Home > Tracking Campaigns > FunnelFlux

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FunnelFlux Announcement + Promo! (37)

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Hi all,

I just wanted to make a brief but very important announcement – pay attention if you run affiliate campaigns and use a tracker (how’s that for targeting broad, lol). There is a limited-time promo waiting for you at the end of the rainbow.

Many of you will know me, one of the STM Forum admins and contributors, creator of the 6 Week AMC and super cool guy (or so I tell myself every day).

Many of you will also know of, have tried or are currently using FunnelFlux – a tracking system that we at iStack are co-developing as part of our STM Ventures arm.

Recently we also brought on Eric Dyck to take over leadership of iStack Training. We have a lot brewing there, you’ll see more about that soon enough.


But what of me?

Since I am powering down my involvement in training I must be setting my sights elswhere right?

I am pleased to announce that I will be taking charge of the directions of FunnelFlux

What can you expect from this?

Well, in the short-term, here is what is going to happen:

• We are shortly rolling out Digital Element integration for carrier lookups, something which has been lacking (and we all know how critical good mobile carrier stats and targeting are these days)
• We have done a massive database restructure to increase reporting performance and solve some issues, provide some more traditional reporting methods, and this is coming shortly.
• We also have a major UI update inbound which will make things simpler, easier to use, and of course, sexier.
• Expect massive increases in the amount of support documentation, onboarding, training videos and so on to help anyone – from noob to veteran – get up to speed with FunnelFlux and how to use it and its more advanced features. (I built the 6 Week AMC from the ground up, rest assured I know how to make tutorial videos)
• Increased transparency into what is being worked on and stuff in the pipeline
• Technical support will increase in responsiveness, although with the above documentation, you probably won’t need much – you’ll be an expert in no time!
• Other goodies in store...

These updates will be happening over the next few months, so if you jump in now you have a lot to look forward to (and will see a lot of improvements very quickly).


And in the long term...?

I will be spearheading the advancement of FunnelFlux to become a reborn, fully managed SaaS product – no servers to manage or worries with scaling, as is becoming the desire and expectation of many affiliates and media buyers these days.

There seem to be a lot of “hosted trackers” appearing as of late with questionable origins, eerily similar UIs and repeated claims about being the fastest tracker, industry leading, unlimited this and that etc.

Rest assured we will be building something bigger and better that leverages our expertise in the industry, unique approaches taken in FunnelFlux, and my passion for technical challenges and solutions that crush other ideas out there.



With that pep talk out of the way, here’s a PROMO for you

For anyone who doesn't have an active subscription, we're giving you a 30-day trial for only $1.

On top of that, this will include free installation and VPS setup (usually $49) should you want it.
(note: for VPS’s we support Vultr and can set you up rapidly. No shared hosting – your campaign’s funeral and not something we support, ever. For dedicated servers, well, you probably have your own support person or know what you’re doing).

To avail of that, just reach out to support after signing up with a support ticket titled "Funnel Flux STM Promo Install Request".

We also know that, with the acquisition of Thrive by Clickbooth, a number of people have been looking to test out another tracker. That decision is up to you and we won’t scaremonger or shamelessly self-pitch.

HOWEVER, to add to the promo, we will also assist with migration of offers/landers to FunnelFlux from Thrive for any transitioning users. We can't really do stats since the systems are very different, but we can at least grease the wheels for you by porting over all those landers/offers you have set up, their names/URLs and of course swapping their tokens out. Who wants to grind through that right?



So, ready to get involved?

>> I want a free* month of FunnelFlux <<

*$1 is basically free. Also, this promo will expire at the end of May!



That’s all folks. Happy tracking and I look forward to helping make your campaigns make more money for you in the future.

-Zeno

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Hey Zeno, maybe its because I'm using Tapatalk - but the link above doesn't work

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More details would be appreciated regarding pricing after iStack involvement and all promised upgrades in the future and also after the $1 30 days trial.

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Any eta on when managed cloud will be ready? I don't like self hosted.

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I'm very excited about that one - Zeno has proven time and time again that he is a talented, knowledgeable and dynamic leader. He's the person you want to have to make your project THE project.

