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Voluum so SLOW lately... (56)

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Anyone has the same problem?

It just loads so slow since few days ago

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Yep I agree..... It has got MUCH worse as time goes on!

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same here.... hard to work with honestly.

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Yes. It is so slow today

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Yep, the outage earlier in the week was the last straw, currently switching over to Funnel Flux and Adsbridge.

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Me and my friends thinking of switching to another tracker too

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Looking for alternatives at the moment as well.

Anybody already switched from Voluum to Funnel Flux and willing to share a couple of sentences about the experience?

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We use Thrive and are very happy with it. However Funnel Flux looks really interesting. Might have to check that one out too.

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Me too looking for alternatives.
Any reviews of Adsbridge? How is their service?

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I heard Adsbridge does everything Voluum does plus a bunch of extra features.

One of the attractive features Adsbridge has is it will allow you to send so many conversions to an offer and will shut off and redirect traffic to a chosen offer once you hit cap.

I have not tried it but for sure I am going to look into it further. Maybe it is time for Voluum to take a look at what others are doing and repair their slow operation issues. The other problem I have with Voluum is
the very slow support response... I recently had a small issue that took 4 days to resolve because of only getting a reply to my support questions after waiting about 24 hours for a reply. If your that large and I
and paying $400 a month... would think you could get a faster response time. I love Voluum, just wish they could clean up a little around the edges.

Just my 2 cents.

NG

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Has Voluum addressed this at all, any chance they will get it back up to speed?

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Probably someone should update this thread with official Voluum replay on what is going on.

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The men in white jackets have moved onto bigger and better things. Affiliate marketers? We dont need em no more

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Switching is easy if you do it this way:

Step 1 - Keep your old campaings on your current tracker

Step 2 - Create all new campaigns exclusively with FunnelFlux

Step 3 - Be amazed lol

Step 4 - Migrate old campaigns after experiencing 3 above

Seriously, we have many customers coming from other trackers, here's how they see it:

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exactly .. this all started getting worse after the DSP stuff the guys are working on. Priorities changed and so did the quality of the tracker

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Hi guys,

Firstly, I would like to dispel the collective air of doubt regarding the apparent hindrance of Voluum tracker's development;

In preceding months, our development focal point shifted heavily towards our integrated mobile DSP, whilst visible augmentations to our tracking solution were put temporarily on the backburner.

Granted, that's not to say that nothing has been done to improve our tracking solution as we have been actively working on broadening the available functionailities (most of which are still undergoing 'backend' development).

With the development of our DSP now entering a latter 'refinement' period, there will be an immediate re-balance of development and resources focused on our tracking solution.
This will be reflected in the coming months as we roll out features that will be firstly akin to user demand, and secondly, keeping us one step ahead of our 'competition'.


For those of you whom experienced a recent 'lag' in panel's performance;

This may have been related to a few backbone infrastructure optimizations that were made last week.
An unforeseen result of these changes was a temporary 'downtime' which we incurred last Thursday.

Granted, the issue was resolved promptly and there should no longer be any persisting effects on panel's performance.

If the issue is still persisting, kindly forward us a support ticket so we can troubleshoot it further.


Kind regards,
Adrian

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Among existed there are bunch of new features added recently to our tracking plaform, like test campaign URL, so you can test redirects, clicks, etc. and then filter out tested campaign in statistics without interfering with actual results. As well as conversion status in the S2S postback, unique redirect rule and exit pop-up in visual editor, that our users already applied to their campaigns.

Btw, as well as Funnel Flux we provide campaigns switching, so we can help you easily move campaigns to AdsBridge platform.
Contact me support@adsbride.com to make your switching today.

Regards.
Alex

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The issues with Voluum are getting worse lately. Besides the slowdown I've experienced for the past week, it seems it still has a problem with Cache..

It seems the tracker was sending the users to wrong links (mobile users to the web offer).

Side note: What kind of server would I need for FunnelFlux to handle 500k-1M cliks/day? mostly from pops

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16 CPU + 32 GB would do it. I recommend Vultr servers, they have this config for $320 -> https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

You pay their servers by the hour, so you can easily try it out.

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I've tried all scenarios

mobile chrome & IE

desktop chrome, IE, mozilla

same exact results, question is Voluum really this bad? I'm only asking because i"m a newbie to mobile and have been having horrible experience with this tracking solution.

Previously my landing pages were taking forever to load, wth

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Looks to me like Voluum have their whole team focused on the DSP, a bad move given the responsiveness of other tracking solutions out there. They need to act fast if they want to keep users.

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Yea I have been noticing this as well lately. Went ahead and emailed their support, lets see how it goes.

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Yeah I emailed support also...hopefully they don't take too long to resolve this issue smh...

