Home > Tracking Campaigns > Voluum

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Why NOT to Choose Voluum for tracking (54)

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Ok, so I first want to say that i've tested all major tracking platforms, and also self hosted and hosted before coming to this decision. I was in the process of porting over some of my major campaigns to Voluum until I realized just how much it was going to cost me in the long run and took a step back. Now for newbies and beginners Voluum is free, which is amazing. Also for anyone running less than 1mil in clicks, its 99 bucks which is a no brainer really... but when it comes down to people who run lots of volume or do a lot of pop traffic, it just wouldnt make sense to use voluum.

Ive calculated based on my previous months that Id have to spend a few grand just on voluum per month + my own dedicated server to host my landing pages and websites on. The cost of voluum is about 20k at least for me personally a year. 20k just for a tracker per year? Compared to imobitrax which is about 1k per year or something else the costs is huge with them. Im currently looking to build my own tracker or something similiar that can be self hosted and has everything that is needed. Also as an affiliate that is growing and getting bigger, the 20k in costs will just get higher and higher. For that much money I can have an extremely fast server and a personal server technician working on it all day and still save money, and happily know that its not depending on another company.

Just my two cents, I feel like any affiliate making significant money himself should not rely on a tracking solution such as voluum and is better off creating something for himself that does everything and more than what the typical trackers do (voluum / imobitrax).. reasons being the obvious savings in costs and also the realiability in knowing you own all your data and you dont depend on another company of shutting down / ddossed or whatever can happen to them.

PS. For those that dont know, voluum charges you per actual visit to your landing page, its not per click but per "action" they call it.

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There are pros and cons whichever way you look at it.

With self-hosting you may have more issues with data dumping, geographic distribution and load balancing, server tech employment and of course the tracking system itself will be different.

However, for very high volumes, it is most certainly the more cost effective option, assuming that there is no change in redirect speed, click loss, and so on that may impact net profit on campaigns.

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tbh, the way it is priced surprised me as well..... as far as I can tell, it's not just per visit... it's per action. each visit/click/conversion is an "action"

ie. get 1 visit, 1 click, 1 conversion from the same visitor and it's 3 actions....

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Yep I realized that too after i posted that. You essentially get charged multiple times per visitor and as far as I know it doesnt even have to be a unique user. So if someone wanted to game the system find someones Voluum lp and create a bot that clicks on their link... i see soo many issues with that...

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They will have to adjust their pricing as other guys come out with a 3rd gen tracker like Voluum which is CDN based. I know 2 companies that are working on some (i'm beta testing)

so Voluum will have to adjust to competition.

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They will also have to mitigate fake/bot traffic for sure - I'm sure they have thought of this because, as you said, competitors could burn your money.

As for the pricing of events, I don't think this is a big issue. The average events per user might be say 1.5 and the pricing has no benchmark to compare to really.

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Free market competition: +1

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but, it's also not just that... it essentially becomes that you pay more as u optimize...

for instance if I start out with a campaign that has

10kvisits,LP CTR 50%= 5k clicks and 1k conversions = 16k events

I optimize, increase my LP ctr and conversions increase on same amount of traffic.

10k visits, 8k clicks, 2k conversions = 20k action

same amount of visitors, 25% increase in actions...

this is not really an outlandish example...

I pay more as I optimize my campaign... on pop traffic that kills ur allowed limits per plan fast.

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yeah, wouldnt be too hard to hit 1,000,000

I have a feeling that they will be adjusting their pricing plans in the future. a jump from $100/month to $1000/month is just too much of a gap.

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Never thought about the optimisation, good point.

@Angry old lady -- there are overage charges, you don't have to jump from one tier to the other. E.g. 5 million a might be $99 for 1 million + overage of $85 (pulled out of butt) for the extra 4 million > $184/month.

It scales up with usage and after X amount the 25 mill plan will become more cost effective.

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I wish they have a plan that is for unlimited events. - say $999.

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wow...huge eye opener. i'm curious to see if they will step in to defend their pricing.

also i thought Voluum was cdn based? where is Voluum hosted then?

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I agree there's a threshold beyond which it's cheaper to host your own server, and hire your own team to maintain it.

I can fully assure you that I'm not at that threshold

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Firstly, I wanted to address our general pricing unit, the event. It consists of visits, clicks and conversions - essentially the items that incur server costs.

Now Karim, I understand that the above is just an example, but let's put it into monetary terms - 16,000 events vs 20,000 events is $0.64 vs $0.80 to double your # of conversions. 1,000 events cost $0.04 on the Pro plan.

Now let's make that more realistic, let's say a campaign with 1M events broken up into 800,000 visits, 180,000 clicks, 20,000 conversions.

You now optimize the campaign using the various reports, and have 800,000 visits, 400,000 clicks, and 50,000 conversions.

That's $40 vs $50 in terms of overage costs and at the same time your ROI goes up over 100% (obviously this is a little exaggerated, but it's enough to squeeze out 1% more conversions to cover the overage cost). So the point of increased costs as you optimize is negligible as it's simply worth it.

Voluum does exactly that, it allows you to pull these high volume reports to dig into that historical data to optimize, something you completely lose with self-hosted trackers.

