How to get ahead in the partnership economy – impact.com

The partnership economy is a rapidly evolving beast, and keeping abreast of the needs of both advertisers and partners is a constant challenge.

At its recent packed-out iPX event in the City of London impact.com brought together a cross section of industry reps, business leaders and even influencers to discuss where partnership as a theme was heading.

So we sat down with James Bennie, Regional Vice President of Customer Success at impact.com, and Matt Sheppard, Customer Success Director, at impact.com, to hear about the current (and incoming) features the impact.com platform uses to empower its customers to keep ahead of the curve. 

Advertisers often cite quickly finding and activating partners as a key challenge of the partnership economy. How does impact.com help them do that?

James Bennie: You’re absolutely right. Fast recruitment of quality partners is critical for advertisers, and the impact.com platform has a number of features that helps advertisers do that.

Automated partner discovery is such a feature, and this searches within the impact.com marketplace (and externally) for appropriate partners based on a number of criteria (including the number of followers and location etc).

You can run multiple searches, and these continually cycle to provide a constant stream of potential new partners.

Once you’ve found your partners, our Prospects feature lets you manage them through the recruitment pipeline, allowing you to execute (and streamline) your partner communications. You can also assign partners to different account users within our platform.

Finally, our Workflows feature is about automating partner applications, and we’re trying to reduce the time our clients take to process applications manually.

Workflows is also great for the partners themselves, because if they fit the criteria to be automatically approved, they can quickly pick their links and get promoting.

How does the impact.com platform handle the complexities and nuances of contracting?

Matt Sheppard: Well, contracting is how we define the relationship between an advertiser and the publisher or partner. There are 100+ parameters that we can contract on and combine these to make thousands of potential iterations of a commercial relationship.

A new feature is the ability to make bulk edits to a contract. So, historically making changes to a contract would be on a case-by-case basis.

But brands have told us they would like to make the same change to a large number of contracts at one time, and this will be available soon.

Something you won’t hear us say often about our platform is that the functionality is pretty limited. However, our CPC contracting was previously limited to a simple one price fits all clicks.

Now we’re working hard to release a new, dynamic CPC functionality that is super granular. This allows brands to incentivise partners to drive particular types of traffic and be rewarded regardless of where they operate in the sales funnel.

It’s no longer just last-click partners that get rewarded.

I presume partnership monitoring must be pretty key for impact.com?

MS: Absolutely. Once you’ve found the partner, built the contract, and they’ve gone live with their content, you need to be able to keep an eye on things and make sure partners are keeping their end of the bargain, particularly when operating at scale.

We’ve got a series of tools that will help advertisers do that. For example, our paid search monitor tool will scan for a brand’s registered keywords, and let them know if their partner happens to be bidding on those keywords.

We also have a promo code monitoring tool that will take appropriate action if a code has ended up in the wrong place; on a blog or forum, for example.

The newest part of our monitoring suite uses compliance technology that has been on offer to the financial sector for a while, but is now available to all advertisers.

The feature makes sure that your partners are promoting the right content, in the appropriate places, at the right time.

How do you report on the performance of your partnerships?

JB: We firmly believe that data is at the forefront of pretty much every affiliate programme.

We also believe that impact.com has led the way in terms of the data made available to our customers within the platform’s UI.

A critical part of that is a tool called Data Lab. It’s a unique feature that brings together large sets of data, allows you to build custom reports, and gives actionable insights within your partnership programme.

Think of it as a big, easy-to-use, drag and drop pivot table, where you can access pretty much every data point that’s available within the impact.com platform.

Data Lab is extremely flexible, and can be used to create a near limitless combination of reports that accommodates bespoke KPIs, custom reports across multiple accounts and programmes, and save and schedule these before sending them to external stakeholders.

Before the end of the year, we’ll also be rolling out a new Data Lab feature allowing advertisers to share a report with a partner or partner group directly within the platform UI.

We’re anticipating this will help partners boost their optimisation ability.

What do you think the future of reporting is?

MS: We are focusing on developing reporting that offers a multifaceted, complete, 360-degree view of the effectiveness of your partnerships.

A lot of this focus is going into enhancing our reports that reveal insights beyond last click. For example, advertisers can now test out certain hypotheses about their partnerships.

Perhaps an advertiser believes that a content-led partner is introducing sales, but not closing them. An impact.com Contribution report will allow them to check whether this belief is accurate, for instance.

Similarly, an advertiser might be concerned that certain partners are leapfrogging other partners at the end of the path to purchase.

So, the impact.com Leapfrog report is designed to expose that happening, and simultaneously reveal the full contribution of all partners, wherever they operate across the funnel.

Both reports are currently in beta, but will be available on the platform soon.

Also published in: Mediashotz