Since you discovered, recruited, and signed new partners to your partnerships program, it's time to assess your tracking configuration.
Tracking is a foundational part of the partnership life cycle. It connects your partner recruitment efforts with the actions of the partnership itself: the conversions, traffic, sales, and new audiences that you've enlisted partners to provide. If you can't track this data, you can't measure the value of a partnership, which ultimately blocks you from moving on to the next step of the life cycle.
Tracking refers to your chosen selection of solutions your program offers partners for their promotional efforts. impact.com uses tracking to determine both the sources of traffic coming to your website and which users convert through at least one of the following: JavaScript (via the Universal Tracking Tag), an application programming interface (API), or a shopping cart or mobile integration.
At a minimum, impact.com recommends tracking clicks, revenue, and conversion events to maintain a successful program. However, the likelihood of seeing desirable results significantly increases as you expand your tracking solution to include data like customer purchases driven by other channels, setting up unique promo codes for partners, tracking app installs and events, and otherwise adding more technical components to your program.
Depending on the way you track, the tracking process begins as early as when a partner joins your program and is ready to start driving traffic. This process is already configured from your onboarding sessions and is in place at launch.
impact.com tracks the entire conversion—from the time a user first clicks on a partner's= tracking link, the last click in the conversion (typically just before a purchase is made), and all clicks in between. Clicks generated from other media sources, like networks, are also tracked if you have the relevant feature set up. Since consumers may not always click and convert in a single session or on the same device, accurate cross-device tracking also helps you connect the dots so you know exactly which events lead to conversions.
The impact.com platform tracks and attributes an event to a partner in various ways; the type of tracking used often depends on the type of partner. For example, an influencer may not have the ability to use a tracking link on a certain social media platform, so they will opt to use a promo code instead.
When you first set up your partnerships program, you enabled at least one tracking method. That said, you can always revisit your tracking setup, learn more about reviewing your tracking setup.
Explore the following in-app guides, help articles, and infographics to supplement what you've learned above.
Help content
For additional help: Look for the blue ? button in the bottom-right corner of your impact.com Dashboard to live chat with a product specialist (or create a support ticket).