Online Marketing Glossary: XML
XML (eXtensible Markup Language):
- Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different information systems. It is used both to encode documents and to serialize data.
Related to HTML, XML aids webmasters in what they can do with their websites. It’s another programming language out there.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Affiliate Fraud
Affiliate Fraud:
- Bogus activity generated by an affiliate in an attempt to generate illegitimate, unearned revenue.
Commonly referred to as Black Hat activity, unfortunately there are lots of tactics that unethical affiliates can use to generate revenue. Click fraud, redirects, adware, software programs, tool bars, etc. There are many active affiliates out there that are working to bring ethics to the forefront of the affiliate marketing community. Some great resources if you’re interested in reading up on what’s going on today in the affiliate industry regarding ethics and fraud, check out:
- Affiliate Fair Play
- UNEthical Affiliates Sub-Forum at ABestWeb
- Parasiteware Sub-Forum at ABestWeb
- Cookies, Adware, & Spyware Forum at 5 Star Affiliate Programs
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Freemium
Freemium:
- A business model that offers basic services for free, or is ad supported, but charges a premium for advanced or special features. The model is popular with Web 2.0 companies that acquire companies through referral networks, organic search marketing, and word of mouth.
The most obvious example of this is within the online pornography industry. Many porn sites will give visitors a free trial or free gallery of abbreviated clips, enticing visitors to pay for the premium membership to gain access to all the content.
Less lascivious websites and services also use this model, of course. Cranberry Radio is a good example, giving free access to the last 30 days of content with commercials. If you sign up for membership, you get commercial free listening & access to their full archives.
The reason this model works is simple – get the audience or target market hooked with the free content and generate that desire to pay for the premium content.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Linkspam
Linkspam:
- A company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to it’s site regardless of the context of the originating site.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen this before in practice. Uninformed manager put their stock entirely into metrics, so that inbound link metric and page rank can be heavy hitters. Professionals truly versed in proper SEO strategies know that the originating content matters almost just as much as the presence of the link.
It can be difficult to push back to overbearing and uneducated managers sometimes, so remember that you have your industry peers to help you to formulate convincing arguments for your side.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
Clickthrough Rate (CTR):
- The number of clicks an ad receives, divided by the total number of times that ad is displayed or served (represented as: total clicks / total impressions = CTR). For example, if an ad has 100 impressions and 3 clicks, the CTR is 3 percent.
Knowing the CTR of your ads will help you to drill down & tailor your ads best to your visitors. This can only help to increase your conversions and boost sales because your visitors will see the ads that are the most relevant to your content.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Commission Junction now hosting Flash links
Any merchant working with Commission Junction no doubt logged in this morning to see this notice on the home page. More and more networks are launching new and innovative forms of creative lately, with ShareASales videos and LinkShare’s easy links, so CJ had to do something!
From their FAQ:
Flash hosting provides you and your publishers with a new type of link creative – Flash links. Flash links hosted by Commission Junction:
- Feature short, non-interactive animated banner ads.
- Automatically start, have continuous play and generally last approximately 5-15 seconds.
- Use advertiser-created ShockWave Flash (.swf) files, which are created using Adobe flash software or with other programs capable of writing .swf files.
With the first phase of Flash Hosting, you are initially allotted 15 Flasgh links, each with a 1MB file size limit.
This is pretty exciting. I’ve heard mumbles lately of CJ being stale in their creative offering, and this definitely gives them another form of link that’s new and exciting for publishers and advertisers. Personally as a web consumer I HATE auto start flash files, but that’s just me. Will we be utilizing this? Man I hope so!
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