Impact Radius Launches Dynamic Payouts in Move Away from Last Click

Santa Barbara-based performance marketing company Impact Radius has today (March 6) announced the launch of ‘Dynamic Payouts’, an update that allows its clients to designate payouts in line with the specific value they want partners to drive.

The update comes as content partners, especially influencer marketers, are taking off in affiliate marketing, driving substantially more revenue within these partnerships than in previous years. As a result, there is a demand among advertisers to structure different types of deals from how ‘traditional’ affiliates – such as voucher and cashback – are compensated.

With Dynamic Payouts, advertisers using the platform will now be able to compensate content partners who played ‘top-of-funnel’ roles in a consumers’ purchase decisions – but have not actually closed a sale – where previously they wouldn’t have received credit for their role in a conversion at all.

The update to the Insertion Contracting capability of Impact Radius’ Partner Manager platform – where clients can manage all marketing relationships – will allow advertisers to set payouts based on more than 100 factors, such as customer status, margin, or the partner’s position in the conversion path, “which, in turn, incentivises partners to drive higher-value sales”, says the company.

“What ‘value’ means for one brand is often different from what it means for another,” said Todd Crawford, co-founder & VP of strategic initiatives at Impact Radius.

Crawford adds that Dynamic Payouts allows advertisers to pay all partners in “the spirit of performance-based relationships”, compensating them in a “fair and transparent” way, while maximising value to their brand.

Opening doors

“There is a huge opportunity in the affiliate space to grow relationships with influencers, and this release will help us set up rules to ensure top of funnel partners are paid out correctly and fairly,” said Cori Pivar, associate director of Rise Interactive, whose clients on the Impact Radius platform include Atkins, eFollett, Harry’s and RCN.

“I think this release is going to change the affiliate industry, opening the door to traditional influencers who shy away from affiliate marketing because of the traditional last click model,” added Pivar.  

Last year, a similar update came from Dutch affiliate network TradeTracker, which announced the launch of Real Attribution, a product allowing its clients the choice to operate on a variety of attribution models. Allowing advertisers to automatically remunerate “multiple publishers and touch-points per transaction” within the affiliate channel, this also came as a result of an increasing demand among advertisers within the affiliate industry to move away from a market dominated by last click.

Today’s announcement by a leading company in the affiliate space is some early evidence that we may be beginning to see the fall of the “last click principle”, as predicted by CEO of Semcasting, Ray Kingman to PerformanceIN.

“In 2018, emerging forms of deterministic attribution, especially as it is applied to multi-channel marketing, will be able to directly inform optimisation and provide lift in ways that up until now could only be forecasted or measured in macroeconomic terms,” said Kingman.  

“A person’s digital ID applied to search, target-ready display, social, direct mail and to the point of sale completes the circle. We believe that the charade of last-click attribution will come to an end and that deterministic channel attribution will be a standard component of ad tech.”