Impact Affiliate Platform
We are continuing our series on some of the most popular affiliate programs and networks with an article on the Impact affiliate platform.
In today’s article, we’re looking at how easy or difficult it is to become an Impact Radius affiliate, what brands you can promote, what commissions you can expect, and how you can get paid. Read on to find out more!
Impact Affiliate Network Review
What is Impact Radius anyway?
This is by far one of the biggest networks in the world right now. It boasts a variety of advertisers that you can conveniently recommend to your blog or website audience.
The nice thing about it is that these are companies pretty much everyone has heard of before at least once in their life. Impact is also one of the most popular platforms because the approval process isn’t too challenging and also doesn’t take too much time.
Joining the Impact Radius affiliate program
There is a very simple form that you have to fill out to find out whether you are eligible to become an Impact Radius affiliate or not. You will be asked to create a username and a password, as well as an account display name.
The rest of the information that the network asks you to provide is pretty straightforward and should be expected when joining any other platform — such as how you intend on promoting the products, whether you have a website, what type and amount of traffic you’re getting, and a variety of such other questions you need to provide answers to.
We have to note that before you will be able to start promoting the offers you come across on the Impact affiliate marketing platform, you will be asked to provide some type of tax information. If you are not based in the United States, you do not have to worry about anything because the process makes it easy for you to join anyway.
Once you are all done with the Impact affiliate sign-up stage, you’ll get access to the dashboard.
Then, you will be able to look for brands that you might be interested in promoting and individually apply to their affiliate programs.
Your application can get rejected for any number of reasons, but you do have the option of getting in touch with an Impact affiliate manager that can go into more detail about why you got rejected and what you can do about it.
So, while creating an account is very simple, each brand has an affiliate manager and since you have to apply for every program, it might take some time to receive your answer and get your approval.
What brands can you promote?
What makes Impact affiliate brands stand out from the crowd and also make this network really worth joining is that many of them are world-known.
For example, in the fashion niche, you have brands such as Banana Republic, Crocs, Adidas, GAP, KOHL’s, Levi’s, Marks & Spencer, Old Navy, and more.
In the beauty niche, you’ll come across a number of well-known names, such as Bobbi Brown, Biotherm, Armani Beauty, Burt’s Bees, Estee Lauder, La Roche-Posay, The Body Shop, or Urban Decay.
The same goes for a wide variety of other fields, so you can promote companies like Best Buy, BarkBox, Canva, Hello Fresh, KitchenAid, Lenovo, NordVPN, Logitech, and more.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to the category of products that you can recommend to your blog readers, and that’s what we like the most about this platform.
We’d also like to note that the dashboard is very easy to utilize, and you can create affiliate links in a matter of one second or less. That definitely eliminates some of the hassle involved in the Impact affiliate software or any other marketing platform you might want to try out.
The platform also gives you access to all of the stats you might want to check out in order to improve your performance.
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What commissions can you expect?
As is the case with other networks that we have reviewed in the past, the commissions and cookie lengths tend to vary a lot from one brand to the next.
Some of the best ones can go up to 80% of the value of the order that your audience places, as would be the case with Postmates, for example. Generally, you can expect commissions ranging from 3% to 20% and more.
So, while we can’t give you a straightforward answer to the question in the previous heading, we will note that most of the advertisers on Impact have pretty good commissions – at least better ones than what you might find on other platforms, especially Amazon Associates.
We’ll give you several examples in this sense. Fabletics pays you a $15 commission for every sale, Fossil Australia has a fixed 8% commission on all orders, and you can expect a $25 rate for Stitch Fix orders. Burt’s Bees has a fixed 10% commission on all qualifying orders, Odacite gives you 15%, but Too Faced pays their affiliates a rate of just 6%.
In other words, it all depends on the companies you want to recommend to your audience. Also, there is not an option of you making commissions even if your readers click on your affiliate link and then decide to buy something else — in that respect, Impact differs from the likes of Amazon Associates — unless your audience gets a different product from the same brand website, of course.
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Impact affiliate program payment terms
When it comes to Impact Radius affiliate marketing, the payout methods and terms matter quite a bit. But that’s to be expected for any other network, since there are some that will make it difficult for affiliates based in countries other than the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia to join or get their money.
You do not have to worry about anything if you become an Impact affiliate. First of all, the payment threshold is pretty low. While on many other networks, it’s $100, Impact Radius asks you to make $50 in commissions before being able to get paid.
