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Partner Program budgets, spend caps, and billing
Partner Program budgets, spend caps, and billing

Understanding partner program budgets and what happens when they change.

Manuel Frigerio avatar
Written by Manuel Frigerio
Updated over 5 months ago

When setting up your SparkLoop partner program, one of the first and most important elements is setting your budget. Our You're able to set a total monthly spend cap as well as a per-partner spend cap for your Partner Program.

What are monthly spend caps?

Your partner program's monthly spend cap is the maximum amount of budget you are willing to spend per month for confirmed subscribers. The budget is spent through your desired CPA per confirmed subscriber (CPA common range of $1-5 per confirmed subscriber).

Minimum spend cap budget

The minimum monthly spend cap budget is $2,000. You won't be able to launch your partner program if you can't afford to spend this amount. While your entire monthly budget may not be exhausted by month's end, the spend cap budget is the maximum amount you will pay out per month.

What happens when spend cap is reached

There are 3 implications to reaching your spend cap:

  1. You will be notified via email when approaching your monthly spend cap with the recommendation to increase your budget if you want to continue receiving paid referrals for the remainder of the month.
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  2. If you do not increase your budget, all partners referring you subscribers will be notified the budget is reached. They'll also be notified they won't be paid for any more referrals until the budget resets.
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  3. Lastly, your publication will be automatically removed from all Upscribe widgets until the budget is increased or resets for the next month.

When do spend caps reset each month?

To understand when monthly spend caps reset, you must also understand the screening period and how it affects budgets.

Only confirmed subscribers count towards your monthly spend cap. These are the subscribers who have remained subscribed beyond the screening period.

An example of this would be if your screening period is 7 days, then your monthly spend cap budget will reset 7 days before the 1st of the month.

Why?

Because all referrals made in the final 7 days of the month will be pending and therefore not confirmed until the following month. So, your partners are able to once again make paid recommendations to your publication 7 days before the 1st of the month.

How to change your monthly spend cap

Here's how to change your monthly spend cap & CPA (watch the video below or follow the step-by-step instructions below it):

  1. navigate to your partner program page (from the nav menu)

  2. click the 'Actions' button

  3. click 'Settings'
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  4. On the Settings page, increase or decrease your:

    1. CPA

    2. Monthly Spend Cap

    3. Per-Partner Spend Cap
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Increasing your budgets will take effect when you save your changes. Partners will receive an email notifying them of these changes.

However, budget reductions don't take effect until your budgets reset for the following month. Partners will receive an email notifying them of a reduction in your CPA and/or a reduction in your per-partner monthly spend cap. They will not receive a notification of your monthly spend cap budget reduction.

Per-partner monthly spend caps

The per-partner monthly spend cap is the maximum any partner is able to earn from your partner program each month. These per-partner spend caps are useful as they allow more partners to refer your publication rather than one large partner taking all the referrals themselves.

We recommend per-partner monthly spend caps to be set at no more than 50% of your total monthly spend cap.

Setting unique caps for specific partners

You may choose to override your spend caps for certain partners. You can increase or decrease their CPA or per-partner spend cap. Do this by navigating to your Partner Program page.

Find the partner you'd like to make the change and click into their partner profile:

Once in their profile, click on the pencil icon to edit and override the settings as you desire. You'll be able to adjust their CPA and per-partner spend cap, along with a few other settings.

What to Expect with Partner Program Invoicing

When we invoice

Your credit card on file will be charged each Monday for all confirmed referrals from the previous week. At no point will the sum of these charges exceed the monthly spend cap you've set.

Invoices surpassing $10,000

If your weekly spend is over $10,000, your credit card will not be charged. Instead, you'll receive an invoice with the total payment due. You will have 7 days to make the payment.

In the case of non-payment from an invoice or credit card processing failure, you will receive a warning of account suspension with instructions to pay your invoice or update your credit card information. Your partner program will also be paused until payment is made.

If failure to pay continues, you'll risk having your SparkLoop account permanently suspended.

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