This year, brand marketing teams are under immense pressure to achieve greater results with tighter resources. Over 54 percent of marketers globally planned to cut their ad spending in 2025; yet, expectations to drive growth and deliver measurable partnership ROI continue to rise.
That means you’re expected to do more with less—managing creators, publishers, and advocates across disconnected platforms while justifying every dollar spent. Reporting takes too long. Opportunities slip through the cracks. And proving the full impact of your partnerships has never felt harder.
We built 2025’s product releases around solving these exact challenges. From unified program management that eliminates platform juggling to AI-powered discovery that cuts partner vetting time from days to minutes, every feature addresses a specific friction point in your workflow.
These updates reimagine how partnership management should work when resources are tight and expectations are high.
In this roundup, we’ll walk through each major innovation and show you how it solves a problem you’re facing right now—whether that’s fragmented data, slow partner discovery, or the inability to prove the full value of your creator partnerships. By the end, you’ll see how these releases set up your program for its strongest year yet.
- Problem 1. Managing partnerships across disconnected platforms
- Problem 2. Finding and vetting the right partners took weeks
- Problem 3. Your dashboard couldn’t show you what mattered
- Problem 4. You had data, but couldn’t prove partnership value
- Helping you achieve partnership growth in an era of constraints
Problem 1. Managing partnerships across disconnected platforms
Partnership teams often work from disconnected systems—affiliate programs on one platform, creator campaigns on another, and referral initiatives managed manually or through spreadsheets.
Each channel had its own contracts, payments, and reporting frameworks, making it difficult to understand overall performance.
This challenge inspired a wave of innovations across the impact.com platform—tools built to unify fragmented systems, streamline program management, and help teams see the full picture of performance.
UBASE: One platform for all partnerships
UBASE provides a unified view into all partnership types. It standardizes setup and reporting so you can launch creator, affiliate, and referral programs from the same foundation—no extra configuration or duplicate data entry required.
Shared tracking logic, contract templates, and payout structures ensure consistency across programs while allowing for channel-specific flexibility.
Because every program type now lives in one architecture, you can instantly see how all of your partners contribute to the same goals. Performance data, partner history, and contract terms flow through a unified data layer, eliminating redundancies and ensuring continuity across campaigns.
No more jumping between workspaces or manually syncing partner details—just one connected source of truth that scales as your ecosystem grows.
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Amazon Seller Integration: Connect Amazon relationships to your partnership hub
Managing Amazon partnerships separately from your affiliate or creator programs creates unnecessary complexity. The Amazon Seller Integration solves that.
Brands can launch, track, and manage Amazon affiliate relationships directly within the impact.com platform. All commissions, performance data, and reporting are now live in the same environment as your other partnerships.
The Amazon Seller Integration eliminates manual setup, allowing you to focus on scaling performance instead of managing spreadsheets.
Shopify Integration for brand advocates: Empower loyal fans at the time of purchase
For DTC brands running ambassador or referral programs, the Shopify Integration for Advocates connects your ecommerce store directly to impact.com.
It syncs discount codes, tracks checkout conversions, and attributes sales in real time. That makes it easier to see which advocates or customers are driving incremental revenue—and to reward them automatically.
The Shopify Integration for advocates automatically syncs discount codes and referral links at checkout.
Problem 2. Finding and vetting the right partners took weeks
Finding the right partners used to be one of the most time-consuming parts of managing a partnership program. You could spend days scouring social platforms, manually vetting creators, and cross-checking audience data across multiple tools—only to realize engagement numbers were outdated or misaligned with your target demographics.
This year, impact.com set out to change that. Our latest features turn guesswork into a data-driven workflow—helping you identify, evaluate, and activate the right partners in a fraction of the time.
Real-Time Creator Search: Instant discovery with live audience data
With Real-Time Creator Search, you can instantly find creators using key indicators such as live audience metrics and engagement trends. You can also filter by platform, reach, location, and brand affinity—all backed by continuously updated data.
Paired with new lookalike functionality for creators and audiences, Real-Time Search surfaces influencers who mirror the performance of your best partners. The result is faster recruitment, higher relevance, and greater confidence that your outreach will pay off.
The lookalike search functionality allows you to discover new creators who share similar traits, audiences, or performance metrics as your top performers—reducing the guesswork in creator sourcing.
Prospect Importing: Streamline large-scale creator recruitment
The Prospect Import feature streamlines recruitment by allowing you to upload entire prospect lists directly into the platform—eliminating the need for third-party tools or manual onboarding.
You can migrate existing partners from other systems or add new creators you’d like to recruit, then pair them with automated workflows that handle invites, acceptance, and onboarding in one seamless process.
After importing your prospects, you can easily access them alongside other potential partners within the platform.
Sentiment Analysis: Vet creators by tone and authenticity
Sentiment Analysis enables brands to understand how creators and publishers discuss their products.
By analyzing tone, keywords, and brand context, you can assess authenticity before committing to a partnership. Is a creator genuinely enthusiastic about sustainability? Do they talk about beauty products with expertise? Sentiment Analysis gives you those answers before your first DM or email.
