Building a report is easy.  Building the right report is another story.

Everyday, Impact Radius tracks billions of bits of data for our customers and we’ve created hundreds of reports to help make sense of it all.

Some users are interested in knowing the latest performance trends. Others want to see detailed results.  We understand the different roles users play when interacting with our system so we try to match the most appropriate reports for each unique role.

Some of our most popular reports include:

• Corporate Dashboard: a unified view of your entire campaign
• Detailed Action Listing: drill down of individual actions
• Traffic Performance: summary and detailed views of online performance by KPIs
• Finance Overview: a snapshot of your financial situation
• Call Performance: summary and detailed views of call performance by KPIs

And now we’re going a few steps further. With our latest release, the Impact Radius reporting module allows users to better customize the reporting function to their specific needs. Users control which reports are displayed in their toolbar, selecting the information most useful to them – see only what you want, when you want.

Impact Radius aims to meet all your reporting needs. Don’t see a particular report? Be sure to speak with our support team to help you locate or build* what you’re looking for.

Helpful Features
Take advantage of these helpful features available for all reports:

Customize reports by date range and desired columns

Share results by exporting reports in PDF, CSV, and Excel formats

Save time with scheduled reports delivered electronically

Save custom settings for future use

For more details, check out the updated “Help” section in your account or start a live chat with our Support Team.

*Additional fees may apply for certain reports.

When should you shop for “affiliate” or “performance marketing” technology? Three scenarios suggest a review of the latest options:

1. You don’t currently have technology in place and you need it.
   Pretty obvious, right? In this case, you know you’re in the market for a technology provider.
2. You have technology but it no longer fits your needs and you’re ready to upgrade. 
   You’re committed to the channel but your situation has changed from when you first built or bought your existing technology. You need something different from what you’re using.
3. You already have it; it doesn’t do what you need and you’re ready to shut the channel down.
   “Huh? This makes no sense,” you say. “Why look to buy when you’re planning to close a program?”
   The simple answer: to avoid mistaking potential technology deficiencies for a flawed marketing program.

Brands considering a shift away from performance marketing are typically challenging the value of the channel’s referrals. Objections raised include:

“We’d be getting all of those sales anyway.”
“After paying the affiliate, the network and our staff, we’re paying too much.”
“Referred sales are always associated with discounts. Big discounts.”
“We’re not seeing enough new customers.”

And the strongest arguments against retaining an established program tend to surface when it’s unclear if existing technology can adapt to significant shifts in strategy.

Today’s marketers should change (but not necessarily end) their approach to managing performance-based referral partners. With the digital landscape ever changing—there are few benefits to having static terms (based on outdated “best practices”) with partners. The same issue arises with implementations of 10-year old technology. In performance marketing, the status quo often represents a way of doing business premised on antiquated models.

The best reason to shop technology is to explore what new product features or updated capabilities will address your current needs. Taking a fresh look at the latest features and products reorients your thinking. Pain points that once seemed impossible to fix (e.g. controlling coupons, understanding the quality of results from an individual referrer) now actually have solutions.

At Impact Radius – we’ve produced a guide designed to provide a fresh perspective to prospective buyers through the process of comparing and assessing the current technology solutions available to marketers.

Get your free download here!

Nobody enjoys paying bills. Make your life easier with our financial clearinghouse. We take care of the tedious tasks so you can focus on what’s important – making money!

Our financial module is fully integrated with our tracking and electronic insertion order systems. Once you determine how you reward your partners, we take care of the rest. Simply fund your account and Impact Radius will automatically disburse payments to all partners. You never have to worry about missing a payment again!

Marketing and finance groups save days each month by fully automating their payment processes. What’s more, we’ve just released some great enhancements to make your life easier.

Did you know about the following helpful functions?

• Balance forecast helps you plan ahead by showing your expected balance change over the next 30 days.
• Monthly electronic invoices shows you exactly what’s passed through your account.
• Automatic delivery sends statements and invoices to who you want, when you want.
• Customize a preset threshold so your account never falls below a certain balance. Balance notifications keep you aware of changes.
• All financial transactions and partner invoices remain stored for you to download at your convenience.
• (For VAT countries) taxes are calculated for applicable payments and we send recipient invoices directly to your partners.

Want to leverage these and more functions? Access the “Finance” feature in the top left corner of your profile.

Spend Minutes, Save Hours
We suggest spending several minutes to review the following areas. It will literally save you hours!

1. Review Invoice Settings Ensure monthly invoices are prepared according to finance requirements and are sent to the appropriate party.

2. Establish Automatic Payments Never miss a payment and give your partners confidence in your program. Watch this short video for more details.

