Optimize is a collection of reports aimed at providing insights about your online marketing channels. These reports can help identify the value of partners throughout the purchase journey, view your high lifetime value customers, and benchmark your partnership program against other channels. Examples like Paid Search or Display channels are benchmarked by tracking any channel clicks where a partner is involved in the customer journey, and if that journey ends in a conversion.
Optimize can report on an action whenever a partner is included in the sales funnel, tracking what they do between when they, for example, click on a partner's link and when they make a purchase on your website.
Optimize can track consumer clicks from multiple channels, giving you more knowledge to make more informed decisions.
With Optimize, you are provided with 3 major data sets, as well as all of the information obtainable from the individual Optimize reports themselves. These data sets include the following:
Partners' engagement with customers throughout the entire journey
Partners' interaction with each other through the customer journey
The total value driven by each partnership
Set up Optimize
This feature is only available with the Optimize add-on. Click here to get the add-on!When you opt-in to use Optimize, impact.com needs to gather the necessary information to configure Optimize.
There are three methods to gather information when configuring Optimize:
Optimize Discovery - Template
Google Analytics Source/Medium Report
Universal Tracking Tag
You should receive a discovery form from your CSM to configure channels, rules, and credit groups. Refer to the Optimize discovery form reference below to learn more about the pieces of information you will be asked to return to your CSM.
The Optimize discovery form will ask you to provide details about the various channels you currently use in your marketing efforts by requesting the following information:
Discovery Form Column | Description |
|---|---|
Channel Name | What you want the channel to be called. This name is purely for reporting purposes. |
Channel Type | What kind of marketing channel is used. Examples of marketing channels include:
|
Media Name | Which vendor supplies the marketing channel (e.g., Google SEO). |
Sample Landing Page URL/Referring URL | Provide sample URLs that show how you want to identify media for that row's channel and media name. If you want to supply more than one sample URL, include it on a new row and set the Channel Name, Channel Type, and Media Name to the same values. For any traffic sources that do not use tracking parameters (e.g., Organic Search), list the referring domain instead of the landing page URL. |
Credit Group | Select whether the channel is Preferred, Standard, or Non-Preferred for crediting. Preferred channels will be credited for driving an action instead of the Affiliate Channel (aka impact.com Partners) when that channel participated in the customer journey. Standard channels will be credited for driving an action instead of the Affiliate Channel (aka impact.com Partners) when that channel participated in the customer journey if no Preferred channels participated. Non-Preferred channels will not be credited for driving action (instead of a Partner), regardless of whether they participated in the customer journey. |
Credit Group Description | This will automatically fill with a description of the credit group you selected in the previous column. |
To access sufficient data from Optimize, you should send specific data points to impact.com. There are specific formats for each of these data points depending on the integration and will be provided during the Optimize onboarding process. Data points include the following:
Customer Status
CustomerId to track users across multiple devices, as well as repeat purchases
Discount
Product Catalog Manufacturing Cost (to calculate margins)
The most important one of these data points, is the Manufacturing Cost of your product catalog. To ensure that partners cannot see margin data, be sure that the column in your product catalog that contains Manufacturing Cost is named "Manufacturing Cost." impact.com will automatically hide this column from any partners that view your catalog.
Reach out to your CSM or contact support if you are not already passing these data points to impact.com.
Tracking other channels: To see data from your other marketing channels in Optimize, you need to be using our Universal Tracking Tag (UTT). To learn more about UTT, check out our datasheet or reach out to your CSM. If you are using UTT but are not seeing data from other channels, contact support.
Affiliate network cost importing: If you are working with an affiliate network and want to see that cost included in Optimize, contact support.