The Lingo Lowdown: What CPA, AOV & CPC Really Mean

Bonus: An insider Q&A with our impact.com customer success manager on why the platform delivers.

Several years ago I (Kris here 👋) was asked by a performance PR agency if I wanted to join their team & learn affiliate marketing in real time. I was stoked. They hired me at a set rate to manage 2 different DTC brand programs on SAS. Within 30 days, they cut my pay because I wasn’t learning fast enough!

Harsh?? Maybe. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I’m sharing this story because we all learn at different rates & in different ways - that’s just a fact! Affiliate lingo can feel overwhelming & frankly, confusing AF! One platform says CPA, another says CPE; some brands talk about ROAS, others about AOV — and before you know it, you’re nodding along while Googling acronyms. It’s not that the terms are impossible, it’s just that they come fast, overlap, and sometimes mean slightly different things depending on who’s using them.

Learning this language isn’t about memorizing everything at once — it’s about picking up pieces as you go and seeing them all in action and the puzzle begins to take shape. Just like any new vocabulary, it clicks faster once you start using it in real conversations & remember to practice patience with yourself & maybe the new hire. ;)

Just a few basics 🤓

CPA: Cost Per Action — Pay when a specific action (like a sale or signup) happens; this is what you pay your partners & should range 2%-25%+.

MTA: Multi-Touch Attribution — Credits multiple touch points in a customer journey, not just the last one.

MMM: Marketing Mix Modeling — Uses statistical analysis to measure how different marketing channels contribute to sales.

AOV: Average Order Value — The average amount spent per purchase.

CTP: The formula to find CTP (Conversion — Click To Purchase) rate is:Number of Clicks /Number of Sales​.

CPC: Cost Per Click — Pay each time someone clicks on your ad or link. Remember when we talked about Linkby? They use a CPC model.

ROAS: Return On Ad Spend — Revenue earned for every dollar spent on ads.

Incrementality: The extra sales or actions driven directly by a campaign beyond what would have happened anyway.

CLO (Card Linked Offers): Deals linked to a credit/debit card, automatically applied when you use that card.

LLM: A large language model is an AI trained on huge amounts of text to understand and generate human-like language by predicting what comes next.