impact.com February 2024 Release

impact.com / performance

Drive revenue and new customer acquisition with Card-Linked Offers (CLO)

We’re excited to announce that we now provide full support for Card-Linked Offers (CLO) partnerships within the impact.com platform! CLO publishers can now send transaction-level data directly to impact.com, where they can be processed, invoiced, and reported on alongside all your other partnerships.

“But wait,” you say. “Back up. What is CLO, anyway?” We’re so glad you asked! CLO is a partnership strategy that allows brands and publishers to seamlessly reward consumers for purchasing certain products and services. Brands often take advantage of CLO to increase average order values (AOV), drive revenue growth, and generate new customers.

Card-Linked Offers link offers directly to consumers’ credit or debit cards (thus the name), so there’s no need for a promo code or additional tracking. And since CLO does not require any web-based tracking, it can be an excellent way to activate your partnerships to drive in-store traffic.

To learn more about this exciting partner category, check out our free PXA course, Partner Spotlight: Card-Linked Offers and browse the active CLO partners in our Marketplace. Once you’re ready to get started, you can check out this help article for additional information. Happy card-linking!

Beta: Switch to your own custom tracking domain today

Let’s talk about tracking links. Everybody uses ‘em. That’s how you track clicks and conversions and everything else you care about as a marketer. Each of those tracking links includes a tracking domain — usually one of several standard impact.com domains.

The downside of using these generic tracking domains is that they add a few characters of (what looks like) gibberish to the start of all your links — such as “sjv.io”. With this release, we are introducing a simple, streamlined way for you to switch to your own custom tracking domains — such as “goto.yourbrand.com.” This can lead to increased consumer trust, since it is more clear that the link they’re seeing is really a link for your brand, rather than a clever lookalike.

Using your own custom tracking domain can also improve your overall tracking performance by dropping a first-party cookie on click. While our standard tracking links drop a first-party cookie once the user lands on your site, some users drop off before your page loads. With a custom tracking domain, your cookies with be first-party all the way through the journey, and you may see more conversions attributed to your program.

If you’re interested in switching to your own custom tracking domain, reach out to your CSM or contact support via the “?” icon at the bottom of your impact.com dashboard. We’ll be happy to get you included in the beta, and we’ll work with you to make sure everything is set up correctly.

Note: Custom tracking domains require a Professional or Enterprise subscription.

Third-party cookies, Google, and you

Google’s long-awaited deprecation of third-party cookies has been in the news lately, and naturally, a lot of folks are asking themselves, “Will this negatively affect my partnership program?” Well, if you’re an impact.com client, we’ve got good news for you: the answer is “nope!”

Our tracking does not rely on third-party cookies, so nothing changes for our users’ tracking when Google finally follows Apple’s lead and kills the third-party cookie. But, in the words of the great LeVar Burton, “You don’t have to take my word for it.” For those who want to verify it for themselves, we put together a help article that will walk you through how to test this for yourself — no dev skills required.

Beta: Explore new frontiers of targeting and personalization with Audiences

We’re always looking for new ways that brands and publishers can work together to drive increased conversion rates and better user experiences. One of the tools we’re building to do that is called Audiences. In a nutshell, Audiences provides a way for you to tap into your partners’ user data (without sacrificing consumer privacy, of course), and provide highly targeted offers to specific user segments — or, “audiences.”

We’ve begun testing with a small group, and we’re ready to scale up the feature to really see what we can do. If you’re interested in participating, reach out to your CSM to learn more. They will make sure your program is a good fit and help you get started.

This initiative requires true collaboration between you and your partner, so it would be good to start thinking about which partner(s) might want to test this out with you. It’s particularly helpful if those partners allow (or require) their users to log into an account, since that greatly increases their ability to segment and target specific audiences. 

Beta: Plan ahead and save time with Scheduled Terms (beta)

If you often offer short-term payout increases to your partners (around key shopping holidays, for instance), you may find yourself manually swapping partners onto various template terms several times in a short period. While you can already schedule a change to new terms and then schedule a “fallback” to another set of terms, that doesn’t always provide all the tools you need to keep up with an intensive schedule of commission changes.

Scheduled Terms is a new tool that lets you schedule any number of changes in advance. This eliminates the need to manually switch partners to different contracts or to continuously schedule “fallback” terms.

With Scheduled Terms, you can set time-bound adjustments to Default Payout, Payout Groups, Payout Adjustments, and Payout Restrictions. If you want early access to Scheduled Terms, please reach out to your CSM — they’ll be happy to get you set up. Happy scheduling!

Note: Scheduled Terms is available to anyone with a Professional or Enterprise subscription.

