What is Impact Radius?
Impact (formerly Impact Radius) – is one of the most robust affiliate networks that offer full partnership management features from recruiting new partners, discovering new brands, building and accepting contracts and proposals, and monitoring performance to optimize the value that each partnership drives.
For affiliates and creators, Impact.com is a comprehensive affiliate platform that hosts thousands of brands and products for affiliates to discover and promote with their audience. The platform makes it really easy for creators to quickly and efficiently monetize their content, build long-term relationships with brands, and grow and scale their audience and online businesses.
For brands and advertisers, the affiliate network helps brands build profitable relationships with affiliates, diversify their revenue, gain visibility, build brand awareness, and access in-depth reports and insights to fully understand how each connection drives incremental results.
The impact of Impact.com
Impact.com has tremendously grown over the past few years amidst heightened competition, inflationist rates, and consumers’ behavior shifts when it comes to their purchase decisions.
Co-founded in 2008 by Lisa Riolo, Roger Kjensrud, Per Petterson, and Todd Crawford, and led by the brilliant David A. Yovanno, Impact has launched to the market to transform how people connect and adjust to these evolving trends.
Over the past decade, Impact has enabled publishers, commerce content, creators, agencies, brands, and retailers with technology to connect, build, engage, and nurture relationships at all levels of the partnership cycle.
Fast forward to 2023, Impact.com has released full capabilities for advertisers and brands to connect with creators and influencers, stretching its offering to full-funnel growth solutions for partners, making it the partnership management platform by excellence.
For brands, there is a constant need to build and maintain cost-effective marketing programs and ROI, focusing on effectiveness and the creation of future demand. And that is how Impact.com comes to market to support all players of the partnership ecosystem:
- Move fast
- Enbody passion
- Grow their customers’ business
Top advertisers and brands using Impact Radius
Impact hosts many popular affiliate programs and offers creators and publishers a wide range of products and brands to promote. Popular retailers, advertisers, and consumer brands set in Impact include:
- Walmart – 1%-4% online sales (3 days cookie window)
- Allibaba.com – 20% seller plan (30 days)
- GrubHub – $5 online purchase (30 days)
- TikTok for Business – 20%-40% spend amount (90 days)
- Constant Contact – $105 per email sale
- Hubspot – 30% monthly recurring subscriptions (370 days)
- Quip – 8%-50% (30 days)
- Shark – 1%-4% online sales (7 days)
- Best Buy – 0.5% online sales (1 day)
- Crocs – 6%-11% (7 days)
- Clarins – 6% online sales (7 days)
- Faberware – 4% online sale (15 days)
- Orange Theory -$25 (14 days)
- DSW – 2% online sale (14 days)
- Gap – 1%-2% online sale (1 day)
Impact Radius Key Features
Discovery and recruitment tools
Partnerships marketplace
Impact.com is the home of thousands of partners to work with, whether you manage your affiliate and partnership campaigns as an affiliate, publisher, creator, brand, retailer, or agency.
Through Impact’s discovery platform, you can select brands, products, and affiliates to work with and get access to build relationships with top commerce content publishers, content creators, tech partners, or loyalty and coupon sites.
For publishers and affiliates, the platform gives access to thousands of global enterprise brands, SaaS, and retailers in the most dynamic category and vertical.
Impact also makes it easy for brands and advertisers to streamline their partner recruitment process from initial outreach to newly joined partners.
The creator marketplace is now available in the Impact’s discovery tool for brands and advertisers, looking to expand their portfolio and work with creators and influencers, building meaningful relationships through more traditional campaign-based contracts with influencers. The creator platform allows to find new ways to connect with creators and unlock performance-based relationships.
Another great feature of Impact is its Extended search feature that allows brands to extend their reach during the recruitment stage by creating customized searches based on keywords, channels, partner size, geo, and language. This provides an additional arm to target prospective lists and partner recruitment opportunities both in and out of Impact’s “Discovery” section.
Automated partner matching is one of the best features of Impact.com as it offers brands and advertisers a way to connect with affiliates that will drive meaningful results. It helps balance diversification with performance contribution.
Advertisers get to be matched with “top path introducers”, “conversion path introducers”, “partners from similar brands”, “partners you will love”, “high revenue potential” partners, or “high AOV potential” partners.
If you have specific targets and you are looking to effectively and efficiently meet your campaign’s traffic, sales, and profit goals, this feature is going to help do the heavy lifting.
Cross-device and multi-channel media tracking and attribution
Impact.com’s cross-device tracking capabilities provide merchants and affiliates with tools to help connect customers’ journeys and interactions across multiple devices to properly allocate conversion credit to the touchpoints that influenced their purchase decisions.
By implementing cross-device attribution, you gain visibility into the customer’s path to conversion and can optimize your marketing spend and strategies to drive the greatest return on investment.
The impact has also in-depth multi-channel attribution reports to help advertisers identify which touchpoints during a customer journey result in a sale.
This is critical in running an effective affiliate campaign and building an integrated media strategy where a better understanding of your customer journey is critical in order to track top-performing channels, and better increase or pull back on spending for your marketing budget for the best ROI on your campaigns.
Partnership optimization tools
If you are looking to diversify your revenue with Affiliate Marketing and take full advantage of the platform, “Optimize” is by far one of the best solutions Impact offers merchants and advertisers.
Participation value reports give you access to explore how each channel drives value into the entire consumer journey and customer path to purchase.
Incrementality analysis helps advertisers understand the value of each partnership, what partners, affiliates, publishers, and influencers introduce, and influence the path to purchase or close the conversion.
