Impact

Impact has tried to adapt by adding UTT for first-party tracking. But even with UTT, their system still requires a redirect hop, a quick, invisible bounce through an Impact tracking domain before sending the user to your site. Modern iPhones, browsers (even Chrome heading into 2026), and ad blockers often block this redirect for privacy reasons, because they recognize these quick detours as tracking shortcuts.

This is why users see those "this domain was blocked" warnings when they sometimes click affiliate links, and it directly hurts user experience, conversions, partner credit, and overall affiliate performance. This is an example what the user see's when they are using Impact and they click an affiliate link and their browser blocks it:

What users sometimes experience when they click on an Impact link due to their redirect hop (outdated technology).

Here is one of our partners still using Impact. They have it "technically" set up in the most direct way that Impact allows for, but you can see that there is a third-party redirect:

Impact still uses third-party redirect hops, which is often blocked by modern browsers, making it one of the most inaccurate affiliate platforms.

Modern browsers now detect these “tracking hops” and increasingly block or skip them. Sometimes the user sees a blocked-page warning, sometimes nothing appears at all but in both cases, the redirect is stripped out and the tracking never fires.

This means users reach your site normally and can even convert, but Impact never logs the click or the conversion. As a result, attribution becomes unreliable, partners lose credit, and performance data becomes misleading.

We've seen it happen dozens of times: SaaS companies move their program to Impact, and performance is mediocre. And Impact can't fix this. To fix it, they would have to rebuild their entire company from the ground up (they won't do this). So if you use Impact as a SaaS company, you are basically agreeing to work with a dated/broken platform from the start.

Anecdotally, we've had 100+ SaaS partners over the years, and nearly every single one has moved off Impact because of major tracking issues. And because of this, many publishers are refusing to work with Impact anymore.

We've seen countless SaaS companies go through the grueling process of integrating with with Impact (into their payment/accounting software for payouts and everything), only to migrate off them as soon as their contract is up, after realizing that this tool wasn't built for the SaaS market, but rather retrofitted to "make it work".

Instead, we recommend using an affiliate platform that does not engage in these redirect practices. Our top pick is Dub Partners.

Impact oversells its marketplace as a major advantage, but for SaaS companies it rarely delivers real value. The majority of partners inside it are coupon and deal sites...not the creators, consultants, or industry experts that actually move the needle for SaaS.

Impact’s marketplace sounds compelling in theory, but in practice it isn't where the best SaaS partners are. The best SaaS partners are the ones you have a direct relationship with.

We've ignored every proposal request from Impact. Our best partners actually have a relationship with us directly.

The part that is most baffling is that on one hand, SaaS companies care an extreme amount about their own UI/UX and customer experience, yet all of that goes out the window when it comes to the UI/UX that the referral/partner will be experiencing on their end.

From an actual affiliate perspective, Impact is the single-most platform that we hate working with most. It's so incredibly confusing to just get a straight answer on "how many people clicked links, how many are in trial, and how many subscribed? There's so many filters and toggles and junk that was obviously added for the crazy complex campaigns required for gigantic eCommerce sites:

Can someone please explain to me how this is a good user-experience?

One of the biggest frustrations with Impact is the complete lack of visibility. As a creator or partner, you can't use one consistent link across all your content and see what's actually converting. Instead, Impact forces you to generate separate tracking links for every single placement: website, YouTube description, newsletters, social posts, individual buttons, etc.

This means if you end up wanting visibility you need to manage dozens (sometimes hundreds) of links just to piece together basic insights. And even then, the data is fragmented, hard to compare, and often inaccurate due to blocked third-party re-directs... And guess what? No creator or publisher will go through the trouble to use hundreds of links as it's a nightmare to mange (remember, we are often dealing with hundreds of partners).

Modern platforms like Dub Partners solve this with first-party tracking and content-level attribution, so you always know exactly which pages, videos, or posts drive revenue, without creating thousands of links.

Accuracy = trust = revenue. When Impact's tracking gets blocked, it doesn’t just hurt performance, it creates doubt across your entire partner ecosystem.

Creators stop trusting the numbers, brands lose confidence in the attribution, disputes increase, payouts decrease, and ultimately partners promote you less.

At Efficient App, we avoid logging into Impact whenever possible because the UI is painful, and we consistently see inaccurate tracking (e.g. a friend used our link to sign up and it showed zero attribution).If this happened once, fine, but when it happens repeatedly, it becomes clear that a large portion of campaign performance simply isn't being tracked. And when that happens, we naturally end up creating less content for the brands using Impact as it is incredibly demotivating.