Paid Search Monitoring: Now available for Google Shopping Ads

Many brands don’t allow partners to run Google Shopping campaigns or bid on items in Google Shopping, but up until now its been difficult to monitor. With this release, our Paid Search monitoring capabilities have expanded to Google Shopping, so you can flag partner bidding on your Google Shopping ads and efficiently remediate violations. Note: This feature is only available for users of our Paid Search Advanced tool. If you’re not already a user and would like to learn more, please reach out to your CSM or submit a ticket in the platform. 

Benchmark Report now available for Travel and Education Verticals

We’ve expanded our popular Bencmark report to new verticals! If you’re in the Travel or Education verticals, meet the qualification requirements for benchmarking, and have Optimize as part of your subscription, you’ll now be able to see the Benchmark report and view analysis of key metrics between your program and the average performance of partners programs in your competitive segment.

Additional currencies are now available for credit card funding

You can now conveniently fund your impact.com account via credit card in seven additional currencies including AUD, DKK, HKD, JPY, NOK, SEK, and SGD.

Subscription and usage information are now available on the Finance Overview screen

Ever wonder how you’re pacing against your allotted platform usage? Wish it was easier to get information about your subscription? With this release, you can now view key subscription and usage details such as your subscription period and current pacing against usage right from the Finance Overview screen. Note: Usage information is refreshed daily and is accurate as of the previous day (not real-time).

Newsletters now support up to 5 ad codes

You can now add up to 5 ad code tokens to a single newsletter (previously 1). Additionally, you’re now able to preview what the ad code will look like when you send a test email—so you can be sure you’re sending the ads you meant to.

Advanced Action Listing with SKU report now available

This new report not only contains order level data, like the standard Advanced Action Listing report, but also product-level data. Simply use the Show filter to show “SKU” and see both order and product level data in one unified report. 

Introducing the impact.com CRM card for HubSpot

HubSpot allows users to display information from other systems on a HubSpot record via CRM cards. Now, if you use the impact.com x HubSpot integration, you can see real-time impact.com data in your HubSpot CRM instance at the Contact record level– on the right sidebar of the record By adding the impact.com CRM card if not already automatically available, you can surface which of your partners have helped driven sales conversations without ever needing to leave your HubSpot CRM. 

Acknowledgment for modified placement fee terms

We are pleased to announce a crucial enhancement to our contract management process. In the event that you encounter a new or modified contract featuring a placement fee, a notification will now be prompted. This notification will require you to actively acknowledge and accept the new or modified terms, thereby ensuring a deliberate and well-informed decision-making process.

You can now search by prospect email on the proposals screen

Previously, if you searched by email, you would only get results from joined partners on the platform. With this release, you’ll now also get results for prospects, saving you time when looking for specific prospects on the proposals screen.

Partnerships Experience Academy (PXA)

Getting Started with Influencer Partnerships – Learning Path Certification

Influencer marketing is rapidly winning the favor of brands who want to tap into the audiences of trusted influencers. It’s the perfect kind of partnership for bolstering a brand’s marketing strategy by creating brand awareness and driving conversions.

If you’re new to influencer marketing, this certification path will help you implement effective influencer strategies that align with company goals. You’ll learn about concrete action plans and best practices, and receive worksheets to get you started with managing a fruitful influencer marketing and partnerships program.

By the end of this certification path, you will be able to: 

• Define influencers and influencer tiers.

• Describe the relationship between influencers and company goals.

• List niche categories and describe how they can target specific audiences.

• Understand and choose between all of the available content types.

• Create scopes of work and influencer briefs.

• Use amplification in your influencer strategy.

• Build a budget with a template included for your use.

• Cast and recruit influencers and negotiate talent rates.

• Conduct product fulfillment and monitor influencer content.

• Assess the performance of influencer programs.

impact.com / creator: Product Training - Fundamentals Certification Path

impact.com / creator is the ultimate influencer campaign management software, and this certification path is brimming with insights and strategies for elevating your brand's presence and engagement through the platform.

Led by Coady Joy, Head of Affiliate and Partnerships Education, you’ll explore everything from the platform’s basic functions and homepage to locating your ideal creators and crafting a robust campaign.

By the end of this certification path, you will be able to:

• Navigate the impact.com / creator homepage.

• Find creators to work with who align with your campaign goals.

• Build a campaign scope of work.

• Manage a successful influencer campaign via the platform.

• Access and collect content for repurposing.

impact.com / creator Product Training - Associate Certification Path

Led by Coady Joy Head of Affiliate and Partnerships Education, this certification path guides you through all the impact.com / creator platform features.

You’ll learn about discovering, recruiting, and engaging with creators on the platform, managing creator campaigns, and protecting your creator program.

By the end of this certification path, you will be able to:

• Apply filters in the Discover Marketplace to narrow down your creator search.

• Identify creator prospects and manage your recruitment using the Prospects tab.

• Discover creators outside the impact.com network using Extended Search.

• Manage tasks and payments.

• Protect your program using social monitoring.