Group Buying Glossary: Part 1

The daily deal space is getting a lot of action in the press these days, and to help you navigate all of the coverage, we’ve put together a Group Buying Glossary. We’ll spend the next week rolling out some keywords and definitions.

• Affiliate: a website that features group offers from deal publishers through an embedded widget
• Agency/Reseller: an organization that provides products or services to merchants or small businesses; e.g.: Entertainment Book, Yellow Pages, or ValPak
• Aggregator: a website that pulls deals from many deal publishers and sorts those deals based on user location, demographics and/or preferences
• API: Application Program Interface; a program-specific set of code that enables applications to communicate with each other
• Audience Affinity: an audience’s level of engagement and interest in the publisher’s content or brand
• Branded Site: a deal site based on a standard template that is designed to reflect the publisher’s brand and personality
• Buyer: an individual who has purchased a daily deal (over 80% of buyers come via daily emails and the rest via share links and direct traffic)
• Core Content: publisher content that is not deal-focused; the content for which an audience comes aside from deals; e.g.: food to a food magazine, beauty to beauty magazine, etc.
• Creative: the copy and graphics found in a deal feature
• Incentive Credits: a set number of credits or dollars a user receives in his or her account as a result of sharing a deal with a friend who purchases

Check back in tomorrow for some more terms! Or, have some you’d like to see added to the list? Tell us in the comments.