impact.com, partners paid for customers, not clicks.

Who impact.com is

impact.com calls itself a partnership management platform: the software a brand uses to find affiliates, creators and other partners, give each one a contract and tracking links, count the customers they bring and pay them. The company behind it is Impact Tech, Inc., formerly Impact Radius, Inc., which gives its address in Santa Barbara, California, and lists offices in cities including New York, London, Berlin, Madrid, Milan, Stockholm, Cape Town, Singapore and Sydney. It reports more than 1,000 employees and more than a million active partnerships on its platform. Its products are Performance, for affiliate and partner programmes, Creator, for work with creators, and Advocate, for customer referrals.

A conversion can reach impact.com from a browser tag, from a batch file, from a mobile attribution provider, or from your own server through the Conversions endpoint of its Brand API. impact.com calls that last route server-to-server tracking and recommends it. Each conversion credited to a partner becomes an action, which stays pending until its locking date and can be modified or reversed through the API until then. impact.com pays partners in more than 70 currencies from the funds a brand deposits with it, and its Protect & Monitor tools look for invalid traffic such as bot clicks and cookie stuffing. It states an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate and a SOC 1 Type II report. Because a server can tell it what really happened, it is one of the affiliate and partner programme connectors of our Rewards & referrals module.

What it does in your platform

• Rewards & referrals

  Runs your affiliate and partner programme. Comparison sites, publishers and creators join it on impact.com, where each gets a contract and tracking links. The platform's server tells impact.com when a customer a partner sent has really qualified under your team's rule, and when a refund or a closed account should take the commission back. The reward here is a commission that impact.com pays to the partner from your programme's funds with it: it is not a credit in your ledger, and the customer receives nothing from it.

How the connection works

No impact.com code runs in the apps. The platform's server calls impact.com's Brand API at api.impact.com: the Conversions endpoint to report an event, and the Actions endpoint to read, change or reverse what a partner was credited with. Every call carries an access token's Account SID and Auth Token, which never leave the server.

1. A partner sends a visitor

   A comparison site in your programme links to you with its impact.com tracking link. impact.com records the click and adds a click ID to the address of your landing page, as the im_ref parameter. When the link leads to an app store, it runs through your mobile attribution provider's link, saved as the app's Download URL in impact.com, which carries the click ID with it.

2. The click ID is kept

   The platform stores the click ID against the new sign-up for the referral window in the partner's contract, typically 30 days, and only if the visitor agreed to tracking: impact.com's own guidance is to leave click IDs and customer IDs out for visitors who did not. For an install, the attribution provider matches it to the click and reports it to impact.com. Nothing is earned yet.

3. The account is verified

   When the customer passes KYC, the server posts to /Advertisers/{AccountSID}/Conversions with the CampaignId, the EventTypeId of your account-opened event, the EventDate, an OrderId of its own, the ClickId and, as CustomerId, the platform's random ID. impact.com answers with a QueuedUri, works out which partner the click belongs to and creates a pending action. No name, email address, card number or document is sent.

4. The first card payment settles

   Your team's rule might be a first card payment within 30 days. When the ledger settles one, the server reports a second conversion with the same CustomerId, and impact.com chains it to the first as a child action. The platform decides that the customer qualified; the partner's contract on impact.com decides what that is worth.

5. The commission is approved and paid

   The action stays PENDING until its LockingDate, then becomes APPROVED and the commission is final. On the clearing date impact.com takes the amount from your programme's funds and pays the partner. Your ledger pays nothing here. An Action Lifecycle postback tells the platform when an action is tracked, modified or reversed, and the platform reads the action back through the API before showing it in the backoffice.

6. A refund takes it back

   If the payment is refunded, or the account is closed as fraud, before the action locks, the server sends a DELETE to the Actions endpoint with the ActionId and a DispositionCode such as CONS_FRAUD. The action becomes REVERSED and the pending payout to the partner is cancelled. After the lock an action can no longer be changed, so the locking period is set with your refund window in mind.

Next to other providers

impact.com sits at the end of a chain the other modules run. KYC / AML confirms that the customer is a real, verified person, Fraud & risk checks the device and the account, and the Ledger settles the payment that makes them count, so a commission follows records your platform keeps, whatever a partner's traffic looks like. impact.com's Protect & Monitor adds its own view of the traffic before it reaches you. For app installs it has integration guides for AppsFlyer, Adjust, Branch and Singular, the mobile attribution connectors of the Analytics & monitoring module. Rewards for customers themselves, such as a refer-a-friend bonus or cashback, belong to the module's referral and loyalty connectors and are paid through the ledger.

impact.com is one of the module's affiliate and partner programme connectors, next to Awin, which describes itself as a global affiliate platform, PartnerStack, a partner ecosystem platform for B2B software companies, and Everflow, a partner marketing platform that also covers media buying. The rule for when a customer counts, the record of which click brought which platform ID, and every KYC and ledger record stay in your platform, so a move between them swaps a connector. What would be rebuilt is the programme itself: partners join the new tool and accept new contracts, tracking links are replaced, and event types and commission terms are set up again, while commissions already earned are settled in the old one.

When impact.com fits best

How we get you live

• The contract

  We help you get your impact.com account and contract in place. impact.com normally configures a programme's event types itself, so we agree them with its team at the start: one for a verified account and one for the first card payment, chained by customer ID, which impact.com sets up when the account is created. Commission terms, referral windows and locking periods are kept in impact.com; the rule for when a customer counts, and the countries and products the programme runs in, are kept in your backoffice.

• The data

  impact.com knows each customer only by the platform's random ID, sent as CustomerId, a field its own documentation describes as a non-PII identifier. The optional fields for a hashed email address, an IP address, a city and a postcode stay empty, and no payment amount is sent unless a contract pays on it. impact.com's privacy policy says its servers are in the United States and other countries where it does business, and that it uses the EU's Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers, so we record that with your team before launch.

• The keys

  We create an access token for the platform alone, scoped to the API categories it calls, with a separate token for each environment, as impact.com recommends. Its Account SID and Auth Token go into your platform's secrets, and a token can be reset or disabled from impact.com's settings at any time. impact.com's documentation describes no signature on its event postbacks, so the platform treats one as a prompt and confirms it by reading the action through the API.

• A full test run

  impact.com documents no separate sandbox. Each event type has a Test function that opens a tracked test visit to your landing page, and the conversions that follow appear on its Test Actions screen, which can take up to 30 minutes, for your team to approve or reject. We run the whole case against your staging platform first, from a partner's link to a reversal, then, as impact.com asks, at least one end-to-end test of every event type in production before your first real partner.