Marketplace Retail Startup Marketing Intermediate impact.com

Power up your customer acquisition: Build your own affiliate marketing program with Segment and impact.com

This recipe teaches you how to use Track, Page, and Identify events to quickly launch your affiliate program, so that you can discover and recruit new affiliate and influencer partners, automate contracts and payments based on the terms they set, and track performance all in one place.

Made by impact.com

Step 1. Configure your Segment calls.

For the purposes of this recipe, we're going to assume you've already set these up. If you need guidance on this, you'll https://segment.com/docs/connections/spec/

Step 2. Add impact.com as a Destination function so that your impact.com program receives events from Segment.

Login to the Segment App, head to the Destinations page, click on “Add Destination” and then search for “Impact Partnership Cloud” within the Destinations Catalog and confirm the Source you’d like to connect to.

To enable impact.com, you must provide your Account SID, Auth Token, and Campaign ID. You can obtain these values from your impact.com account or reach out to our support team.

Once you receive the token you can follow the steps on this page to turn on the connection within your Segment account.

Step 3. Configure your Segment events to align with impact.com requirements

impact.com requires the following:

Page events
Identify events
Track events
- Should have an event identifier and a customer identifier (userId). For e-commerce Track events, such as “Order Completed”, it should also contain a category, SKU, and item quantifier value.

An example Track call

analytics.track('Order Completed', {
  checkout_id: 'fksdjfsdjfisjf9sdfjsd9f',
  order_id: '50314b8e9bcf000000000000',
  affiliation: 'Google Store',
  total: 27.50,
  subtotal: 22.50,
  revenue: 25.00,
  shipping: 3,
  tax: 2,
  discount: 2.5,
  coupon: 'hasbros',
  currency: 'USD',
  products: [
    {
      product_id: '507f1f77bcf86cd799439011',
      sku: '45790-32',
      name: 'Monopoly: 3rd Edition',
      price: 19,
      quantity: 1,
      category: 'Games',
      url: 'https://www.example.com/product/path',
      image_url: 'https:///www.example.com/product/path.jpg'
    },
    {
      product_id: '505bd76785ebb509fc183733',
      sku: '46493-32',
      name: 'Uno Card Game',
      price: 3,
      quantity: 2,
      category: 'Games'
    }
  ]
});

impact.com passes a unique irclickid query string parameter into the landing page URL when redirecting the user through our tracking domains. The value associated with this parameter is used to perform attribution analysis.

If you're using a Segment JavaScript source on every page of your site, this value is automatically received from Segment (e.g. as part of context.page.url).

Step 4. Setup tracking settings and the event types on impact.com

Please read the general instructions here first.

Add your main website domain to Site Definition:

Tracking settings and event types on impact.com

Set your Default Landing Page URL, toggle on Program Tracking Template and add irclickid={clickid} as the querystring parameter to append. Finally, enter the potential Deep Linking URLs, especially when subdomains might be in-scope here.

Create a new event type call “Online Lead” and input “User Registered” for Codes:

Create a new event type call “Online Sale” and input “Order Completed” for Codes:

Step 5. Setup template terms on impact.com

In this example, the Track calls for User Registered and Order Completed will be used as conversion events on impact.com. First, navigate to Contracts > Template Terms to create a new Template Term.

We are naming this new Template Term “Segment Example” and selecting Online Lead (mapped to “User Registered” in Event Code from Step 4) as our first payable event. We have set a flat $10 for CPL.

Select “Add another Event Type” to configure the next payable event.

Select Online Sale from the dropdown menu, and select your desired payout % - we have chosen 15% in this example:

Step 6. Test events

To confirm that you’ve successfully and correctly set up the tracking integration, please follow the instructions on the End-to-End Testing guide here.

Testing helps ensure that actions are reported and attributed correctly. Since impact.com offers a variety of flexible, dynamic contracting options, there’s a chance human errors may slip through. By conducting end-to-end testing, you can ensure contracting rules are correctly configured so when real partners onboard, there are no surprises with calculating payouts and final reporting.

Step 7. Discover and Recruit partners

After configuring the connection between impact.com and Segment– you’re ready to identify and recruit perfectly aligned partners like affiliates, influencers, publishers, and more to your program.

To get started, select Discover from the menu.

From here, you can choose your own adventure to find the right partners for your brand:

Browse the curated collections of partners

Or, if you have a particular type of partner in mind, you can narrow down your search results with search filters like location, audience country, audience size, etc.

If a partner profile catches your eye, you can view their profile to learn more about their media properties, audience statistics, vertical niche, and more.

If you’re interested in learning more about them, you can email them directly from the impact.com platform. If they look like a good fit for your program, you can send them a proposal.

Step 8. View reports

Monitoring your program's performance is key to a successful program. With impact.com’s reporting functionality, you can analyze data reports in a variety of formats which help you keep track of important information and track success. The following reports are at your disposal:

The by partner report allows you to see a list of each of your performing partners and organize their performance by a variety of metrics. This report gives you a quick and seamless view of your high performing partners.
The by day report looks at your customer journey data by day, tracking clicks, actions and partner success in an easy to view graph so you can follow trends over time.
The by ad report allows you to track successes within your program by individual ad so that you have even more control over viewing user trends and marketing successes based on content you have provided for your partners.
The action listing report lists out every action your platform has hosted and allows you to organize this pertinent data by an incredible variety of metrics, including promo code, relationship time, customer status, and more.

Bonus: Create Your Own Reports

The impact.com Data Lab gives you the tools required to create powerful custom reports for your specific use case. The Data Lab creates visualizations that portray various data sets in different ways depending on the data you choose to include; it answers unique questions, piecing together strings of data that generally would not be put together in a report, and provides valuable and immediate insights.

Using the impact.com data lab allows you to create custom reports and create custom measures for your program success. For more information about our data lab please refer to our Data Lab help document.

Wrapping up…

In this recipe, we’ve taught you how to:

Ensure that the Segment Spec is configured and that you have setup the Identify, Track, and Page API calls
Add impact.com as a Destination function so that your impact.com program receives events from Segment
Configure your Segment events to align with impact.com requirements
Setup the event types on impact.com
Setup template terms on impact.com
Test events to confirm tracking and reporting are as setup as intended
Discover and Recruit partners
View reports

You are now ready to launch your affiliate program and have the ability to discover and recruit new affiliate partners, automate contracts and payments, and track performance all in one place!

Getting started is easy

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