Sentiment Analysis gives you an at-a-glance view of how partners are talking about your brand.
Pre-Qualified Brand Recommendations: Drive faster, higher-quality partner activations
Pre-Qualified Brand Recommendations allows creators and publishers to instantly see which brands they’re already approved to work with—so they can skip cold outreach and start collaborating faster.
To maintain high partner engagement and drive faster activations for brands, we’ve layered intelligent recommendations on top of this already high-performing system. Partners now see pre-approved brands ranked by relevance to their audience and content—keeping discovery fresh and interest strong.
Pre-Qualified Brand Recommendations help brands connect with ready-to-collaborate partners and activate campaigns in seconds.
Problem 3. Your dashboard couldn’t show you what mattered
Data is everywhere—but true insights are harder than ever to find. Metrics exist in silos, performance views are static, and surfacing the right data requires too many clicks or too much manual reporting. The result is slower decisions, missed optimization opportunities, and teams reacting to data instead of leading with it.
That’s why impact.com’s 2025 updates focused on making your dashboard work smarter with new ways to visualize performance and surface actionable insights instantly.
VNext: A new interface that highlights needle-moving insights
The new VNext interface reimagines how partnership data comes to life with an action-based, productivity-driven experience.
The dashboard surfaces the metrics that matter most through:
- New chart formatting
- Flexible comparison tools
- Customizable widgets
- Side-by-side views of creator, referral, and affiliate data—no exports required
It’s a modern, intuitive workspace built to help teams act faster, work smarter, and turn data into impact.
The new UI puts your most impactful data front and center, with flexible customization to fit your team’s unique workflows and priorities.
Ask Impact AI: Your conversational command center
Ask Impact AI brings conversational intelligence directly into the platform. Think of it as a built-in analyst, trainer, and assistant all in one.
Ask Impact AI instantly:
- Surfaces data using visualization such as charts and comparisons
- Links to relevant product help docs and industry knowledge
- Recommends new partners based on historical success patterns
- Connects you to customer support when needed
Behind the scenes, it draws from multiple verified data sources—including your analytics, the impact.com help center, and Seismic library—so your answers are accurate and contextual.
With an intuitive conversational interface, Ask Impact AI delivers the data and answers you need to grow and optimize your partnership program.
Problem 4. You had data, but couldn’t prove partnership value
Partnership teams have no shortage of data, but when it comes time to justify budget or show leadership how partnerships contribute to growth, the numbers rarely tell the full story. Awareness, sentiment, trust, and content influence—the things that make partnerships powerful—are often invisible in traditional reporting.
That’s why impact.com’s 2025 enhancements were built to close that gap, giving you clearer attribution, more transparent performance metrics, and tools that finally prove the true value of your partnerships.
Earned Media Value Reporting: Measure true creator value
Marketers have long known that creator partnerships drive influence that can’t be captured by last-click attribution—Earned Media Value (EMV) Reporting finally puts numbers to that invisible value.
EMV Reporting quantifies how creator content amplifies your brand beyond direct transactions. You can see exactly how creator partnerships contribute to awareness and trust by measuring visibility, engagement, and influence across channels.
The result is a more holistic view of ROI that helps justify spend, optimize future partnerships, and tell a clearer performance story to leadership.
You can customize your EMV settings by social platform, providing a flexible report that transforms engagement data into clear insights, proving ROI and helping brands invest confidently in creator partnerships.
Performance Campaigns: Even more streamlined campaign management
Managing performance campaigns has always been a balancing act—spreadsheets for tracking, email threads for contracting, and a patchwork of tools for payments and reporting.
Performance Campaigns centralizes the entire campaign lifecycle inside impact.com. Instead of juggling offline workflows, brands can now assign tasks, invite partners, define compensation models, and track deliverables—all from a single dashboard. This transparency means that every step, from outreach to payment, is visible and measurable.
You can set up a performance campaign by defining your goal, setting your budget and partner count, choosing compensation rates, and outlining placement, timelines, and content expectations.
Enhanced Social Listening: Deeper insights into online conversations
Keeping track of how your brand is talked about online has always been a challenge. Without a unified view, opportunities slipped by before teams could act.
The new Enhanced Social Listening feature changes that. You now have up to five listeners to track multiple brands, competitors, and campaigns simultaneously. Monitor sentiment, discover creators already discussing your products or category, and catch emerging trends before they become mainstream.
Enhanced Social Listening reveals how your brand, partners, and competitors are being discussed across social media platforms in real-time.
Helping you achieve partnership growth in an era of constraints
Even as budgets tighten, the partnership economy continues to expand its role in driving sustainable growth. 2025 was the year impact.com doubled down on making that growth simpler, smarter, and more connected.
Every update—from UBase’s unified infrastructure to the AI-powered discovery—was built to help you do more with less while achieving measurable ROI.
Ultimately, these innovations empower you to streamline your stack, act on insights faster, and connect every partner type in one place—so you can focus on building relationships that drive revenue.
Ready to eliminate platform chaos and do more with less? Book a demo to see impact.com’s latest releases and how they can transform your 2025 strategy.
