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Optimize Startup Guide

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.

Main features

  • 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.

Optimize report data

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!
Step 1: Complete the Optimize discovery process

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.

Optimize discovery form reference

The Optimize discovery form is used to set up your Optimize solution and will ask you to provide details about the various channels you currently use in your marketing efforts by requesting the information below. Any future updates to your solution can be done in-app; you will not need to fill out another discovery form.

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:

  • Email

  • Paid Search

  • Organic Search

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. Learn more about the credit groups.

Partners managed via impact.com are configured to the Preferred credit group by default; if you are using advanced contracting credit groups or you are not sure, please reach out to support for assistance.

Credit Group Description

This will automatically fill with a description of the credit group you selected in the previous column.

Step 2: Submit your unique Optimize data points

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)

    • 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.

Step 3: Access the Optimize reports

Additional Optimize information

  • 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.

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