Glossary

Every word on this site, in plain English.

71 terms from lead operations and performance marketing, written for people who work in this business rather than people who write about it. Where a term goes by several names, all of them are listed.

13 terms

Payouts and money

How you get paid, and the words buyers use when they talk about it.

CPL also called Cost per lead: The buyer pays a fixed amount the moment a lead is delivered, whatever happens to it afterwards. Predictable, and the model where lead quality matters most to the buyer rather than to you.
CPA also called Cost per action, cost per acquisition: The buyer pays only when the lead does something, usually deposits. You earn nothing on delivery alone, so volume without quality earns nothing.
Hybrid: Both models at once. A smaller fixed amount when the lead is delivered, plus a bonus when it converts. Common when neither side wants to carry all the risk.
CRG also called Cost per rate guaranteed, guaranteed CR deal: You and the buyer agree a volume and a promised conversion rate upfront, which sets a guaranteed rate per lead. If the batch converts worse than promised, somebody has to absorb that, which is why the exact terms matter more here than in any other model.
FTD also called First time deposit: The moment a lead becomes a paying customer for the buyer. Usually the event that triggers your payment on CPA and hybrid deals.
Baseline CR also called Expected conversion rate: The conversion rate you assume when estimating revenue before the real conversions land. It makes today's numbers useful instead of blank, and gets replaced by confirmed revenue as leads actually convert.
EPC also called Earnings per click, earnings per delivery: What a buyer actually earns you per lead sent, averaged over recent traffic. Comparing EPC across buyers tells you where volume should go, rather than comparing headline rates that ignore rejections.
Quality deduction also called Haircut, scrub: Money a buyer holds back for leads they judged bad. If you do not model it, your expected revenue will always be higher than what actually lands in your account.
Settlement: Matching money that arrived against the specific leads it was paying for. Doing it by hand is where revenue quietly goes missing.
FIFO settlement also called First in first out: Payments are applied to the oldest unpaid leads first, automatically. Partial payments are allowed, so a buyer sending 80 percent of an invoice does not break the accounting.
Remittance: The buyer's own statement of what they are paying and for which leads. The document your numbers get compared against.
Revenue event: A permanent record created when a lead earns something, storing the agreement terms exactly as they stood at that moment so later changes cannot rewrite history.
Dry run also called Preview mode: Running a change without saving it, to see what it would do first. Used before recalculating caps or pricing on live contracts.

6 terms

Who is who

The same person can be called three different things depending on who is talking.

Affiliate also called Publisher, partner: Whoever sends the traffic and gets paid on results.
Media buyer: Someone buying paid traffic on ad platforms and sending the leads it produces to a buyer. Usually the person actually using Alion day to day.
Buyer also called Advertiser, client, brand: Whoever receives your leads and pays for them. In this documentation buyer always means the receiving side, not the person buying ads.
Affiliate network: A company sitting between affiliates and advertisers, managing many publisher relationships at once. Can be your customer, your partner, or both.
Tracker also called Binom, Keitaro, Voluum, RedTrack: The tool measuring your traffic, clicks and ad spend. It answers what your traffic cost. Alion answers what happened after the form was submitted, and passes conversions back to your tracker so both sides of that sum live together.
Workspace also called Tenant, account: One separated operation inside Alion, with its own leads, buyers, agreements and team. One login can belong to several, which is how agencies keep clients apart.

13 terms

Traffic and routing

How a lead gets from your landing page to the right buyer.

Lead: One person who filled in your form, with the contact details and the metadata that came with them.
Landing page also called Lander, pre-lander: The page where the form sits. Registering it in Alion is what lets the system know which rules apply to leads arriving from it.
Traffic source: Where the click came from, such as a specific ad platform or a native network. One of the things routing decisions can be made on.
GEO: The country a lead belongs to. Almost every commercial rule in this business is set per GEO, because a lead's value changes completely between countries.
Distribution tree: The rule structure deciding where each lead goes, branching on traffic source, landing page, country and language, with each branch ending in a set of possible flows.
Routing flow also called Flow: One complete instruction for handling a lead: which buyer, which destination, and which steps fire along the way.
Weighted split: Sending a set percentage of leads to each buyer, for example 70 to one and 30 to another, instead of alternating or guessing.
Fallback chain: The ordered list of buyers to try when the first one rejects a lead or their system is down, so a rejection does not mean a wasted lead.
Pass-through flow: An extra delivery that fires alongside the main routing decision without affecting it. How your tracker and your team get told about every lead, not just the ones a particular buyer won.
Cap: A limit on how many leads a buyer will accept, set per day, per week or across a whole contract. Leads sent over cap usually do not get paid, which makes caps a money problem rather than an admin one.
Overdelivery: Sending more leads than a cap allows. The leads are gone and normally unpaid, which is why caps are enforced on every single lead rather than checked in batches.
Lead shuffling also called Recycling, re-shuffle: Taking leads nobody converted and sending them to a different buyer. The money most operators leave on the table because moving leads by hand is not worth the effort.
Redelivery: Sending a lead somewhere for a second time. Safe only when the system knows everywhere it has already been.

14 terms

Lead quality and fraud

The checks that stop you paying for traffic that was never real.

