Glossary

Media buying

In performance marketing, media buying is purchasing ad traffic — push, pop, native, banner, search — and monetizing it against offers that pay per action. The media buyer's margin is the spread between what the traffic costs and what the conversions pay out.

The core loop

The workflow is a tight loop: pick an offer, launch campaigns on a traffic source with several creatives and landings, track every click with sub IDs, then read the numbers — cut placements and creatives where EPC sits below CPC, scale the ones where it clears. Speed of iteration is the actual edge; the tooling (tracker or ad server, spy tools, landing page infrastructure) exists to shorten that loop.

Solo buyers vs teams

Solo affiliates run this loop on rented tools. Media buying teams industrialize it — shared tracking infrastructure, budget and payout controls per buyer, and consolidated reporting — which is the point where teams typically move from third-party trackers to their own white-label platform.

Related terms