Impact Affiliate Program Review: Everything to Know

Impact.com is a leading global partnership management platform that provides enterprises with the tools and insights they need to find, manage, and measure their partnerships with affiliates, social influencers, sponsors and others.

The company has been recognized as one of the fastest growing private companies in America by Forbes Magazine in 2011.

From Digital Advertising to Partnerships

Display ads are a great way for advertisers to get their message out there, but they can be intrusive and slow down the loading time of a web page — not exactly the way to a consumer’s heart. In order to combat this, many companies have gone from advertising with display ads to partnering with content providers. This is because partnering with content providers offers more value for advertisers than just paying for an ad space on a website.

At its core, Impact helps connect brands with creators who can produce high-quality content. As a creator, you can use Impact to find opportunities that fit your skillset and interests. And as a brand, you can use Impact to connect with creators who can help tell your story in a unique way that resonates with your audience.

Impact’s Partnership Management Platform has been transforming the way enterprises discover and manage partnerships by providing them with a 360-degree view of their partnerships across industries and geographies. Impact.com also offers an innovative cloud-based solution for enterprise partners to manage all aspects of their business relationships in one place, including affiliates, influencers, publishers, etc. and offers multiple procedural options that come in handy for any business wanting to grow online.

Let’s look at a case study that will clarify how Impact can manage and optimize a company’s entire exclusive partnerships through every life cycle stage.

Case Study: Sephora

Is there a woman here who doesn’t know the beauty store Sephora? The uber-popular brand was founded in France in 1970 and boasts high-quality skincare products and cosmetics brands, expert in-store support, and guides for product use all over the United States.

In the past, Sephora’s performance marketing team relied on paid search advertising, social media promotions, and a fragmented affiliate channel across various countries and regions.

Unfortunately, the team lost time and resources from a lack of customization, payment confusion, and overlapping affiliates. They needed a unified partnership management solution. Enter Impact.

By switching to impact.com, Sephora found the perfect partnership platform to help them focus on addressing their core goals.

The Sephora team collaborated with all their partners and affiliates to build a strong foundation on the impact.com platform.

With impact.com’s help, Sephora could focus on reaching its goals: managing partners across different regions. This helped automate previously manual processes like partner approval and contract set-up— saving time and resources. Sephora could also efficiently track and share partner performance, leading to new opportunities for diverse partnerships that no longer required independent oversight or management.

Brands and Influencers

The influencer market has seen steady growth in recent years, reaching $13.8 billion in 2021.  Influencer collaborations offer many benefits, such as impacting the purchasing decisions of their followers and providing them with meaningful content.

In fact, many consumers turn to social media accounts, YouTubers, and TikTok stars for recommendations on purchasing decisions. As a result, 40% of consumers buy a product after seeing it on Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram.

The power of influencer partnerships is that they provide customers with trusted content. Research shows that 82% will buy something because a friend or family member told them about it on social media, and 81% like getting many perspectives from those they trust most before making their purchase decision!

Influencer Types By Role 

Influencer marketing is a hot new way to boost your ROI and increase brand awareness. As we have seen, Influencers come in all shapes and sizes, but they do have one thing that unites them: the ability to boost your ROI.

Influencer marketing is the modernized tool for brands to connect with customers, but it’s more than just “following the people who say nice things on social media.” There are five types of influencers that work in different ways to advance your ROI:

1. 1. Celebrity Influencers (1m+ followers)

1. 1. Macro-Influencers (250k – 1m followers)

1. 1. Mid-Influencers (75k – 250k followers)

1. 1. Micro-Influencers (10k – 75k followers)

1. 1. Nano-Influencers (<10k followers)

Impact’s Multi-Step Approach

Impact offers a multi-step approach to its successful partnership program:

1.    Discover & Recruit

This tool lets you discover and recruit global partners to your partnership program. Since it is automated, you won’t have to spend much time looking for suitable business partners.

It lets you simultaneously send hundreds of personalized messages to different affiliates and provides an overview of your recruitment efforts across prospect groups, email templates, etc.

2.    Contract & Pay

Impact provides Dynamic Payouts to adjust partner commissions automatically using different factors. Its ingenuity allows you to reward highly beneficial partners often overshadowed by others who use coupons or cashback. It saves you money by rewarding the affiliates only when their lead converts or a free trial is converted to paid.

3.    Tracking

Impact offers you accurate tracking of conversion, app installations, etc., through the API plugin. If the API isn’t your thing, however, you can add a universal tag to your site header. Their cross-device identity tool lets you see the devices a customer has used to access your product. It also identifies the devices belonging to a single user and sees how different partners participate.

Impact has multi-layered and precise tracking technologies that prevent cookie blocking and give you a comprehensive view of different events, channels, and devices.

They use the cookie and non-cookie method so that your partners who deserve it should be credited. If a cookie is blocked or deleted, Impact uses a digital fingerprint (non-PII) to accurately track customer actions. They tie the visit to appropriate action, which ensures that your partners are rewarded accordingly.

4.    Engagement

The automatic partner engagement lets you determine how each partner is doing through 40+ performance reports. These reports include geolocation, promo code, time of day, etc.

5.    Protect and Monitor

There is a lot of fraud that occurs in affiliate partner marketing. Malicious actors often try to game the system by stuffing cookies, faking app installations, and injecting clicks where they have no business. They intend to earn false credits and improve their standing through these frauds.

Impact prevents such frauds with its machine learning algorithms, fraud detection methodologies, and qualified data scientists. They review your traffic, score it, and mark malicious actors so you can remove them quickly.

6.    Optimize

You can also improve the efficiency of your program by optimizing it according to the situation. The Contribution Report reveals which partners are making incremental contributions so that you can incentivize for them to perform even better.

Pros of Impact:

• •  offers an excellent platform for managing hundreds of partner affiliations. Every business is different, so Impact has customized solutions for each particular case. It allows brands to easily adjust other elements, such as contracts, terms, tracking requirements, etc., for better performance.

• • Its extensive partner recruitment network allows businesses to curate their lists and recruit different partners. Companies can also negotiate their terms within a short period. Since Impact does it all for you, you don’t have to keep numerous spreadsheets on your computer and keep an eye on all affiliate partners.

Cons of Impact:

• • They need to improve their live chat feature. It is a good addition, but chatting with more than ten partners at once can become overwhelming and frustrating. It gets harder and harder to manage the more affiliate partners join. Their message management needs significant improvements so multiple partners can be handled simultaneously.

• • Their influencer discovery network is relatively new, so always double-check before you select someone as an affiliate partner. Always recheck the creator engagement metrics to only recruit the people you desire.

• • Affiliate marketers complain about their payment process.

Recap

Impact Affiliate Program brings many features that can help your business grow and gain more traction in the online market. They have a well-established network of affiliate partners and influencers you can contact directly from their platform. However, in my research, I found many bad reviews related to the lack of prompt payment to affiliate members and some users complained about the “poor” quality of influencers and portals of dubious origins and intent.

If you still want to try an affiliate network for your brand, I suggest you start with a free/low fee platforms without long term commitment.