it helpful to have at least a basic understanding of HTML, especially if you’re creating any of your own web pages. You don’t need to become an expert at HTML—or even become competent at it—but being able to recognize basic HTML will take some of the mystery out of some things you’ll be asked to do at times as an online marketer. If you’ve ever used your browser to “View Page Source” on the current web page, a page full of HTML (and JavaScript) will be displayed.

For a quick introduction to HTML, just spend an afternoon going through the first handful of lessons this comprehensive course:
   

Impression Tag

The term “impression tag” is another way of saying “tracking pixel.” In ClickMagick, we always refer to impression tags as tracking pixels, regardless of whether the pixels are implemented using HTML image tags or JavaScript code.


JavaScript

Whereas HTML is the markup language of the web giving pages their look-and-feel, JavaScript is the programming language of the web which gives web pages the ability to dynamically change and perform other useful tasks. To give an analogy using a car, HTML would simply be what the car looks like and JavaScript would be the underlying mechanics that make the windows go up and down, the wheels turn, and the brake lights go on and off. In other words, without JavaScript, your web pages would just sit there, unmoving and static, beautiful though they might be.

As online marketers, you will often be given snippets of JavaScript code to add to your web pages to give them special capabilities. For example, an autoresponder might give you a snippet of JavaScript code to put on your opt-in page to generate and process an email form; Facebook might give you a JavaScript pixel to track an ad that you’re running; Or, you might use JavaScript code from ClickMagick to pass click ID information through your web pages and on to your affiliate network.

Unless you’re developing web pages, there’s no reason for you to learn JavaScript. Your involvement with JavaScript should be limited to simply copying it from a service you’re using and pasting it into a web page in your funnel to give the page some extra functionality.


Landing Page

“Landing Page” is a somewhat generic term that means the first page of your funnel. A landing page could be an email opt-in page, it could be a video sales page, or any other type of page. The key point is that it’s the first page your visitor sees after they click on your traffic link.


Order Bump

An order bump is an additional sale that is typically offered on the checkout page of a primary sale. This differs from an up-sell which typically is offered sometime after the initial sale. One way to distinguish an order bump from an upsell is that order bumps are typically charged along with the initial sale, on the same credit card transaction. Upsells are additional charges, resulting in two or more credit card transactions.


Order Page

An “Order Page” is a page where a user is asked to make some type of exchange, usually by entering some sort of payment information, but it doesn’t have to be. A “Checkout Page” pretty much always means a payment page, whereas an Order Page includes non-monetary exchanges as well. For example, maybe you have a page that converts video files from one format to another. The page where the person uploads their video could be considered an “order” page, and the converted video would be returned on the Thank You page that’s displayed next.


OTO

“OTO” is an acronym for “one-time-offer.” A one-time-offer is a sales approach that uses fear-of-loss to get you to buy something by suggesting that you will only be given a discounted offer a single time.


Page Builder

A Page Builder is a tool that helps people build their websites much more quickly than writing everything directly in HTML. Page Builders provide pre-built web pages that you then modify to suit your needs. Page Builders can be a desktop or mobile applications, but more often than not, they are online web development tools. If you’ve ever seen an advertisement promoting that you can build a website “in minutes,” that’s a Page Builder.


Pixel

A “pixel” is a single dot on your video screen. The word “pixel” is short for the term “picture element.” A “tracking pixel” is a piece of HTML code or JavaScript code that uses a display pixel to determine whether a web page has been visited or not. When you hear the terms “pixel” and “tracking pixel” just understand that they are two very different things, just as a “letter opener” and a “letter” are two very different things. That said, when you hear the word “pixel” in the context of tracking, people are, in fact, talking about tracking pixels. See “Tracking Pixel” for an explanation of how tracking pixels work and what they are used for.


Postback URL

A Postback URL (also called a “webhook”) is a special URL used in server-to-server communications. Simply, when you’re working with a system such as an Affiliate Network that supports Postback URLs, you would give that system a URL to invoke once a sale (or other action) is made. This URL then passes back the sales information to ClickMagick.

For this to work correctly, you need to do two things. First, you need to send the Affiliate Network a piece of information that identifies each click sent to the network and, second, you need to set up the URL that that Affiliate Network should use when a sale is made.