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Hope they can get their sh*t together. I really love their interface.

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I just switched to Funnel Flux as well due to the service/availability issues. To those nervous about the tech knowledge necessary to install Flux, don't worry it's really easy. The process is straightforward except the procedures don't specifically state that you need to create a MySQL user account first. Create that account in advance and you will have it ready when the installation prompts ask for it.

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Hey, thanks and welcome to FunnelFlux

For those who're not very tech oriented and still want an optimized server, we have a step by step installation tutorial here:
http://www.funnelflux.com/vultr-setup/

With our helper scripts, you can have an optimized server with FunnelFlux installed in less than 10 minutes, literrally.

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Hi:
I am also a newbie, never used any tracking tool before was about to get started with Voluum due to the fact that you can start off without the worries of setting up your own hosting and incur additional expense from that.
But since the frequent surge of complaints about Voluum I am now thinking about Funnel Flux.
Do you have a skype contact so that we could chat there for further assistance with Funnel Flux?

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I'm in the exact same position, and looking to make a tracker decision in the next couple of days. Is this good for newbies who aren't running complex traffic funnels?

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So the slowness issues are still there? Nothing has been done to resolve those?

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If you are looking for SaaS platform with user-friendly interface and all advanced features, you may find interesting Adsbridge solution (it was mentioned above)

What will you have when sign up to AdsBridge:

- 30-day FREE trial
- Tracking & advanced TDS
- Extra-fast redirects
- Smart auto-optimization
- Assistance of our support team
- Landing page builder & hosting

Why AdsBridge?

- We are intergrated with lots of affiliate networks and traffic sources (so you simply choose them from our templates)
- We provide hide referrer option
- You can use multi-offer landing pages
- Daily cap for offers

Looking forward to meet you on our platform. Our support team will be more than glad to guide you through and give you useful tips. Or you are always welcome to ask here http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-ASK-AdsBridge!!!

Regards

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Long time voluume user who is now split testing between Thrive and funnel flux.

I prefer Thrive, my business partner prefers FF. I feel the only reason I do not hold FF at the top of the list is that its nowhere near the same as Volumme where at least thrive is an easy transition. I think once I learn FF better it will end up being the winner.

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I installed FF over the weekend and compared to Voluum Voluum is a bit more intuitive but I did like the Funnel creation tool for the campaigns. Should make training a team easier. FF needs to add the pre loaded traffic source profiles like Voluum has with tokens, etc. I may have missed them but I ended up manually having to set the traffic sources/tokens up.

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Yah it sounds like more people are moving over to FunnelFlux and Thrive lately. If you want a paid tracker those two are the way to go lately.
P202 still gets the job done though, just depends how much volume you push/server setup. A Dedi might be over kill as well.

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I'm interested if anyone noticed an increased in ROI/revenue after switching to either Thrive or FunnelFlux? I've heard a few stories, but I consider them rumors.

While the front end of Voluum has been slower lately and the costs add up, I prefer using my time to scale campaigns instead of wasting it migrating everything just to save a few (even hundred) bux.

If anyone could share his experience after migration, it would be helpful

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just curious, what are ppl's hesitation with ads bridge?

i'm not running huge campaigns yet but seems like the big volume guys are all switching to either ff or Thrive?

am i missing something on ads bridge?

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Apologies for us not being very responsive on STM - we'll be changing that moving forward.

It's worth keeping in mind that we operate at a different scale as compared to self-hosted solutions. We're currently tracking around half a billion visitors a day, and well over $1 billion in ad spend on an annual basis. This means that we have to do things carefully with a ton of testing and at this scale features and improvements simply take a lot more planning and time to implement as opposed to self-hosted PHP scripts. We also continue to maintain and develop our proprietary VoluumDB database technology which enables us to do what we do at this scale, anyone with a bit of technical insight can understand that this is no small feat.

A handful of users do report some sort of sluggishness of the panel - something that we continue to monitor and look into.

Our VoluumDB team is working on something called conversion refactoring which will speed up the loading of certain reports even several hundred times. This will likely solve many woes about the 'slow' speed of platform and we'll keep you updated on that.

We'll also be implementing measures to make us more transparent if and when technical issues do arise.

Your understanding and patience is appreciated -- we are a young company, and as we grow so quickly we sometimes learn along the way. You'll be pleased to know that we will be releasing some new features in the weeks to come, and some game changing ones such as actionable insights (think statistically significant profit based insights on all variations of grouping reports) in the months to come.

Best wishes,
Robert

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Sold for another month
Thanks for update.

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Well, I was thinking of switching because that is a feature I wanted in a tracker. Nice to see you chime in here and give us a heads up

As for the reports optimisations, will we be able to generate reports from last year, and choosing a period longer than 30 days and 2 drill down without the front end crashing?

