| 10 min read

Impact Radius Affiliate Platform Review

Whether you’re just getting started for the first time in affiliate marketing, or you’ve been doing it for years, one of the challenges is finding the right affiliate partners for your business. Many affiliate programs are available through platforms and networks, and one worth considering is Impact. 

Impact works with more than 1200 brands’ partner programs, and can be a key partner for affiliate marketers, content creators and influencers. 

What Is Impact Radius?

Impact Radius, now known as Impact, is a partnership management platform. The platform offers a range of services for brands, publishers, and businesses. 

Brands and businesses can use it to scale partnerships with affiliates, influencers, strategic business partners, publishers, and more. 

Publishers such as bloggers or news sites, affiliate marketers, creators and influencers, or mobile app creators can use it to find and connect with brands and businesses, and to monetize those partnerships.

Impact seems to really strive to offer a complete customer journey for affiliates and partner companies alike. 

Garit Boothe, finance blogger at Digital Honey, uses Impact along with other affiliate networks for his financial website. “Impact has a clean, modern-looking dashboard. It's easy to use,” he says. “This is a big deal because the affiliate marketing industry is as old as the internet, and many of their competitors have horrible, outdated websites.”

Is Impact An Affiliate Network?

Affiliate networks are companies that help facilitate connections between businesses with affiliate programs and potential affiliates. They allow those looking for affiliate opportunities to find companies offering affiliate programs and other partnership opportunities, create affiliate links, track sales and impressions, upload tax documents, receive payouts, and more. 

For businesses offering affiliate programs, the network provides functionality and automation that makes the process of acquiring new partners easier, adds helpful tools and resources for affiliate management, and helps businesses understand where they are getting the most value. 

In that sense, yes, Impact is an affiliate network. But it’s also more than that. It offers industry insights, an ecosystem of affiliate marketing and digital marketing experts, articles and webinars on marketing strategy, and more. A variety of tutorials can help you explore ways to improve results. You can even sign up for the free Partnerships Experience Academy

Sometimes, though, the roles of Impact versus the brand isn’t clear, Boothe warns. “One of the confusing things about Impact Radius is that they aren't necessarily managing the relationship for the companies that are in their portal. Oftentimes, those relationships are managed by in-house employees or even by third-party affiliate marketing agencies. Many times they just manage the analytics tracking and payments for their clients.”

How Long Does It Take To Get Approved By Impact Radius?

Impact says it will review applications within 72 hours, though some influencers say it has taken longer to actually get approved. Filling out your application correctly and completely can help you get approved in a timely manner.

“Impact's process of applying to affiliate programs is pretty straightforward,” says Boothe. “This is great, because most of their competitors make this overly complicated or difficult.”

Signup begins at app.impact.com where you can use email, or any of the following accounts: email, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter or LinkedIn. Its language drop down menu offers 42 language options. 

Once you sign up, you need to take additional steps to fill out your profile.

For your public profile, you will want to include information such as links to social media accounts, your promotion methods, and keywords relevant to your business. 

Perhaps you signed up for Impact already to work with a specific brand. If you want to work with multiple advertisers, you need to make sure you have also joined the Marketplace. This requires additional steps.

Once you have been approved, you can apply for various affiliate marketing programs, it may take longer to get accepted into these programs. 

Influencers will fill out a variety of personal details (gender, ethnicity, relationship status, education and more), though you can always choose “prefer not to say” (except for birthdate) and you can choose to pause your profile.

If you have a website where you’ll be featuring offers, you’ll have to verify it either through an email address with the same URL, or by adding code to your website.

You will also need to provide details about your business. Once you have completed these steps you will decide how you want to be paid and upload any relevant tax documents. 

How Do I Get Paid From Impact?

In order to get paid from Impact you need to make sales that can be credited to your referrals. And before you can make affiliate sales, you need to find companies that offer products that align with your business and will resonate with your target audience. 

Influencers can also get paid through flat fee sponsorships or gifting. In those cases, you’ll need to complete the terms of your contract. 

Impact supports lots of payment models including per click, pay per conversion, pay per view, sponsorship/flat fee, gifting, tenancy (advertising space) etc. This allows brands and affiliates/creators to find a payment agreement that works for both parties. 

Once commissions or fees are earned, and your account balance reaches a minimum payout threshold you choose, there are three ways to get paid; PayPal, wire transfer, or automated clearing house. 

Wire transfer allows you to be paid every week, the automated clearing house pays via direct deposit into your bank account on the 1st and 15th of the month. PayPal is another option but it carries a 2% processing fee capped at $20. (If you get paid that way you may want to set a higher threshold to minimize the fee.)

As mentioned, Impact has partnerships with more than 1200 brands. Whatever vertical your business is in, there is pretty much something for everyone. Once you have found the best affiliate companies for your business, you will need to apply to each one. Upon acceptance, you’ll supply any additional information needed and, in some cases (such as influencer campaigns), negotiate terms.

Companies can also reach out to you proactively to invite you to work with them, so make sure your profile is complete, up to date, and check to see who has reached out. 

Be prepared for potentially irrelevant invitations though. 

Boothe explains: “One of the more annoying things about Impact is that they allow just about anybody to invite you to apply to their affiliate program. This is irritating because 95%+ of the invitations are irrelevant. I have a finance site, and companies selling household decorations or medical devices reach out asking me to promote their products. This includes an email notification, which I haven't figured out how to turn off, so it feels like spam.”

The Bottomline: Impact 

If you’re an influencer, digital marketer, publisher or creator looking for ways to earn money, the Impact affiliate platform should be on your list of monetization opportunities. It’s one of the leaders in performance marketing, and it offers a wide variety of tools and options to help drive success. 

Just understand you may get invited to promote products that aren’t a good fit for your audience. If you’re willing to sort through those offers to find the right programs it may be a good fit for your business.

“Overall, I like Impact much better than most of the other affiliate networks or programs that I work with,” says Boothe. 


More Articles
Newsletter Card

Newsletter

Stay up to date on the latest news, articles, and announcements from dash.fi. It’s easy and it’s free.