Impact Affiliate Review: Features, Integrations and Pricing

Affiliate programs can bring you serious revenue, but the path there is far from easy. You’re tasked with endless marketing tasks like affiliate recruitment, performance monitoring, asset sharing, commission management, and much more that can easily eat up days in your workweek. That’s why affiliate tracking software is a must for any brand with an affiliate program or thinking of launching one. 

You might consider Impact for affiliate marketing software, a platform where you can find new affiliates, access reports, and complete a wide range of more affiliate tasks. We’ll cover Impact’s key features and compare it with Tapfiliate to help you decide on the best software for your program. 

What Is Impact and How Does It Work?

Impact is an affiliate software that helps brands track and optimize money from affiliate marketing with a partnership marketplace, detailed reporting, commission payouts, and more. It covers a wide variety of partnership types, including premium news publishers, strategic B2B partnerships, ambassadors, premium news publishers, micro- and macro-influencers, and more. 

How Can Impact Help You Grow Your Brand?

Discover and Recruit

Impact stands out with an impressive number of affiliates (including influencers) that brands can choose from within the platform. You can filter affiliate searches on the database by competitors, follower count (micro or macro influencers), or geographic region. Plus, you can pick from category specialties like arts and entertainment, home & garden, pets, fitness, and subscription services.

Additionally, Impact leverages machine learning to analyze affiliate programs and accordingly offer affiliate recommendations to brands. You can also set up alerts to learn about new affiliates pop up who match your recruitment criteria.

Contract and Pay

Impact offers automated, dynamic payouts that you can automatically toggle to increase or flag based on:

• Customer level: new or existing customers, customer lifetime value, location
• Order level: discount code, cart size, order value, or category
• Item value: category, profit margin, product types

You can also use participation bonuses to reward and engage affiliates based on more than just sales. For example, if you have an influencer affiliate that drove a certain amount of web traffic to your website, you can reward them for that, too. Impact lets you dish out rewards at every step of the conversion funnel, including clicks, downloads, signups, and more. 

Payout schedules are also customizable, which means you can set up a day, week, or month in between tracked events and a payment. 

Track

Impact offers tracking for multiple events (not just purchases), including subscription sign-ups, leads, app installs, upgrades or upsells, and more. The platform enables tracking with its universal tracking tag that you can plug onto your site’s header. Otherwise, you can use Impact’s APIs for reliable, customizable tracking without needing cookies. 

Another solid feature is Impact’s cross-device tracking. You can tell whether an affiliate brought you a lead, or if they came from one of your paid search posts, blog posts, or influencer marketing campaigns, for example. Plus, Impact’s TrueLink^TM helps you direct and reroute potential customers to various pages on your website without having to switch out links across your affiliate partners. This linking tech also allows you to:

• Automatically turn off links for outdated offers
• Test various landing pages for conversion optimization
• Personalize link landing pages based on customer history
• Offer time-sensitive and location-based promotions 

Engage

Impact’s affiliate platform offers various engagement opportunities via commission offers and creative assets. The software lets you automate various affiliate manager tasks like email notifications, to-dos, and stage changes based on partner performance or actions. You can also customize your own workflow for partner content proposals, negotiate terms, and view proof of posts right there on the platform. 

Ecommerce brands can also harness Impact’s Curated Product Catalogs, which gives you control over the products each affiliate can see and rules for them to promote them. Though catalogs like this are ideal for ecommerce businesses, Impact also notes a use case for travel brands and financial service providers as well. 

Protect & Monitor

Impact’s reporting suite offers a look at insights across the entire conversion and marketing funnel. You can monitor affiliate partner performance, posts, issues, date ranges, and leads on easily digestible dashboards. But Impact takes that a step further with its more full-picture monitoring on websites and paid search performance as well. Additionally, Impact keeps tabs on suspicious activity with fraudulent traffic alerts. 