3. Schedule Reports Customize the report you need and have it automatically delivered on your schedule.

Need assistance? Check out the “Help” section in your account or start a “Live Chat” with our Support Team.

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a defined method for software applications to communicate with each other. Impact Radius is excited to release a new REST API protocol to help customers streamline and automate tasks.

Consider some of these time-saving REST API applications.

Advertisers:

• Upload transactions from back-office systems in real time, like sales from your call center.
• When unique events occur such as the completion of a hotel stay, automatically approve conversions and credit your partners.
• Link your e-commerce system to submit returns without ever having to log in.

Media Partners:

• Get your latest approved campaign details to keep your promotions fresh and accurate.
• Download and build your own promotional links (even deeplinks) to launch new ads in seconds.
• Stay up-to-date on performance and earnings by receiving live data.

We’ve already seen customers make use of this powerful tool in creative ways. Start unleashing the power of the API today!

To Get Started

1. Sign into your account and access the “Technical Settings” menu in the top-right corner.

2. Click on the “API Access” tab to access your account ID and authentication token.

3. Access the Dev Portal for full documentation and ideas for using the API.

Need assistance? Check out the “Help” section in your account or start a “Live Chat” with our Support Team.

On Tuesday, Feb 7th, Impact Radius co-founder Todd Crawford is speaking at the Online Marketing Summit to share some expert coupon strategies for eCommerce companies. Here are some highlights of the key action items he’s recommending.

More and more you hear eCommerce brands debating the pros and cons of partnering with coupon and deal sites.  And, for that matter, the merits of discounting altogether. The concerns are understandable, especially with the insatiable demand for more and more offers coming from the consumer base.

As an eCommerce brand, the choice of whether to play in the coupon space is ultimately one of mitigating risks and maximizing opportunities. So, how do the brands enjoying the success of a solid coupon strategy do it?

Action Item #1 – Try alternatives to site-wide discounts

It’s well known that “Free Shipping” promotions are a popular alternative to percentage-off discounts.  What are some of the other offers popular with consumers?

• Deal of the Day – these short-lived promotions limit your exposure
• Bundling & Gifts with Purchase – can help you increase your average order value
• Specially Priced Items with Limited Quantities – lets you test with control

Action Item #2 – Negotiate for premium placement

To understand the true potential of partnering with deal sites you need to get the best placement. Use a limited-time, high-value offer (this week only take an additional 5% off) to place your brand front and center.

Action Items #3 – Build partner loyalty with exclusive offers and vanity codes

Coupon sites are in constant competition to attract the loyalty of deal-seeking consumers. Exclusive offers will typically increase traffic.  Vanity promo codes increase conversions tracked.  The combination creates a measurable lift in payouts – which is foundational to achieving top-of-mind status with your partners.

To learn more about these action items and other ways to leverage coupons and promo codes – attend Todd’s session at OMS12 or drop us a note.

The Big Lie: We Must Accept the Breakage

Failure to attribute every referred action is a big issue for performance marketers. The numbers whispered in private conversations cite between 5-30% lost. That’s a big, expensive problem. But a bigger problem is that somewhere along the line we’ve all grown to accept the breakage and believe that technology deficiencies can’t be overcome. The message “this-is-as-good-as-it-gets” is not only a big problem: it’s a big lie.

Tracking Breakage: A Performance Marketing Fact-Of-Life.

None of us, not even the advertisers that purportedly receive “free” leads or sales, benefit from unattributed conversions.  So why, if sub-standard tracking technology hurts everyone, have the third-party tracking solution providers failed to better their products? What possible arguments have quieted what should be loud, insistent demands for improvement? Given their typical fee structures, the biggest providers of tracking technology have an incentive to track better: they, along with the referral partiers, would collect more money. Instead, the tracking solutions rarely acknowledge the issue.

Even by conservative estimates, the dollar value of uncredited transactions (and associated fees) is staggering. Yet somehow there’s a common belief that tracking breakage is simply a performance marketing fact-of-life. Acceptance is so prevalent that people talk little about tracking.  It’s not glamorous or exciting, but the technology is foundational to the money-making.

Maybe getting credit for 5-10% fewer of referred conversions is just not enough to cause a revolt? Or maybe the networks and other third-party solutions responsible for tracking think the cost of the fix outweighs the benefits? Whatever the reason–Impact Radius thought the “business-as-usual” approach to tracking was unacceptable. We challenged ourselves to fix tracking performance and, as a result, have made significant improvements. So, now when someone else captures some, but not all, of the total referrals sent by a partner, we *know* that tracking solution is incomplete. We don’t believe the big tracking lie.  Neither should you.

