Impact.com: Forging a new era of business growth through partnerships

Business partnerships come in all shapes and forms: from affiliate and influencer marketing, to SaaS providers and strategic B2B alliances. For all parties to be successful and drive business growth through a partnership, they must have a way to manage, track, and measure the incremental value their partners provide throughout their relationship. That’s why impact.com has developed technology that makes it easy for businesses to create, manage, and scale an ecosystem of partnerships with the brands and communities that customers trust so that businesses can focus on building great relationships.

The partnership management platform is currently helping thousands of brands, including Walmart and Shopify, to manage and optimize their partnerships’ ROI through its purpose-built platform. And impact.com has brought this vision to life with its software built on Google Cloud Platform. 

“We believe in the power of technology and partnerships to create transformational growth for our customers, our company, and ourselves,” says Lisa Riolo, VP Strategic Partnerships and Co-founder at impact.com. “This mindset has been integral to the success of impact.com, which grew from a five person startup to a company valued at $1.5 billion as of September 2021.”

Fuelling business growth with the right partnerships and technology

impact.com’s original vision was to significantly improve the technology available to performance marketers while empowering traditional media channels with the data and measurement systems available to digital marketers. But it’s always been clear that for the company to remain relevant it needs to constantly evolve to meet the needs of the next generation of marketers.

“We designed our toolset to be future-proof, flexible, and to adapt to the changing global landscape. Our customers rely on impact.com to manage their strategic partnerships on a global level,” says Riolo. “This combined ability to be reliable and continually innovate is the sweet spot we look for when selecting the components of our technology setup, and that’s what we found in Google Cloud.”

As a company that focuses on helping businesses grow through their partnerships, scalability has always been one key criteria behind impact.com’s technology. As it acquires multiple product-led technology companies throughout its growth, the importance of being scalable becomes more evident. New companies joining impact.com suddenly gain access to a multitude of businesses they could be working with, while their customer base tends to multiply due to the exposure they gain through these new partnerships. 

“From a strategic perspective, when you need something new you can build it, buy it, or partner with someone who has it. We do all three,” says Riolo. “Each time we welcome a new company, we bring them on board Google Cloud so they can lean on the same reliability and scalability as we do. Having the ability to accommodate our growth is a must, and scaling on a Google Cloud environment is seamless and efficient. Additionally, we are taking advantage of the global footprint of the platform to run our applications closer to customers with low latency.”

Helping more businesses to grow in the cloud

As buyers increasingly turn to cloud marketplaces to fulfill their procurement needs, impact.com is launching its partnership management software on Google Cloud Marketplace. This means that companies of all sizes can find and quickly deploy impact.com’s software on Google Cloud without having to manually configure the software itself, its virtual machine instances, or its network settings. And by taking this step onto the cloud, they gain access to infrastructure that can keep up with their success.

“Our commitment to our partners centers on how we best support and enable their growth. I believe, as customers grow, their need to be in the cloud is critical to their ability to scale up, no matter what type of business they are,” explains Riolo. “So being on Google Cloud Marketplace is important for impact.com to get more exposure, and also important for Google Cloud,  because the growth-focused businesses we attract need more cloud capabilities. That’s how we grow together, and we’re very excited about what this means for the future of our relationships.”