How impact.com's tracking links carry a click from your partner's site to your checkout — and how Shared ID lets partners label their own traffic so you both know exactly what's working.
Think of a tracking link as a name tag pinned to every click. When someone clicks a partner's link and lands on your site, impact.com quietly records who sent them. If that visitor buys something, the sale gets credited to the right partner and the commission is calculated automatically. Without the tracking link, a sale just looks like any other visitor walking in off the street — you'd have no idea a partner was responsible.
Shared ID is a smaller name tag clipped onto the bigger one. Imagine a magazine publisher who promotes you in a newsletter, in three different articles, and in a sidebar banner. All of that traffic comes through the same partner, so by default it all lands in one bucket. Shared ID lets the publisher write a short label onto each link — say newsletter-june or review-article — so the traffic arrives pre-sorted. You see it in your reports; they see it in theirs. Same data, two views.
Most programme managers obsess over which partners drive revenue, and rightly so. But the partner level is often too coarse to act on. A content publisher might send you a thousand clicks a month, half of which convert beautifully and half of which never buy. If you only see the partner total, those two very different streams blur into one mediocre average — and you might cut a partner who actually has one outstanding placement hiding inside a pile of weak ones.
Shared ID is what turns a flat number into a story. When a partner tags their placements, you can finally answer questions like "is it the product reviews or the coupon page that drives sales?" That tells you where to negotiate a better rate, which content to ask for more of, and which placements are quietly wasting everyone's time. It also builds trust: partners who can prove which of their pages convert tend to invest more in the relationship.
In the impact.com dashboard, the Shared ID surfaces as a column you can add to action and performance reports. Build a saved report grouped by partner and then by Shared ID, and you'll get a clean breakdown of every labelled placement. Sort by conversion rate rather than raw clicks — a placement with 40 clicks and 10 sales is far more interesting than one with 4,000 clicks and 12 sales.
Watch for partners who send plenty of clicks but never populate Shared ID; that's a coaching opportunity, not a red flag. And keep an eye on Shared IDs that suddenly spike, since that often signals a partner has featured you in a new placement worth rewarding. Export a month of Shared ID data into a spreadsheet now and then to spot patterns the dashboard's default view hides.
| Use Shared ID when… | Skip it when… |
|---|---|
| A partner runs multiple placements and you want to compare them. | A partner has a single placement — the partner total already tells you everything. |
| You're negotiating commissions and need placement-level proof. | You haven't yet confirmed your conversion tag passes the value through. |
| A publisher wants their own granular reporting to optimise content. | The added labels would only create noise no one will ever analyse. |
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