Interested in learning more about Impact Radius’ tracking advantage? Drop us a note and we’d be more than happy to show you.

In the summary of our #2012Marketing Challenges Series, we referenced our plans to post solutions for each of the topics listed in the series.  We’re pleased to announce the publication of our 2012 Marketing Solutions e-booklet. It’s available for free from our resources page.

The advice and action items for each of the 12 topics were developed in collaboration with a group of guest authors (listed below) — and we’d like to thank them all for their contributions!

We’d also love to hear any additional tips or advice from the community. If you have a key action item to help your fellow marketer, please post a comment and share.

Learn more about our awesome guest authors:

• Adam Viener @adamviener
• Shawn Rorick on LinkedIn
• Matt Hunter @matthunter
• Tricia Meyer @sunshinetricia
• Dylan Touhey @onenetmarketing
• Geno Prussakov @ePrussakov
• Chris Kramer @chrismkramer
• Stephanie Lichtenstein @microsteph

I’ve spent over 25 years in managerial roles and learned early in my career to ask anyone presenting me with a problem or issue to also recommend a solution or next steps. Otherwise, every problem becomes my problem. And that scenario quickly cripples organizational effectiveness.

After a while, this rule becomes part of the team’s culture. So, when we conceived of the “#2012Marketing Challenges” series, we planned to include a “solutions” piece right from the start.

Another fundamental management lesson relates to making decisions based on the recommendations of others. My choices are usually better when I understand the problem before picking a best course of action. Don’t jump to conclusions without having all relevant information. It’s obvious, right? Unfortunately, in our haste to be efficient and trust our team, it’s easy to short-cut the decision-making process.

Plus, the decision maker can’t always afford the time to become a subject matter expert. We must focus our knowledge on either a “broad and shallow” or a “narrow and deep” understanding. Ideally, the information we’re missing is balanced by the rest of the team.

With the busy executive in mind (and to provide a basis for our #2012Marketing Solutions), here’s a summary of the 12 challenges we’ve covered in the series.  Each references the more in-depth articles in case you want to dive deeper into the specific issue listed.

Challenges List

	Technology		Budget
	Experience		Media

	Challenge Topic	Opportunity Trend	Required Resources				Projected ROI
1	Mobile
2	Display
3	Convergence of Traditional & Online
4	Deal & Coupons
5	Privacy vs Personalization
6	Digital Tools
7	Data Management
8	Attribution Reporting
9	Social Media
10	Executing a 3-Screen Strategy
11	Prioritization
12	Emerging Media

This is our 12th and final post in our 2012 Marketing Challenges Series. To read the series from the beginning click here.

By 2016, Forrester predicts that online advertising spend will overtake TV. Advertisers will spend almost $77 billion online, comprising 35% of overall ad spending.

And with the next evolution of digital channels such as Microsoft’s Kinect, Apple’s iAD, and social gaming platforms such as Zygna taking the centre stage, marketers will have to try a little harder than a QR code, a mobile website, or a social media web 2.0 campaign to keep up in the digital age. The emerging media platforms are racing to amaze their customers with innovative and novel experiences. And marketing has to keep pace.

Strap yourself in, because 2012 is really a point of rapid transformation—and new emerging media opportunities will make even the most successful traditional campaigns such as the Old Spice Man look like flat, boring talking heads of the past.

Here are the challenges of emerging media flying towards us in 2012.

Emerging media looks fun . . . but can smaller brands play?
There’s no denying that emerging platforms such as the Kinect offer really, powerful ways to capture the hearts and minds of customers. The famous Chevrolet Volt campaign, for example, created a virtual test drive for their new car, allowing customers to physically explore and engage with their new product using their bodies and voice on the Kinect. A 30-second wide-angle shot of a car speeding in the desert just doesn’t compare to a car commercial you can drive yourself.

Good for Chevrolet, but can smaller budgets keep up in these emerging media channels?

An even bigger challenge is consumer expectation. Consumers want to experience new things with digital technology. Advertising has to capture attention, but our methods are slow to catch up. Is an old banner ad enough to catch the eye of your audience? Starbucks didn’t think so and went beyond the display ad, creating a user-centered experience that involved touching and personalization.

Is it all just about brand?
Or can performance marketers also see a response in emerging media?

Consider in-game advertising – the largest revenue driver for most game publishers. Interstitial video and IAB banner placements load between levels or during game play in addition to lead generation offers.