Optimize

Impact offers robust reporting and tracking capabilities, but its Optimize features help you make sense of all that data. Brands can view trend insights across your display network, social media campaigns, and affiliate campaigns to learn more about how effective each marketing tactic is in achieving conversions. It also generates line graphs to help you assess partner performance and compare multiple affiliates over time. 

You can also track KPIs like cost per action (CPA), customer lifetime value (CLV), total clicks and actions, and partner ROI to understand your affiliate program more deeply. 

Can Impact Affiliate Integrate with Your Existing Marketing Tools and Platforms?

Impact integrates with 45 direct integrations to software across a wide range of use cases and industries. For example, it integrates with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, analytics tools like Supermetrics, customer relationship management (CRM) software like Hubspot, and payment processes like Recurly and Stripe. Additionally, it offers deep linking tools to measure mobile performance, like its integration with Adjust. 

Can I Use Customization with Impact?

Impact offers brands solid customization potential with: 

• Branding and white-labeling
• Program widgets
• Microsites and layouts
• Partner reports
• Partner emails

Just keep in mind that more robust customization features are only available on higher-tier plans. For example, Impact offers custom domains, but you can only access it with its $5,000-per-month tier. 

Impact Pricing

Impact doesn’t list any pricing information on their website. If you want to learn more about monthly costs, you’ll have to request a demo and inquire with the platform’s support team. However, we could reasonably infer from various review sites like SaaSworthy that plans start at $500 and reach as high as $5,000 per month. Overall, reviews also echo relatively high pricing for Impact’s platform despite its extensive features. 

Who Are Some of Impact’s Customers?

Impact is known for its high-ticket clientele of brands that make serious annual revenue, often big corporations like Uber, Ticketmaster, Lenovo, and Microsoft. Here’s a quick look at some of their other customers: 

• Virgin Australia: An Australian airline company that brings billions in annual revenue from domestic and international flights
• Ulta Beauty: A billion dollar cosmetics company in the retail and ecommerce spaces; publicly traded
• Siteplug: A performance marketing solution that uses its software to manage brand partnerships and drive more revenue

What are Impact Reviews Like?

Overall, Impact Radius has many positive reviews, with an average 4.5/5-star rating on G2 across 799 customers. Positive reviews cite satisfaction with Impact’s user-friendly interface, detailed reporting, comprehensive tracking, and recruitment potential. Here’s an example review from Dr. Ashish J., a digital coach: 

Impact helps me find the best partnership deals and share [more] products with people [customers].

Most negative reviews have qualms with Impact’s expensive pricing. One Verified User in Apparel & Fashion echoed similar sentiments on G2: 

While Impact.com offers many valuable features, one aspect that could be improved is the complexity of its pricing structure. The various pricing tiers and add-on features can be confusing to navigate, especially for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets… Additionally, some users have reported occasional glitches or technical issues with the platform, although these seem to be relatively infrequent and are typically addressed promptly by the support team.

8 Steps to Choosing Affiliate Program Software

Not sure which affiliate platform is best for your brand? Keep reading for an easy step-by-step guide on how to pick your perfect affiliate program software.

Decide What You Need

Affiliate software can help you achieve many different marketing goals. But every business is different. You might prioritize a platform with a niche SaaS network of affiliates to recruit from; or, you might prefer software with immense automation capabilities to speed up your operations. Whatever your business goal, keep it top of mind as you browse through affiliate software options. 

Do Your Research

The affiliate software industry continues to grow, meaning new options appear on the market pretty regularly. It’s your job to sift through all those options and decide which ones make the most sense for your business. But before that? You need a solid list of contenders that you at least know have a solid reputation and the functionalities you need to streamline your affiliate program. 

It’s always easy to start with a Google search, but the best research comes from your industry network. Find out which affiliate software businesses similar to yours are using. Or, peruse through affiliate industry publications for software ideas. 

Look at Integrations and Possibilities With Your Tech Stack

Integrations just make life as a digital marketer much easier. Say you have email marketing campaigns with Mailchimp, pay affiliates through Stripe, and regularly use Shopify for your ecommerce business tasks. Wouldn’t it be great to handle all those tasks from the same place? In that case, you’d want a software that has direct integrations with Stripe, Mailchimp, and Shopigy (PS — Tapfiliate does). 