Impact’s LTV and behavior reports by media partners will also help you explore how partners participate in the entire conversion paths, activating, and retaining customers and contributing to building profitable and incremental results. Get insights on;
- New and returning customers’ rates
- Purchase frequency, revenue per customer, margin per customer
- AOV, average path time to conversion
Benchmark insights
- Get insights and recommendations on how to recruit and optimize high-ranking partners in your segment/vertical
- How to engage and activate non-productive partners, already driving clicks and with a likelihood to quickly turn into revenue-active partners
- How to recruit and optimize from under-indexed partner business models.
Robust fraud monitoring and prevention – Affiliate fraud takes many forms nowadays, whether it is cookie stuffing, use of stolen data, click fraud, or URL highjacking, it is the pet peeve of brands and advertisers. To prevent financial loss or brand reputation damages, Impact offers robust fraud monitoring capabilities to detect traffic abnormalities, and prevent brands from malicious tactics leading to overpaying commissions and lower ROI.
Finally, the last top feature worth mentioning is Impact Data Lab which provides all the tools to build customized reports and streamline your data-driven decision-making process, sharing the data story with key stakeholders.
Impact’s Interface and Use
Impact.com interface and UI is very easy to navigate and easy to customize. Users can build comparisons, benchmarks, and any other KPI reports with widgets.
- For brands, you can easily switch between all products and solutions of Impact.com’s partnership cloud such as “Discover” Engage”, “Optimize”, “And “Monitor and Protect”.
- “Walkthroughs” give users quick access to find their way into the platform such as creating and managing ads, discovering new partners, and building contract and template terms.
- For partners, you can easily switch between “brands”, “reports”, and “content” to quickly access deals, content, and tracking links, find new brands to promote and explore all your campaign performance in just a few clicks.
Impact Radius Integrations
Impact’s affiliate platform has solidified many partnerships with third-party tech partners to offer seamless experiences for consumers, advertisers, and publishers, and build robust partnerships and programs, powered by world-class solutions via built-in integration.
Connect all your tools from analytics and reporting, CRM, to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), marketing, or subscriptions. Impact.com has made it very for users to sync their data across multiple platforms, automate their workflows, and streamline their marketing efforts. Top Impact’s integrations include:
- Analytics & Reporting – FMTC, Adjust, Clarisights, Segment, Supermetrics, Tealium
- eCommerce – Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace, WordPress
- CRM – Hubspot, Salesforce
- Marketing – Bannerflow, Rokt, Rodeo
- Subscriptions and Payments – Bold, Recharge, Stripe, Chargebee, Recurly
- Customer Data Platform – Anytrack, LiveRamp, Mparticle
- And the list goes on…
Impact’s Pros & Cons
As with any affiliate tracking and management platforms, there are pros and cons to consider with Impact’s affiliate network; our verdict:
Pros:
- Easy-to-use dashboard
- Reporting and customization
- Great customer and tech support
- Monthly features and product enhancements
Cons:
- Paid add-ons
- Advertisers’ onboarding Process
- Pricing plans transparency
- Complex API process for beginners
Impact Radius Support & Resources
Impact has a wide range of technical support and resources to help you get started, scale your affiliate earnings or drive revenue, troubleshoot tracking issues, or simply answer a specific question;
- Access to help docs, knowledge base, video tutorials, best practices by industry, blog, and email marketing guides.
- 30-minute “Book time” with technical services engineers to get additional support
- 24/7 Chat
- Sign up for Impact. com’s business newsletter to get the latest information about new product and feature releases, access to benchmark and market trends guides, and more.
- Hire an expert, an agency, or an independent contractor to help you get your program to the next level.
- Partnerships Experience Academy (PXA) – Impact is one of the best affiliates and partnership platforms that offers comprehensive courses, strategic guidance, and learning paths leading up to getting certified, whether you connect as a publisher, a brand, an influencer, an agency or a freelancer looking to learn and master affiliate and influencer marketing. PXA is completely free, up to date with relevant topics, and offers to build in-demand and marketable skills, essential to thrive and stay relevant in this industry.
Impact’s Pricing & Plans
Impact.com is free for publishers and creators to join. For brands and advertisers, pricing may include a one-time setup fee and a monthly subscription fee.
Impact Radius Affiliate Network Alternatives
Impact’s best alternatives and other affiliate platforms are CJ, Awin, and ShareAsale
- If you are looking to quickly get started and streamline the onboarding process with an affiliate network, CJ (formerly known as Commission Junction) is probably going to be a better option for you. Nonetheless, the platform’s UI seems a bit outdated and could be improved.
- Awin offers more robust API capabilities to help speed up everyday affiliate tasks.
- ShareASale is one of the oldest affiliate platforms, offering the best pricing for brands to join the network.
All affiliate networks offer robust benchmark reports to get insights into peers’ and publishers’ performance per sector or verticals.
Impact’s Referral Partner Program
Impact’s Referral Partner Program is self-hosted in the Impact Network and offers content creators, passionate bloggers, and entrepreneurs to join the program and earn $25 per account completion and 8% in online sales. Get access to promotional resources and reliable tracking and reporting capabilities.
Impact Radius App
Impact’s affiliate platform is also available in the Apple store to manage your partnerships anywhere and anytime.
Final verdict
If you are serious about driving revenue growth for your brand or earning affiliate income promoting exciting brands that match your audience’s interests and needs, Impact is a powerful partnership management platform for creators and advertisers seeking to build meaningful relationships to optimize their performance marketing efforts.
With a wide range of features, including advanced partner matching and reporting, multi-channel tracking, attribution modeling, and affiliate and influencer fraud prevention solutions, it provides businesses with the tools they need to make data-driven decisions and achieve a higher ROI.
While there may be a learning curve and cost considerations, the benefits of using Impact are substantial, especially for businesses operating in the complex partnership ecosystem. If you’re looking to take your digital marketing to the next level, Impact Radius is certainly worth considering.