Regards,

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Anyone else having problems logging into Voluum?
Pretty disappointing.

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yep same here. almost a daily thing these days..

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It was dead for like 10 mins, can login now

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Hi guys,

Yes, we've faced a login issue for around 11 minutes. Please note that tracking data hasn't been affected - all is good now.


Apologies for that,
Marcin

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Same here, was down for like 15 min. Getting this "we´re having trouble with our front end servers" message daily. Hope something changes soon or I´ll be switching trackers.

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slow again, and also the cache takes to long to clear. It took Voluum like 10 mins to stop traffic to a lander I take off from a camp.

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Funnel Flux is really next level stuff.

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Are they shutting down? WTF

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Of course not. Just developing their DSP.

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Voluum is awesome, and a software/development-first company. Much respect. Most of the selfhosted thingamalings are just arbs

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Voluum is down from 1 hour. Can't see my active campaigns

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Huh? Thank you for the info. I will have to switch tracker now.

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Hi pronewbie,

We haven't incurred any service downtime for Voluum in the past hour.

Can you kindly send me a ticket with your Voluum mail so I can see if there's anything awry with your account?
Ticket mail: tickets@voluum.uservoice.com


Best,
Adrian

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Voluum isn't going anywhere as most of our clients are affiliates.. we seriously appreciate that so many of you have stuck with us since the beginning.

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@iAmAttila I can see how that touches a nerve, and it sucks. Just like you, I'm very passionate about our industry and its growth too. I also don't know about the full context of your conversation between you and Robert, but if I'm to take a guess as to why Robert said what he did, I'd say it because there are a few facts and realities about our industry and some of the practices that we cannot ignore, So before everyone starts bashing think over the following first. (No, I'm not a Robert/Voluum fan boy, we've never spoken or met. But I'm a fan of people and companies, who are doing stuff to move the industry forward for us all. I've been in the game long enough to understand their decisions. It's something I think about a lot. )

Affiliates have always been and still are an expendable "bottom of the food chain" channel. As you've mentioned, once affiliates are used to build up a company, they are usually dumped, especially if there's a need to reduce risk.

Part of the reason for this is the fact that although it's not the case for the entire affiliate community, there are bad apples that mess things up for all affiliates.

Yeah is cool that an aff can make a ton of cash by skirting TOS with cloaking/blackhat etc, all this makes companies like FB, Google etc not want to work with the channel beyond a certain point.

Everyone is free to make money, but it also means the affiliate channel becomes a crowd companies don't want to associate with.

80/20 rule applies here. If 80% of fraud, tos violations and problems come from a channel and you could fix that by just dissociating from that channel, it's often an easy biz decision to make. Especially if that same channel is becoming a smaller and smaller % of total revenue. Affiliates may drive revenue, but the entire yearly spend of all the affiliates out there probably doesn't add up to the quarterly ad budget/spend of a major brand.

I've said this multiple times, if we are to grow and be taken seriously by the billion dollar brands that could benefit so much by working with affiliates, we need to clean up and do it quickly.

There's a LOT of money sitting out there that will never flow our way if things stay the way they are. The short sightedness is costing us all way more than most realize.

The last time I blogged about this issue many years ago, I mentioned how this is not a "I'm more holy/better than you statement or way of thinking." When I was new in the affiliate space, I had my moments of short sightedness too. It's only after really understanding how all the pieces work together, that I realized more about the greater harm

It starts with the "Thought Leaders" in the space stepping up and being real leaders for the industry. Stop using and teaching about methods that validates the reason why saying you are an affiliate immediately categorizes you as a low life scammer in the eyes of many.

PS: On our end we are staying away from developing tech that enables some of the more blackhat methods even it it means leaving a ton of cash on the table. That's why we haven't built cloaking into P202 even though we could have created one of the most advanced systems available.

PPS: @iAmAttila Just in case it came across wrong, I'm in no shape or form saying you are a part of the problem. I've only really seen you talking about the stuff that will take as more in the direction of where we should be heading as an industry.

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100% agreed here.

Theres more money out there than I believe most people realize.

The two biggest advertisers we're working with right now (on my network) are both 100mm+ companies, and they are very vigilant about following the law.

They break the rules, but they follow the law.

Transparency is important to the growth of any individual, of any company, and of any industry.

I would never be able to be in a married/committed relationship with my wife if I was continually using canned pickup lines on her, and sheisty NLP tactics on her all day. Maybe that works to get laid, but it wont foster a safe/trusting/fulfilling relationship.