Response rates for around-game ads are generally quite low which makes them a primary vehicle for brand advertisers. At $2 CPM you can buy a lot of cheap targeted inventory but don’t expect the click through traffic to rival any of your other channels.

Yet branding, as this earlier Impact Radius Marketing Challenge post shows, does play a critical role in driving direct response. Our customers are influenced by a combination of channels and marketing events. For that reason, the challenge is for performance marketers to better test how exactly these new emerging opportunities can be added to the marketing mix.

It’s not just all fun and games
According to a recent research study by KN Dimestore and SocialVibe, 90 percent of users “pay active attention to the brand message when interacting with incentivized engagements, and brand perception rises an average of 38 percent after completing the engagement.”

Users exposed to an incentivized advertisement or video inside a social gaming environment are 161% more likely to visit the brand’s website and 36% more likely to shop for the brand at the store location after the engagement. This response rate is profound when compared to other incentivized advertising practices such as online surveys offer sites and cash-back eCommerce programs.

According to Radium One (a demand side ad platform anchored in social gaming) in-game videos have a 99% view rate when linked with a social currency. And 70% of users will conclude a full video view inside a social game with post-view interaction rate as high as 25%.

Alternatively, Kiip has introduced a players rewarding system of advertising, showing offers to players after attaining gaming milestones. By strategically timing the presentation of the offer, CEO Brian Wong claims click-through rates have reached as high as 70%! In-game social advertising is incredibly effective.

Social Games
Social gaming is proving incredibly effective for both direct response and brand marketers.

Source: Business Insider

Just as companies such as Zynga and Rovio have taken the market by storm, traditonal gaming players are taking notice. Large console game developers like Electronic Arts and Xbox are re-designing their entire publishing strategies to become more social with direct integration with Facebook, Twitter and the social graph.

The challenge? How to track and analyze response rates (conversions) from these channels? Do we need to update our analytics? It took us long enough to start measuring social media. Emerging media like social games are too important to not properly track and analyze.

Mobile — get ready to profit
A recent study showed that 75% of people would rather leave their wallet at home rather than be without their mobile phone (see our earlier post on mobile marketing). Mobile is becoming the central access point into the minds and hearts of consumers.

By the end of 2011, eMarketer predicts that mobile ad spending will reach about $1.23 billion. Impressive considering that marketers only spent $777 million on mobile in 2010.
Headed our way: break-neck mobile adoption with revenues projected at about $24 billion by 2012.

There is no doubt that the revenue generated by mobile is an enormous emerging opportunity. The challenge is whether marketers are ready to properly track and optimize it.

Marketing . . .at the speed of innovation
Our technology is enabling us to do what we couldn’t do before, to experience media with a personal connection in fun and meaningful ways.

Emerging digital media is not only killing TV advertising. It is killing anything that looks, feels, or sells like traditional broadcast media. Consumers are just not going to be blown away by a digital print ad or run to YouTube to watch a funny 30-second spot. These tactics will have some success in 2012, but they are showing their age and showing that they come from a different media generation.

Your challenge for 2012 is to do an honest evaluation. Ask yourself: who is our target customer and how do they consume media? is our marketing tapping into the possibility of technology? Or are we trying to stuff old, tired sales messages into bright new experiences?

2012 isn’t just another year
We are marketers in a different world.

So what does the market want from us?

What are consumers expecting?

What can we do to amaze our audiences?

Digital marketing needs the attention of our audience—so what will we do in 2012 to earn it?

Emerging Media Solutions Coming Soon
Those are the challenges we at Impact Radius are monitoring when it comes to emerging media. Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay tuned for our solutions report designed to help you better understand emerging media as well as other digital marketing challenges predicted for 2012.

Impact Radius offers robust multi-channel reporting solutions to help you analyze the performance of your different marketing channels in an increasingly complex purchase path. If you just want some free advice, message us on Twitter or drop us a note at contactus@impactradius.com.

Earlier this fall, at Digital World Expo, we conducted an informal survey asking marketers about their biggest challenges. Nearly everyone described a common scenario: Managing their many priorities with too few resources. Getting it all done with less. Less budget. Less headcount. Less time.

Whether or not marketers actually need to squeeze more from their budgets, staff or daily schedule, the perception is getting it all done is an increasingly difficult goal. Why? What’s changed in recent years to challenge marketers with the fairly straight-forward goal of generating leads and closing sales?

In this post, we’ll look at how the quantity and complexity of data, the increasing number of channels and the growing choice of solution providers make the pursuit of marketing effectiveness a frustrating endeavor.

For earlier posts in our 2012 Marketing Challenges series, click here.

A Matter of Time Management?