Don’t see your tech stack in a software’s integration list? That’s not always a deal breaker. You might be able to create custom integrations if the platform offers APIs or customization through Javascript. 

Think About What Your Budget Is

Affiliate software ranges drastically in price point. You might find an affordable starter plan under $100, but plans with more complete functions can creep up to the thousands of dollars. At the end of the day, your affiliate software should make your partner marketing campaigns less expensive in the long run with more strategic insights to boost sales. Meaning? High price points aren’t always a bad sign — you just have to make sure the features will bring your affiliate program more revenue for it to be worth it. 

Still, newer businesses should look for starter plans that they can scale with as they grow. That’s why Tapfiliate’s Essential Plan is such a universal great fit for new and small businesses alike. 

Use a Free Trial

Most affiliate platforms offer either a 7-day or 14-day trial. Our advice? Check out the ones with a 14-day trial, first. Two weeks gives you more time to really get a feel for the software, including how commissions work, how fast and efficient customer support is, and how you can leverage the platform for your affiliate program’s unique needs.

Test UX and Usability

Strong user experience (UX) is a must for affiliate software. If you’re hitting constant errors or spending hours manually completing a task that can easily be automated, that software has more work to do in terms of usability. But UX can even be as simple as a clean, accessible interface, digestible and visual reporting, comprehensive dashboards, and overall ease switching from feature to feature. 

Consider Security

Affiliate marketing fraud can look like fake traffic and leads, malicious browser extensions, data breaches, identical IP addresses from affiliates and customers, as well as credit card fraud. 

Today’s digital marketing teams can’t be too careful. That’s why your affiliate software must have security features in place to protect your business data and revenue. Look for companies that offer GDPR compliance for data privacy, suspicious click or purchase alerts, and accessible reporting features to view any potentially fraudulent activity. 

Talk to Customer Support

An affiliate platform’s technical support team should be responsive, knowledgeable, and easy to talk to. They can be the difference between a productive day and a wasted budget if you’re not careful. Look at customer reviews to assess customer service level, but even better? Talk to the platform’s support team yourself. Assess how long it takes them to get back to you, and decide whether they’re truly helpful answering your inquiry, or if they make your operations more difficult. 

A Value For Money Alternative to Impact: Tapfiliate Affiliate Software

Looking for an affordable yet scalable affiliate solution? Tapfiliate is a viable alternative to Impact for ecommerce and SaaS brands with any size or budget. 

Pricing:

Tapfiliate’s pricing plans all include unlimited affiliate programs, real-time performance reports, accurate performance tracking, email and live customer support, and access for one team member. Here are some more details about our pricing and features: 

• Essential: $89/month. Up to 20,000 tracked clicks, 2,000 tracked conversions, deep affiliate links, and coupon codes.
• Pro: $149/month. Up to 100,000 tracked clicks, 10,000 tracked conversions, access for 5 team members, product-specific commission structure, affiliate groups. 
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Unlimited tracking requests, unlimited team members, single sign-on (SSO), dedicated account manager, full white-labeling, custom verbiage, advanced MLM sales goals, in-platform messenger. 

Learn more about our affordable and scalable pricing plans. 

Free Trial

We offer a free, 14-day trial to help you understand all of Tapfiliate’s features and capabilities. Test out use cases and get a real-life picture of your affiliate programs, elevated, with our software. Use this time to toggle our flexible commissions, peruse the affiliate dashboard, get granular with custom, visual data reports, or chat with our incredibly knowledgeable customer service team. 

MLM

You don’t always know which affiliates would best promote your brand name and products. But if you notice a few of your existing partners perform well? Chances are, they could be a great resource for affiliate recruitment. We leverage those connections via MLM features, where you can reward your affiliate network for bringing you more affiliates (sub-affiliates), and where both sub- and original affiliates take home a commission on a sale. 