Fraud score: A number summarising how suspicious a lead looks, based on its IP, email, phone and device together rather than any single signal.
Device fingerprint: The combination of browser and device characteristics that identifies a visitor without a cookie. Useful for spotting one machine pretending to be fifty people.
Proxy: A server that relays a connection so the real origin is hidden. Legitimate in plenty of contexts, but on an inbound lead it usually means the stated location is not the real one.
VPN: The same idea as a proxy, applied to a whole connection. A lead claiming to be in Germany while connecting through a VPN needs its other signals checked before you sell it.
Tor exit node: The last hop of the Tor network, where anonymised traffic rejoins the normal internet. Almost never a genuine consumer filling in a form.
Datacenter IP: An address belonging to a hosting company rather than a home or mobile connection. Real people rarely browse from a server.
Disposable email also called Throwaway, temp mail: An address from a service that deletes it after a short time. Nobody expecting a callback uses one.
Honeypot: An address or field that only an automated script would ever fill in, used to catch bots without troubling real visitors.
Geo consistency: Checking whether what a lead claims matches what its IP and phone number say. A German form fill, a Brazilian IP and a Dutch phone prefix is three different answers to the same question.
Duplicate also called Dupe: The same person arriving again, matched on email, phone or IP. Selling one to the same buyer twice is the fastest way to lose the account.
Deduplication also called Dedupe: Catching duplicates before delivery rather than after a buyer complains.
Duplicate chain: The full family tree of a duplicate: the original, every copy that followed, which field matched, and where each one was sent.
Enrichment: Adding information to a lead that did not come with it, such as fraud signals from an external provider.
Circuit breaker: A safety switch that stops calling an external service after repeated failures, so an outage somewhere else does not take your lead intake down with it.

10 terms

Delivery and integration

How leads physically reach a buyer's system, and how you prove it.

API: The interface one system exposes so another can send it data. If a buyer has one, they can be connected without anybody writing custom code.
Webhook: A message one system sends another the moment something happens, instead of waiting to be asked.
Postback: A message sent back to your tracker or ad platform when a conversion happens, so your reporting and your ad optimisation both know about it. Without it, your ad platform is optimising blind.
Click ID: The identifier your tracker attaches to a click, carried all the way through to the conversion so attribution survives the whole journey.
Destination: One configured endpoint a lead can be sent to: a buyer's CRM, a postback URL, a Telegram chat, an email address or a generic webhook.
Push and pull: Two directions of sync. Push is Alion sending a lead out. Pull is Alion fetching status updates back in on a schedule. Most buyer relationships use both.
Business-success detection: Judging whether a delivery really worked by reading the response body, not just the status code. Plenty of systems answer with a technical success while refusing the lead inside the message.
Response field extraction: Pulling useful values out of a buyer's reply, above all their own lead ID, which is what makes reconciliation possible later.
Audit trail also called Delivery log: The permanent record of exactly what was sent and exactly what came back, replayable. It turns we never received that lead from an argument into a question of evidence.
Rate limiting: Capping how many requests something can make in a period, so one traffic spike cannot degrade the system for everyone else.

7 terms

Status and reporting

Knowing what happened to a lead after it left, and being able to prove it.

Canonical status: One shared vocabulary that every buyer's own wording maps into, so buyer quality can be compared on the same terms instead of four private dialects.
Status mapping: The translation table between a buyer's labels and the canonical ones. It means the buyer never has to change their system to work with you.
Append-only history: Storing every status change as a new permanent row instead of overwriting the last one, so the whole sequence stays provable.
Sync forensics: The detailed record of each sync session: when it ran, what changed, what succeeded and what did not. Where billing disputes get settled.
Agreement version: A frozen copy of the commercial terms as they stood at a point in time. Changing a price creates a new version and leaves the old one intact, so March's leads keep March's rate.
Drill-down: Moving from a summary number to the individual leads behind it. The difference between arguing about an invoice total and pointing at the specific rows.
Attribution: Connecting a conversion back to the click, campaign and source that produced it.

8 terms

Security and platform

Who can see what, and how the account itself works.

PII also called Personal data: Personally identifiable information: names, phone numbers, emails, IP addresses. The part of a lead that carries legal obligations as well as commercial value.
Field masking: Hiding specific fields from specific team members, so people can do their jobs without seeing customer personal data.
Row-level isolation: Enforcing separation between accounts in the database itself rather than in application code, so one workspace structurally cannot read another's data.
Permission: One switch controlling one ability. Fine-grained permissions are how a media buyer sees lead flow without seeing what you pay per lead.
SSO and SAML: Signing in through your company's own identity system instead of a separate password. Usually an enterprise requirement.
SLA also called Service level agreement: A committed level of service, normally expressed as uptime. 99.9 percent means roughly 43 minutes of downtime a month.
Prorated upgrade: Changing plan mid-month and only paying the difference for the days remaining, rather than starting the billing period again.
Hard limit: A ceiling that stops the action rather than billing you for going over it. Reaching one prompts an upgrade instead of producing a surprise invoice.

Features See where these words are used All 56 features, with the problem each one solves. FAQ Questions about how it works Setup, routing, fraud, billing and data.