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Moving on to the more general points..

I understand your reasoning behind pricing, however it really is specific to what you do. If you're buying cheap pops and don't need complex reporting then yes, you might be better off using a self-hosted tracker which will take care of your basic redirect needs.

However, if you're looking to extract value from historical data, or pull complex reports based on millions of clicks then Voluum is a priceless tool for many. Believe it or not, we have some 100M+ users spending over 5 figures a month with our tracker - simply because up until now there wasn't a solution that could handle big data.

We didn't enter this industry to create simple cheap scripts, we're trying to reinvent tracking. Having said that, I know that some of the available scripts like Prosper and CPVLab will always be the most cost effective solutions for some - we don't intend to compete with that.

In it's current state, I realize that Voluum doesn't offer much more than a CPVLab, or a iMobiTrax in regards to functionality. We're just getting started and have no intent on slowing development down. We've invested a lot of money in building our own technology, mainly VoluumDB which powers both ZeroPark & Voluum and enables us to do real-time reporting with billions of requests a day. Our team is continuously growing, and we release features weekly and we'll continue to do so.

You're all businessmen, can you really compare the cost of a script, versus a platform that's hosted on a complex server infrastructure with a full-time team of 15 senior developers incurring all sorts of other running costs? To achieve scale where it's profitable for us to continue business we have to spend a lot of money on marketing too, be it Affiliate Summit shows or other conferences. It all adds up..

To sum up, if you can honestly say that you will yield a higher monthly profit by switching to a self-hosted tracker then the answer is clear. On top of that, many people simply like the peace of mind of not having their own servers, hosting their landers on CDNs and taking a vacation without worrying

Lastly, to clarify again there is no gap between the $99 and $999 plan. That's where our overages kick in, check our calculator.

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And finally to conclude, I know how everyone loves screenshots with figures. I received an email from a client that's been running on our Beta since last year thanking us for creating a tool that allows him to do what I touched upon above - attached was this screenshot (he mentioned I could post it on our site as a case study).



Sometimes I think just being able to pull a general report like this to see what you've accomplished in the past year is enough to justify any price

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I misread the date range as being from 2014-09-05 to 2014-09-06 and my jaw dropped.

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No doubt Voluum is a great solution for new guys starting out. It's very convenient. But business wise it's just not a smart decision to run at that pricing with big volume.

Looking at that screenshot you posted, does that mean the ended up paying around $40,000+ for tracking that year (correct me if I'm wrong)? It's short sighted of that affiliate to run his tracking at that cost especially if he will grow.

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Why is that?

If something costs me $40,000 or even $400,000 but lets me make an additional incremental profit above my risk adjusted cost of capital that I would not have made otherwise, then the absolute cost is not really a consideration.

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You are implying that Voluum was the main reason why this revenue was made, when it most likely wasn't.

There is also the fact that there are alternatives that can get 90% of the functionality for a fraction of the price.

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I'm not implying this, the client that sent me this screenshot was.

As I said, Voluum is not a solution for all. You need to figure out what works best for and what yields the biggest profits at the end of the day.

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So I'm looking at this dataset, and I have a couple notes.

1. I'm seeing average payouts go from $0.25 to $110.00. WOW
2. It appears that every campaign has some sort of landing page, even the $0.25 average payout one. No direct linking.
3. The average cost per view never goes over $0.01, it's 1/3rd of a cent.
4. There are somewhere between 200 and 250 campaigns in total in this account (see the # of pages)
5. The top 50 campaigns by visits control 1/3rd+ of the traffic.
6. The most profitable campaign had a $1.25 payout.
7. The 5th campaign from the bottom has no traffic cost. Probably not properly reported.
8. The average daily profit for this affiliate is ~$1,000/day. There are some affiliates here pushing $xx,xxx and more per day. I'm curious to know their traffic volumes.

My head is spinning just thinking about the manpower required to create all those landing page variations, creatives, and finding places with traffic that cheap.

Almost impossible to not pull this off without media buys.

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I'm curious, how much would you spend to handle that level of traffic? I worked on HFTs a couple years ago and they handle massive databases purely in RAM, while spending ~$4-5MM/year just for that database power.

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458M events over the course of a year would be would be 38M a month, costing $1395. So $16,740. I recall when I ran CPVLab some 3 years ago doing around 1M clicks a day I was spending around $800 on my dedicated server.

Here's some food for thought. Based on some benchmarks that a few of our tech savvy clients have done Voluum's click loss is around 3% lower than any self-hosted solution even with a powerful dedicated server.

In the above screenshot, there's around 407M visits. The earnings per view (EPV) is $0.0046.

407M*0.03*$0.0046 = $56,166 additional revenue. At such high volumes I imagine the click loss is even higher on self-hosted solution.

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Sorry that comment was directed at cmdeal's post.

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Just to clarify: STM works to support and assist affiliates using any tracking platform.

We don't have an official "preferred" or "recommended" tracking solution at this time, and the mod team uses a wide variety of different trackers for their campaigns.

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Hi Everyone, It appears my stm account has been compromised. I've removed all post, changed my password and would like to apologize for anything said.