With best-selling books like David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” advocating a better methodology for productivity, a marketer could easily conclude the difficulties of planning and executing direct response campaigns is simply poor time management. If we had a better system, were better organized or more productive we would perform better. Perhaps. It’s important in designing a solution to a problem, however, to have an accurate diagnosis. Otherwise, we end up trying harder instead of working smarter.

In the course of this blog series, we’ve described several common occurrences in today’s marketing landscape.  In particular, coping with the amount of data introduces a variety of new challenges that, left unmanaged, will slow down the best of marketers. No amount of personal productivity will overcome true information overload.

Data doesn’t equal confidence
A recent eMarketer survey showed that 71% of CMOs felt unprepared to leverage the large amounts of data that continue to flood the online marketing space.

In the planning process, marketers are left wondering: which of the many choices available will lead to the best possible outcomes?

Part of the problem is simply the mass of data we’re expected to analyze—all coming from different sources and telling us different stories. As one marketing executive put it, “Analytics are a key driver to decision making, but we need automation to save manpower cost.”

In 2012, the challenge isn’t to develop more analytical innovation. Instead, we need to better integrate and use the technology and data we already have.

Where to put the budget?
Budget is controlled at the top levels and sometimes allocation isn’t properly aligned with our goals and objectives. For example, during a campaign we may discover a need to increase brand awareness. The greatest opportunities may be increasing ad spend in social media or mobile. But, from siloed data reports, these same channels don’t show the investment directly driving sales revenue. And so, moving spend away from search or email proves a difficult argument.

A marketing channel’s performance is measured by the revenue metric.  So choices made within budgeting processes may lead to constraints in actual performance.

How are channels interacting?
You may be collecting plenty of data, but are you clearly and quickly determining how the channels are interacting?  How does PR, Email, and Paid Media compare to your performance-based partnerships?  (See our previous post about consolidating the digital marketing toolset for further discussion of this challenge).

Our intention is to integrate different tactics, but achieving multi-channel marketing effectiveness is tested by our organizational structures. Often we plan and execute in silos. A respondent to a recent Forrester survey summed this up:  “We work on different projects in silos. SEO works on SEO, PPC on PPC, banner on banner, print on print. We rarely exchange knowledge. IT slows things down because it has different company priorities like phone systems, corporate e‐mail, CRM management.”

Marketing versus tech capabilities
Marketing and technology now have to work together. But managing campaigns isn’t the only job of IT. This means that marketing initiatives often have to compete against other business initiatives.

IT backlogs create delays in time sensitive campaigns. And our commitment to tracking every lead and tweaking campaigns in real-time creates a reliance on our IT departments. As one marketing manager puts it, “Everyone wants fully integrated programs that manage everyday activities easier. It is also much more convenient when you can access information yourself instead of going through a busy IT professional.”

This challenge is actually wide-spread, as a director points out in the Forrester survey mentioned above, “Marketing in my company is still functioning very manually across all channels. Hence we need technology for improved workflow. Out IT department is notorious for overpromising and underdelivering. Currently it is held to no work standards by upper management.”

Plus, while real-time campaigns demand fast, agile movement as we are also challenged with integrating beyond the marketing department. As the director of marketing communications for a large consumer brand put it, “Marketing lacks direction and integration across the departmental, enterprise, and supplier ecosystem. As a result, we recreate work, are slow to respond, and make our job harder than it needs to be.”

Even in our own marketing (Impact Radius), we sometimes struggle to keep up with our inbound marketing agency, One Net Marketing.  Digital marketing agencies can move very quickly, but between internal feedback, approval processes and trying to juggle between client requests, product development, attending conferences, writing blog posts, and managing internal tasks–taking a marketing campaign from planning to execution is never as fast or as direct as you’d like.

From promise to reality
The underlying theme here seems to be that while marketers are adept at planning and executing campaigns across individual channels, we still are struggling to create a unified view of customer interactions.

We have granular data. We have technological ability. We have fast, agile teams and know that we can use a variety of different channels to reach our marketing goals. But at the end of the day, we still struggle to tie it all together—in both planning and execution.

What is your biggest challenge when it comes to planning and executing multi-channel campaigns?

Planning and Execution Solutions Coming Soon
Those are the challenges we at Impact Radius are monitoring when it comes to balancing the time crunch. Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay tuned for our solutions report designed to help you better understand planning and execution as well as other digital marketing challenges predicted for 2012.

Impact Radius offers robust multi-channel tracking solutions to help you analyze the performance of your different marketing channels in an increasingly complex purchase path. If you just want some free advice, message us on Twitter or drop us a note at contactus@impactradius.com.