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Pilot Phase for Paid Recommendations
Pilot Phase for Paid Recommendations

How our pilot phase feature ensures partners only recommend publications their audiences will love to read

Manuel Frigerio avatar
Written by Manuel Frigerio
Updated over a year ago

What is the pilot phase?

The pilot phase is an easy, low-risk way for you to test out new partners for your partner program.

With the pilot phase enabled, new partners can join your partner program and make up to 50 paid referrals.

Based on the confirmation rate of those 50 referrals (ie how many of them become amazing subscribers), the partner will automatically be removed from your partner program, or approved to continue recommending you with your "normal" partner budget.

This gives you a low-risk, low-effort way of allowing many different partners to try recommending your publication, while only the best ones (for you) can continue recommending you at scale.

How does the pilot phase work?

⚡️ You can enable the pilot phase in your partner program settings --> Partner Screening

  1. Choose a minimum-acceptable referral confirmation rate score (RCR Score). Your SparkLoop account manager can help you with this during onboarding
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  2. Activate the "enable pilot phase" toggle and click "save"
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  3. New partners who join your partner program will see a badge informing them that your publication has a pilot phase
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  4. The new partner can recommend your publication and refer up to 50 subscribers
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  5. Once the partner has referred 50 subscribers to you, they will be paused until the the confirmation rate of those referred subscribers can be analysed (ie until they pass the engagement screening period)
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  6. SparkLoop automatically analyses the referral confirmation rate of the partner's referrals for you. If they meet your minimum-acceptable RCR Score (from step #1), the partner will be approved to continue recommending you with your normal per-partner budget
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  7. If the partner's RCR Score is lower than the minimum-acceptable RCR Score, they'll be removed from your partner program and will not be able to recommend you in the future

💡 Pilot phase referrals count towards your partner program's monthly spend cap. The 50 pilot phase referrals have the same CPA, quality and engagement conditions as your normal referrals.

Manual pilot phase review

To automatically approve or reject partners in the pilot phase, your partner program needs to have enough existing partners to establish an RCR score baseline (how we determine whether a partner's referral confirmation rate is good or bad).

Normally, it takes 3-4 weeks after launching your partner program to establish this RCR baseline.

Pilot phase partners will be held in a pending state during this time, until we can automatically approve or reject them.

You can override the automatic pilot phase approval process for any partner by manually reviewing their pilot phase and approving them yourself.

Partners who are pending pilot phase review can be found via a banner in your partner program dashboard:

You can manually approve the partner by reviewing their profile, RCR and referred subscribers. This will allow them to instantly continue recommending you with a full per-partner budget:

FAQs about the pilot phase

  1. The pilot phase is a one-time-deal of 50 referrals. Each partner can go through the pilot phase only once, and — unlike normal partner budgets — each partner's pilot phase budget does not reset each month
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  2. Partners will be notified via email of their approval or rejection from the pilot phase
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  3. Confirmed referrals made during the pilot phase are paid for at your normal CPA and are subject to the same screening conditions as your "normal" partner program
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