I find the timing oddly amusing since we did in fact talk to robert in a very friendly manner yesterday..... :|

I recently got subscribed to another thread that I've never viewed on here either, I wonder if there is a vbulletin database issue or if someone is manipulating the software.

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BAM have our answer.


Dear BeyondHosting-Tyler,

Someone has tried to log into your account on STACKTHATMONEY Forums with an incorrect password at least 5 times. This person has been prevented from attempting to login to your account for the next 15 minutes.

The person trying to log into your account had the following IP address: 95.211.153.66

All the best,
STACKTHATMONEY Forums



nqhf150.dediseedbox.com

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Welcome to the club. That happened to me 2 months ago...

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Had a chat with Tyler and I deleted my posts too. It's funny how it all circles around, I used to work closely with him some 3 years ago as my CPVLab install kept exploding due to volume which led me later to creating the first version of Voluum.

Not sure who would go thru all that trouble to try to defame us. Can only think of a competitor

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Glad we got it resolved.

We're working with the owners and admins at stmforum.com to figure out how my user and kaltera's got compromised.

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We are looking into this, I have the older posts saved. I'm curious to see who was posting those posts, they certainly knew an awful lot about server set ups.

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The person did know a lot about Voluum and server setups in general.. we're going to check our logs to see if anyone ever logged into Voluum with the IP of 95.211.153.66

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Also found IP: 117.254.56.223

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95.211.x.x is Leaseweb NL server.

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I saw the posts before they were removed. I'm a customer for both Beyond and Voluum. Felt like a service-provider boxing match.

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Yes it did. I saw the emails in my inbox and thought "oh my god" and quickly logged in and began removing them because it seemed like something I could actually say.

Extremely disappointed that someone took advantage of my reputation to try and utilize it to flame Roberts company.

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I had the suspect that weren't you to write those posts, because I never read something harsh like that coming from you, even when few angry customers attacked you in the past

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I'm not known to go out on someone like that, especially not on a public forum. I will however gladly prove someone wrong when I know I'm in the right, I quickly stand up for our service and reputation.

:-)

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Been using Voluum with a Pro plan; last month scaled up some pop campaigns, as a result without warning, the monthly bill quickly went to almost $700 with all the overages. When I emailed Support to inquire why there was no warning in the system (like the Noobie plan subscribers get after 50% usage), nor the offer to roll into the Agency plan was presented, the Support replied along the lines of "it's your own fault for not checking"... wow, great!

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The allowance and overage charges are very clear. Your running a business and Voluum is an integral part of it, calculating costs like this is 101.

Have you looked at Thrive? Max you would end up paying is 99 (after server costs)

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I got one of those bills as well, although I had been keeping up with my overages and wasn't surprised when it came in. That's what made me look into Thrive, which is what I'm using now.

Thrive is excellent (and Tyler did a phenomenal job of optimizing my BH server) but as I've run more and more INTL pops, I've started to notice a bit more click loss in certain geos than I did with Voluum + Rackspace Cloud Files.

This is not a problem with Thrive or my server, it's simply inevitable. My server and landers are in the US, so latency to some far-away geos will inevitably be worse than a cloud solution like Voluum that has servers in many places.

So, these are things that have to be considered when deciding between a cloud solution like Voluum or a self-hosted tracker like Thrive.

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@integrity

We're about to launch a few more locations, what locations would be ideal for you and your target?

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Nice, so BH is going INTL?

As far as locations go, with my US server I've noticed the most click loss in Asian and Middle Eastern Countries, as well as Latin America.

From doing some reading it appears as though (and please correct me if I'm wrong) these would be the optimal server locations to cover as much ground as possible while maintaining a reasonable budget:

Asia -- West Coast US Datacenter (California)
Middle East -- Europe Datacenter
Latin America -- Miami, FL Datacenter

I think that setup would cover the most ground. In my case, I'll have to think it over as for my current needs, it may be more economical to just use Voluum than to get 3x servers and tracker licenses (or more).

And for those of you out there that might think I am stressing over nothing, if you are running 1 million clicks a day and are losing even just 2% more clicks than you would with servers in each geo, that's 20k clicks a day.

20k clicks at $0.003 CPC is $60 a day, or $1800 a month in traffic you're losing, plus the revenue you didn't generate. It adds up.

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Sorry about the useless thread but hey I was mad and sad.

I would of not cared if I was making money and could afford a paid plan.

I understand the reason for the change but man I wished I had more time.

Isn't it old and outdated. Plus I didn't really like it when I used it in the past. Selfhosted tends to cost money too, might be better off using AdsBridge.

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Consider it done, just started the process of deploying our cloud in Amsterdam. :-) Should see the new locations within a few weeks.

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Haha , same here

I missed the deleted posts of Rob and Tyler, what was there?

So much account hacking on this industry....

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Someone compromised my STM account and went on and on bashing the architecture of Voluum. At first I started reading it going wow I don't remember writing this... then 3 paragraphs in it got really angry and I was like.. yeah not me.

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Nice, that's great!

Looking forward to having BH's pro-level support in EU. Gonna be on the lookout for it.

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