Impact Radius, founded in 2008, and based in Santa Barbara, California. It is focused on the financial services, travel and hospitality, retail, where it has clients such as HP, American Greetings, Lands’ End. The enterprise, Impact Radius was started as a means to change the way advertisers manage media and performance partnerships. However, it should be stated that the network doesn’t focus merely on its merchants, but on the technology and platform as well, so as to help its merchants manage their own advertising programs. That said, the company has a mere 100 employees. It receives 95% of revenue from software, and 5% from services.
In 2013, things changed. Impact Radius gained market share after the fall of Google Affiliate Network. That wasn’t the only change for the company. In 2016, the company announced that it joined the Internet Advertising Bureau Australia as it takes another step towards boosting the company’s presence in Australia. Its move to open an office in Australia was a strategic move. It gave the company access to IAB’s market leading research, education and events. Plus, it connected the company to other IAB members, such as Facebook, Yahoo7, Google and Telstra.
Nonetheless, Impact Radius was an early entrant into the Multitouch Attribution (MTA) zone. The company offers a unified measurement approach that consists of both MTA as well as Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM). This approach is aimed to measure the bearing of offline and online media. Still, the platform centralizes reporting for all channels, runs predictive analytics and compares attribution models to analyse channel contribution to conversion. The 5IQ technology of Impact Radius helps advertisers and agency partners to gain unparalleled access to an ocean of new publishers with growth opportunities all over the world. The insights gained can then be used to with revenue growth, as well as efficiency of advertising budget, and return on advertisement spend. But, it claims same-day access to performance data and also provides advanced analytics consulting if needed. This, it does through its products of affiliate marketing suite, affiliate marketing platform, affiliate management, tag management, tracking and attribution, and affiliate solutions. But, clients select the approach they prefer.
Impact Radius uses a methodology of comparative modelling approach, which consists of both rule-based and algorithmic options. It uses hidden Markov Chains model, and other methods for MTA. Hidden Markov chains is model for randomly changing systems that assumes the Markov property; the future state depends only on the current state not on the events before it. In a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) the state changes are hidden (can’t be observed) but correlate with a variable that can be observed.
The edge Impact Radius has, is that it is primarily a performance marketing platform that employs a fraud intelligence database to help determine whether campaigns generate nonhuman impressions or clicks. It also emphasizes its ability to incorporate no media (e.g., macroeconomic, seasonality) and offline (e.g., call center logs) data into its MMM models.
You should, therefore, consider Impact Radius as a viable solution if, your marketing spend is heavily invested in digital display media, thereby making ad fraud and view ability critical components to measure campaign success, or of you have advanced analytics skills in-house or through agency partners and want a self-service platform that provides unified measurement options. Impact Radius also offers analytics services. And it was in fact, Gartner that recommended marketers to consider the Impact Radius solution if they are heavily invested in digital display media and want a self-service platform with unified measurement.
Garter, which listed Impact Radius as a representative vendor in its 2016 report, did cite that this company has the ability to provide same-day access to performance data and capture both online and offline media in conversion path analysis. The report also pointed to Impact Radius as beneficial advantage based on its roots in performance marketing and our incorporation of ad fraud technology as a key differentiator.
Other advantages of Impact Radius solution is that by automating critical marketing process and through real time delivery of visual reporting insights, the network is able to drive in revenue for a number of global companies such as Shutterstock, American Airlines, Wayfair and so on. It also helps its marketers to manage their Ad tags by themselves, without IT involvement and thus streamline workflow and decreases cost. Plus, its marketing team does a lot of campaign testing and optimization functionalities, thereby unlocking new revenue opportunities. In addition, its ad tags does not affect page load times and thus offers high conversion rates and better page load time. Its Tag management system also locates tags that impair site performance and those that does not comply with site requirements. Furthermore, publishers are able to manage all tags through their intuitive interface which includes chat, re-targeting, analytics, multivariate tag testing, JS queries etc. Not to mention, its advertising tags are functional and compatible with mobile websites as well. Plus, brands today constantly face the challenge of finding new distribution channels and marketing opportunities to witness a high return on investments.