With ClickMagick, each click generates a unique “click ID”. You can easily pass this click ID to the Affiliate Network in your tracking link.

To find your custom Postback URL for any particular affiliate network, just see the Postback URL Tool in the Tools menu.
 

PPV

Pay per view. This is an advertising form where advertisers pay for how many times their ad is viewed, versus how many times the ad is clicked on (pay-per-click). Because the advertiser is paying only for views and not actual traffic, the cost-per-view is significantly less than a cost-per-click would be.
  

Primary URL

When you create a tracking link in ClickMagick, the URL that the click is sent to after it has been recorded is called the “Primary URL”. Other tracking systems might call this the Destination URL, Final URL, or Target URL. Basically, when you’re tracking clicks, you’ll direct those clicks to a tracking link and once the tracking system has recorded the click, the tracking system will then redirect the click to the page you actually want the visitor to land on.


Referrer Masking

Hiding or “blanking” your referrers so the sites you’re sending traffic to can’t tell where it’s coming from.

To learn more about how to blank your referrers, read this article:

How do I completely hide my referrers?


ROAS

Return On Ad Spend. This is simply Revenue divided by Cost, and it shows exactly how much revenue you generate for every dollar spent.
 

Sales

Within ClickMagick, a “Sale” simply means how many times a “Sales Tracking Pixel” has recorded a conversion in the “S” column of your tracking stats. See “Tracking Pixel” for more information.
 

Sales Tracking Pixel

Often shortened to just “sales pixel”. See “Tracking Pixel” for a complete explanation


Slug

You can pass data through links in two different ways: in a “query string,” or in a “slug.” A slug is a descriptive piece of text that is preceded by a slash “/” in your link. Here’s a visual difference in how you would pass the word “bottle” or “case” to a wine website, first using query strings, then using slugs:

https://winestore.com?product=bottle
https://winestore.com?product=case
 
https://winestore.com/bottle
https://winestore.com/case

ClickMagick uses slugs to differentiate between different tracking and rotator links. Other websites, like WordPress, use slugs to determine which page you want to see.
 

Squeeze Page

A “squeeze page” is a generic term for any type of page where you’re collecting information from your visitors. An email opt-in page is the most common type of squeeze page. You can remember this by thinking of “squeezing information out of them.”


Sub-ID

In ClickMagick, a Sub-ID is an optional piece of information that you can add to a tracking or rotator link that allows you to gather more information on how that tracking or rotator link is being used. To add a Sub-ID to a link, simply add the “/” character to the link followed by the Sub-ID data. For example, if your tracking link is...

https://www.clkmg.com/[USERNAME]/golfclubs

...you could add up to 5 Sub-IDs to that link like this:

https://www.clkmg.com/[USERNAME]/golfclubs/data1/moredata2/extradata3/4thdata/fifthpiece

To see how you would use this extra data, read this article:

How do I use Sub-IDs?


T1, T2, and T3

See “Traffic Tiers.”


Target URL

See “Primary URL”.


Thank You Page

A “Thank You” page is a page in a funnel that the visitor is sent to after completing a task, typically one in which they were asked for some type of information, such as entering their email address, or making a payment. The Thank You page doesn’t have to say, “Thank You”. The page could be an upsell page, an eBook download page, or any other page that immediately follows an information request page.


Traffic Tiers

Traffic is classified in three separate “tiers,” commonly referred to by the names T1, T2 and T3. Tier 1 is “premium” traffic from the top 5 countries where you’ll typically get the most opt-ins and conversions: the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Tier 2 consists of 43 countries where most of the remaining “good” traffic comes from, such as Germany, Sweden, Brazil. Tier 3 consists of all the other countries where few leads or conversions ever come from, such as Yemen and Nigeria.

When buying trying traffic, you’ll often have the option of specifying what percentage of the traffic should be in the Tier 1 category. You’re given the choice because Tier 1 traffic is the most expensive type of traffic. Of course, if your products are geared toward German-speaking customers, or you’re selling Nigerian flags that only Nigerians would want, then the distinction between T1, T2, and T3 traffic is pretty much meaningless since you would be targeting specific groups of people.