Another aspect we would like to mention is that Impact Radius is now available in more than 80 countries, so you can choose whichever payout method works in your own country.
The three main ways you can withdraw your money are listed below:
- ACH
- International bank transfers
- Cheque
So, obviously, the downside is that you cannot get paid through PayPal, but if we were to add something with respect to that, it’s that PayPal actually has pretty hefty commissions. That said, you’re probably better off using the rest of the payment methods — and there’s always the option of you creating an account on Payoneer or similar services.
International bank transfers do have a drawback, though, in that the threshold of them is $100. For cheques, the threshold is $50, while for ACH it’s just $25, so even lower than what you might expect.
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Pros and cons to becoming an Impact affiliate
When it comes to the advantages, we’d like to note that this is one of the networks that we have come across where the signup process is super easy. You can get your answer in 24-48 hours and then you can apply to each affiliate program.
The tracking features are another reason to join this network because they allow you to see how you are progressing and what performance you actually have. The automatic payment processing is another pro.
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Unfortunately, there are also drawbacks to becoming an Impact affiliate, such as the fact that each brand manages its own affiliate program, so you can expect a lot of back and forth until you are approved, for example.
Another con that we came across and that was mostly expressed in other Impact reviews from actual affiliates is that the support system isn’t really worth writing home about. Although the company does strive toward offering good customer service, there are a lot of things to improve in that field.
To sweeten things toward the end of this section, we would like to note that the Impact affiliate dashboard is very user-friendly. You can categorize the affiliate programs as per the relationship you have with them (whether you’ve applied or not applied or are already considered pre-qualified to join them) and based on the payout model.
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Some brands pay per click, others pay per leads, and there are several that also pay per install or sale.
Something very important that we also have to add is that Impact Radius charges 2% of your earnings when you withdraw your money. In other words, while it is completely free to join, there is something that you will have to pay later down the line.
We couldn’t help noticing that some of the affiliate reviews that we stumbled upon note the fact that some of these people get their accounts suspended without receiving any explanation whatsoever.
Just to make things clear, if you go against any of the policies clearly specified in your initial agreement, such as promoting on shady websites, using spam comments on other websites, or anything else that can get you banned from the program, they will identify these procedures and will boot you out.
All in all, we’d say that joining the Impact Radius network is worth it and if you stick to the rules, you are not going to encounter any problem whatsoever. The variety of world-known brands that you can promote is perhaps the most significant advantage of all.
Some of the best affiliate programs that you can find on the platform are, at least in our opinion, some of the following:
- Skillshare
- SEMRush
- Constant Contact
- Bluehost
- Canva
- Pluralsight
- Sage
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How does Impact affiliate marketing compare to other platforms?
Since it is never a good idea to put all of your eggs in one basket, we thought we should look at several other affiliate programs or networks that we have reviewed in the past and see how they compare to Impact Radius.
CJ Affiliate
There are a lot of brands you can find on CJ Affiliate, too (previously known as Commission Junction).
But the thing that makes Impact and CJ Affiliate quite different is that once you are approved, you will not be forced to go through an individual approval process for each brand you want to become an affiliate of.
The payout threshold is also $50, which is something you will encounter on Impact, too. CJ Affiliate also doesn’t have a PayPal option available, either.
ShareASale
This is perhaps one of the largest and also best-known networks right now. There are over 15,000 brands on ShareASale, and lots of them are companies that you might have heard of before.
Neither Impact nor ShareASale have a PayPal option, so they are quite similar in that respect. ShareASale is much larger than Impact, though, and they also offer payout in multiple currencies. There’s also the option of conveniently talking to someone if you experience a technical issue, so we’d say that all in all, ShareASale does have better support compared to Impact.
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Amazon Associates
Anyone in the world can become an Amazon affiliate, so the process itself is very easy. Once you generate your first commissions, someone from the company will look at your website and see whether you fit the profile that the affiliate program has built over time.
The biggest drawback of becoming an Amazon affiliate, and one that you definitely do not have to handle with Impact, is the 24-hour cookie length. On top of that, the commissions aren’t worth writing home about, with most of the product categories generating you a rate of 3% to 5% tops.
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To conclude, we’d say that Impact Radius is better than Amazon Associates in every possible way, even considering the drawbacks that we have previously mentioned in the section above — such as the fact that you have to be individually approved by each brand.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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