Similarly, if I ran my affiliate network like many people run affiliate networks (ie. 'sell' affiliates on 'the highest' payout, but slowly increase the shave for affiliates, and/or send fraud/unmonitored traffic to advertisers) I would be able to build a substantial/lasting business.

If StackThatMoney ran their operation just trying to get more subscribers without using that capital to expand into new arenas (ie. conferences/meetups/guides/training/etc) then the userbase would grow weary and eventually die out.

If Voluum ran their operation just trying to help people skirt around ad networks, then the ad networks would eventually grow weary, and make it harder for Voluum users to advertise.

Being transparent in no ways means being a saint either. Some of my richest friends run companies in the binary options, gold, and nutritional supplement industries.

I believe to grow the industry, affiliates need to focus on innovation, creativity, and other stuff that people like Mr. Green and a lot of the other people on this forum are proponents of.

All the richest affiliate marketers I see EMBRACE change, and go on to create bigger, 'more legit' companies. Theres nothing wrong with that. As a community we should support that.

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Really thoughtful comments here!

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Laurent here founder @ trackingdesk
One of our users suggested I get involved in this thread since there is plenty of action about switching trackers, but more importantly some high level discussions. Having been in the affiliate industry since 1998, I have seen quite a few things and from both sides of the fence.

A $70 billion industry (just in the US) isn't going to disappear because of some blackhat methods and other issues related to TOS violation. Yes, that's a number that I pulled from a couple of research documents from Forrester research Mc Kinsey consulting. Those guys do not have a clue about STM, TrackingDesk, Voluum or the affiliate summit, yet, they gather figures from the top companies involved with performance marketing such as eBay, Amazon, CJ and other big players. And while it's true that the affiliate is the last bit of the food chain, it is still the essential part, without which there is simply no performance / affiliate marketing industry.

And yet, strangely enough, while reading all those reports trying to extract a magic figure (i.e. how many affiliates are out there? How many make at lest $X/month), I realized that this figure was simply unknown. Top consultants scratched their head, went to their clients to gather some info, I spoke to top executives at Hasoffers, Cake and other companies and the answer was simply the same. "we know what we have in store, we dont know what's out there, but we know there are plenty more". You can read the affstats survey, which is interesting, but it's a few thousands people, you can check the combined attendance of all the affiliate conference, worldwide and you'll probably hit the 200k mark.That's it. And we all know that there are so many many more... Millions!

So let's take a step back and look at what retailers, enterprises, app developpers and others, see as a huge marketing channel, which is growing every year, as a one of their main revenue's growth drives. Now that we know that, let's not just congratulate ourselves, but let's start raising our head and stop considering the affiliate marketing industry as a low level, last bit of the food chain, black hat industry or a community trying to be heard by the big shots.

Mr. Baffoe - The affiliate marketing industry is "taken seriously by the billion dollar brands", not only because the affiliate marketing industry is a many-multi-billion dollar industry, but because online advertising is often not what it seems to be, while affiliate marketing remains a solid, down to earth business model. You're talking about "bad apples" in the affiliate industry? Let me remind you, that it is estimated that about 50% of CPM/cpc spent, worldwide is being spent on botnets and that the top CPM sellers are not the companies that you would suspect but the top, white-collars, clean cut guys that you only wish would give the affiliate marketing industry some respect...
Yet, those guys have all been reluctant to implement real data forensic software to prevent reselling fake eye balls.
This is precisely why, the billion dollar brands are increasing their budget toward performance marketing rather than allocating budgets to "black boxes" buying traffic from robots

Anyone cares to check what was the cpm spent worldwide? If you think that affiliate marketing did some fraud, then think again and look closely at the white colar big ad networks hiding behind the hype-buzz-fancy motos such as programatic media buying, audience targeting, data targeting, big data analyics and so forth...

I'm not angry I'm just saying that it can only do everyone some good, to take a step back and look at the overall industry from a more pragmatic and reasonable stand point.

Getting back to the innitial point - Voluum being slow -
Software combined with distributed infrastructure/cdn isn''t something easy to put in place and maintain, especially when you handle what is the most valuable commodity of the user - TRAFFIC. So, we might not have their problems, but we are on the same side Cloud Based vs Self Hosted.

For those of you old enough to remember, this ever going discussion is like 15 years ago IT people arguing about:

Microsoft Exchange vs Gmail
or
Mainframe vs cloud computing
or
Memory stick vs dropbox

Yes, i've also heard about the new self hosted tracker. Clearly, the guys did a great job developping nice features.

But no matter how cool is the application, how great are the features, self hosted remains self hosted with all its limitations and vulnerabilities : Security, software maintenance, scalability, dependency. When the server is down... it is down.

My 2 cts... on that.

Have a nice week end!

Laurent

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