Token

A “token” is a piece of text used as a placeholder that will replaced at some point with an actual value. A real-life example of a token would be those sticky notes on financial documents that say “ SIGN HERE =>  ”. In this example, you would replace every sticky note with your actual signature before the document is finalized and submitted. In the same way, when you read or hear that some part of a URL is a token, it simply means that that token will be replaced with a real value before the URL is actually used.

Tokens can be any piece of text, but in ClickMagick they are always surrounded with angle brackets for consistency. For example, [clickid], [s1], and [amount]. Affiliate networks will sometimes use curly braces: {amt}, {transaction_id}, etc. The MailChimp autoresponder uses tokens that look like *|EMAIL|* and *|FNAME|* which will be replaced with the email recipient’s email address and first name before the email message is actually sent.

It really doesn’t matter what the tokens look like as long as you know they are tokens and will be replaced with real values at some point before they are actually used.


Tracking Code

See “Tracking Pixel” below.


Tracking Pixel

A tracking pixel is a small piece of HTML or JavaScript code that you insert into a web page to record whenever the page is loaded. You could use a tracking pixel to simply count the number of times a page has been loaded, or you could use it as a way to know how far visitors are making it through your funnel.

For example, if you have an email opt-in page followed by a Thank You or Offer page and you were to put a tracking pixel on the Thank You or Offer page, then you could use the pixel information to count how many people had opted in to your email list since the only way to get to the Thank You or Offer page is to opt-in to your email list.

By extending this concept, you can place tracking pixels on all of the important pages in your funnel, allowing you to track exactly how many visitors are making it to each step. If you then find that a lot of visitors are not continuing on through a specific page, you can look at that page and work on optimizing it to perform better.

To make this easy to track in your stats, ClickMagick has three different types of tracking pixels: action tracking pixels, engagement tracking pixels, and sales tracking pixels. The only real difference between these tracking pixels is in which column they show up in your stats. Action pixels record in the “A” column. Engagement pixels record in the “E” column, and Sales pixels record in the “S” column. Sales pixels also update your sales statistics to include the sales amount that the pixel recorded.

Also, from a terminology viewpoint, when a tracking pixel is processed, that’s called “firing the pixel”. The count is called a “conversion” and the conversion is “attributed” to a specific tracking link. Take the phrase: “When the action tracking pixel fired, the conversion was attributed to the tracking link named ‘Callaway Golf Clubs’”. That simply means that the value in the “A” column of the “Callaway Golf Clubs” tracking link was increased by one.

For a really in depth explanation of tracking pixels and tracking code, read this article:

What are tracking pixels and tracking code? 
 

Tripwire

A tripwire is generally a small initial sale in your funnel designed to turn your visitor into a customer. The idea behind a tripwire is to get the visitor into your system where you can then continue to re-market to them for your main products or services.


Upsell

An upsell is an offer that is made after someone agrees to make an initial purchase. Unlike a downsell in which the followup offer is almost always a less expensive option, an upsell can be a small extra purchase, or something much larger. For example, if you ordered an online video course for $197, you might be offered a smaller $47 upsell for some bonus videos, or you might be offered a larger $997 upsell for a ticket to a live event. Split-testing can come in handy here to see what type of offer on the upsell can make the most actual sales for your particular product or service.


UTM Parameters

UTM parameters were introduced by Google a number of years ago and have quickly become the industry standard for tracking online advertising. There are 5 standard UTM parameters: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content. To track your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, you use these UTM parameters in the link from the ad to the landing page of your sales funnel. The landing page has tracking code that looks for these UTM parameters and records what it finds so you can determine where the click came from (utm_source), and other information that you’ve passed in as UTM values. You can learn all about UTM parameters in this article:

What are some Best Practices when using UTM Parameters?

In ClickMagick, UTM values can have a maximum of 100 characters and only contain letters, numbers, hyphens ‘-’, underscores ‘_’, periods ‘.’ and the plus symbol ‘+’.
 

Webhook

“Webhook” is a newer way of saying “Postback URL.” See “Postback URL” for a complete explanation.

Article 222 Last updated: 03/05/2024 2:25:33 PM
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