Automation

Automation isn’t the future anymore — it’s the present. You need it to have any hope of scaling or coming out on top of your competitors, otherwise your operations just can’t keep up. Tapfiliate streamlines your affiliate campaigns with automated commission structure changes, performance bonuses, and notifications via webhooks and email triggers.

Plus, we have an integration for automated workflows that trumps all automation features an affiliate platform could offer: a Zapier integration. We see this integration as the epitome of automation, helping you enable automated triggers across different platforms with ease. Zapier links events from your entire tech stack and lets you schedule a string of actions that you can customize at any time. 

Integrations

Your affiliate marketing platform should gel seamlessly with the rest of your tech stack. Tapfiliate makes integrations seamless with its 34+ direct integrations to various SaaS, payment, marketing, and ecommerce solutions like PayPal, Stripe, Mailchimp, WooCommerce, Teachable, and more. Plus, we also offer custom integrations via JavaScript or the RESTful API, where you can integrate with any software in your workflow, even if they aren’t listed on our integrations page. 

Multi-Language

Proud of your international affiliate program? You have influencers in South America driving more revenue to your website, along with North American publishers bringing more organic traffic. Guess what — you can maintain and streamline those international partnerships with Tapfiliate’s multi-language features. Your affiliates can view their dashboards in six different languages: English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. 

Multi-currency:

Your affiliate program might need multiple currencies to compensate and engage your international partnerships. Some platforms only allow you to choose one type of currency, which alienates some affiliates and inconveniences others. Tapfiliate allows multiple currencies that you can use for different affiliate programs. 

For example, say you have one affiliate program for Mexican sales and another for German? You can enable peso payments and Euro payments for each program. All you need to do is inquire with our customer support team and we can set everything up for you seamlessly. 

Direct Messages:

Affiliates get enough emails and notifications, which makes it easy to skim past an important message or update from you, the brand. Tapfiliate’s Enterprise Plan offers an in-platform messenger where you can DM, send notifications, and customize messages to your affiliates instantly. 

Flexible Commissions:

Affiliates bring different benefits to the table. Meaning? Flexible commissions are in order. One affiliate might not bring you as many conversions as another, but perhaps they still bring you regular brand awareness in a niche audience segment. Tapfiliate lets you reward different affiliate groups in a way that makes sense for your business. Automate performance-based commission increases, set up percentage-based or flat-fee commissions, and dish out bonuses to engage affiliates. 

We also offer product-specific commissions, where you can offload excess inventory or promote certain products with heightened commissions to entice more affiliate sales. SaaS brands can set up recurring commissions, where affiliates can make money off every monthly payment for more engagement. And finally, lifetime commissions engage affiliates even more with the prospect of commissions on a customer’s entire sales history. 

White Labeling:

White-labeling means Tapfiliate’s branded elements fall off while you can replace them with your brand’s messaging, slogan, logos, and other assets. 

Here’s why it’s valuable: 

Brand consistency is a cornerstone of every successful business, and Tapfiliate furthers that principle with our completely white-labeled pages. Give your affiliates the complete brand experience with a branded affiliate portal, customized domain for your affiliate program, and a branded affiliate signup page. 

Impact Affiliate Management vs Tapfiliate Affiliate Management

Impact has many affiliate software bells and whistles, but it’s price point isn’t realistic for newer or smaller businesses. 

If you want an affiliate marketing platform with flexible commissions, easy affiliate management, and in-depth reporting at an affordable price? Tapfiliate’s your best option. 

Pricing

Tapfiliate’s pricing tiers cater to different business needs and affiliate program specs, offering solutions for brands just launching their affiliate programs or looking to scale. Our Essential Plan is a modest $89/month, Pro is $149 per month, and Enterprise plans depend on your unique goals and business needs. 

Impact, on the other hand, is a much more expensive affiliate software that’s inaccessible to newer businesses. While pricing details aren’t listed on its website, other sources and customers say it has a minimum cost of $500 per month for its most basic tier, which upgrades to $2,500 for the mid-tier, and $5,000 for Enterprise plans. Additionally, customers cite frustration with confusing additional chargers that they incur when they tack on additional features not included in their subscription. 

Overall, Tapfiliate’s pricing structure is more accessible, scalable, and transparent. 

Affiliate Program Management

Both Impact and Tapfiliate offer a wide range of affiliate management features. Tapfiliate offers real-time reporting, automated recurring and lifetime commissions, and performance incentives to keep your affiliates engaged with consistent revenue. Additionally, our affiliate coupon codes and branded creative assets make it easy to streamline affiliate marketing campaigns with better productivity. We also offer customizable cookie durations to appeal to your brands’ sales cycle, which is especially important for SaaS companies, which have notoriously longer sales cycles. 

Impact offers extensive affiliate onboarding tools, migration support, machine-learning-inspired partnership recommendations, and a large marketplace of thousands of affiliates to potentially partner with. 

MLM (Multi-Level Marketing)

Tapfiliate’s MLM features help you recruit more qualified affiliates referred to you by your existing affiliates. This expands your affiliate program and rewards existing affiliates with commissions on sub-affiliate performance as well. 

On the other hand, Impact doesn’t list any MLM capabilities explicitly on its website.  

Tracking and Reporting Analytics

Both Tapfiliate and Impact offer advanced tracking and reporting analytics to give brands the most actionable and detailed insights into partnership performance, customer behavior, and overall affiliate program success. Tapfiliate gives you immense customization potential with custom meta-data fields and filtration to narrow in on the metrics most important to your success. 

Languages and Currencies

Tapfiliate offers its affiliate dashboard in six different languages, and both Tapfiliate and Impact support multiple currencies for international affiliate programs. Impact shares compatibility with over 70 currencies, but doesn’t list multi-language options on its websites. 

Customization

Both Tapfiliate and Impact offer customization features like white-labeled pages and custom domains. However, it’s much cheaper to access these features with Tapfiliate’s Pro plan ($149/month) than Impact’s enterprise plan ($5,000/month). On top of that, Tapfiliate offers customizable onboarding fields for affiliate signups, as well as bonus incentives based on your chosen performance milestones. 

Automation

Tapfiliate’s Zapier integration offers immense automation potentials for your workflows. We also automated our customer referral program to help you promote your products even faster. Plus, our webhooks and automated emails make it easy to manage all aspects of your affiliate program. Impact automates partner payments and recruitment. 

Support

Both Tapfiliate and Impact prioritize high-quality customer support. Tapfiliate offers premium phone support and a dedicated account manager to enterprise customers, as well as a 24/7 live chat available to customers on all pricing plans. Impact has a 24/5 live chat function available to pro plan members 

FAQs about Impact

What’s Impact

Impact is a leading partnership management software that connects brands to a wide range of affiliate types while offering management features to strategize and optimize affiliate programs. 

What are the Limitations of Impact?

Impact’s most prominent limitation is its high price point, which, at a minimum $500 per month, isn’t accessible to newer businesses or brands just launching their affiliate program. 

Furthermore, the platform poses a significant learning curve that might make its comprehensive features difficult to harness for digital marketers. Some affiliates also find Impact’s approval process too slow, which hinders brands from promoting products as fast as they possibly can. 

Who are Impact’s Competitors?

• Tapfiliate: A flexible, affordable, and scalable affiliate management platform that offers management and optimization features for ecommerce, SaaS, dropshipping, and subscription-based businesses. 
• PartnerStack: An affiliate platform for mid-market B2B SaaS brands with lead sharing features, along with customer journey insights, flexible commissions, and fraud prevention. 
• Post Affiliate Pro:  A cloud-based affiliate tool that offers various tracking features like IP, pixel, S2S, and cookie tracking. 
• TUNE: An affiliate tool for financial, direct-to-consumer, and subscription-based companies with affiliate programs. 

It’s time to get more revenue out of your affiliate program. 👉  Try Tapfiliate’s 14-day free trial today!

It’s time to get more revenue out of your affiliate program. Try Tapfiliate’s 14-day free trial today!