Some pretty amazing stuff are coming soon!

I know many of you will be interested in the SaaS version of FunnelFlux and I expect current customers will have questions about that one. Just so you know, if you migrate to the SaaS one when it's available, you will have the ability to seamlessly (automatically) copy all your campaigns' assets from your FunnelFlux self hosted install to your cloud hosted account.

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good to see active development of funnelflux.

> Digital Element integration for carrier lookups

Super! Best data available. Not cheap but the one to use.

Congrats @Zeno on the new focus. Are you staying involved @vitavee?

As it doesn't mention self hosted will remain an option, I'm assuming that will be discontinued? Sad to see another self hosted tracker disappearing. ��

Just when its become painless to manage your servers for self hosted apps.

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Yeah definitely staying involved

We don't have any plan to discontinue the self-hosted version - even though the majority wants cloud hosted, there are still many affiliates who prefer to control everything.

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Cool so self hosted staying. Good news.

"Own your Data" affiliates will be happy with that

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+1 ... I agree!

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Good luck with that. Always good to have a more competitive space.

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The roadmap looks really impressive. Good luck

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If it is zeno working on a product, there can only be one outcome:

Pure awesomeness.

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SAVVY! Looking forward to it. Funnel Flux is the best tracker I've ever used (9 years as an affiliate and counting). Can't wait to see what you guys can do with it.

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Probably! Fine for me... and others it seems.


We have no plans to change pricing for the self-hosted version at this stage. Upgrades and so on will be made more publicly available in the near future, customers will hear about that later.



No ETA as of yet, but we will release a SaaS product in stages as we move through different production milestones -- so there will be alpha testers, beta testers, and different points in time where we will do intakes with the product in its early state.


Our efforts are certainly focusing elsewhere but we will definitely keep the self-hosted FunnelFlux going and updated -- though its unlikely that we will spend much time porting SaaS features to the self-hosted version if overbearing.

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Ok, now this will finally move FunnelFlux to the absolute TOP league, where it rightfully belongs

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Are there any features that Voluum currently has (besides being cloud hosted) that Funnel Flux doesn't?

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Actually on my personal opinion is better than Voluum. By only using the visual funnel builder, it's just faster and easier to build specific flows based on conditions. Not to consider multi-level drill-down (a life saver) and pricing.

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This is a little hard to answer... for the most part, there are lots of clear features that most trackers all have -- to some extent, with the more advanced/rare features like upsell tracking, statistics processing, etc. being something that some trackers have and some do not

On the other hand, some people consider ways the user interface works as a feature -- e.g. tabbed views, being able to select many offers and do a batch edit, etc.

There are plenty of differences given all of that.

The only specific thing I can think of off hand is that Voluum has impression tracking via an impression pixel and integrates directly with Zeropark (thought thats not a fair thing to compare to given they are operated by the same company).

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Interesting. Correct me if I'm wrong. A while ago, I understood that funnelflux is built with PHP, with use of IONcube. I'm wondering if the latest FF version is ready for use with PHP7. The question arises from the fact that PHP7 delivers a major performance increase compared previous versions. I'm not sure how or if this performance increase affects redirect speeds, though I can imagine that it would be beneficial in other areas of the code.

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Support for php 7 will definitely improve performance in all aspects.

In addition to speed, the server uses less CPU at higher traffic loads.

This is based off my metrics after switching to support php 7 last year.

It took a while for ioncube to support php7, but now that it's supported, I assume FF will be compatible with php7 if it's not already the case.

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Good news and as a FF user i'm waiting for this "database restructure" and see what are the improvements because big reports are the only point I dislike with FF.

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I'm sure the db restructuring will boost performance, but I'm betting the saas solution will be an even bigger performance boost.

In my experience most affiliates run self hosted tracking using highly inadequate servers for the performance needed from trackers.

For example if you are running the tracker on the same server as the database, you are already off the wrong direction

Same thing if you don't have multiple tracking servers, located in the geos your traffic is being generated. Of course they are load balanced etc etc.

Don't forget to also add a local replicated database in each geo as well since database connections also introduce latency. You can see there's more to this than meets the eye.

Up until a certain point, the costs to do this correctly for just your needs will usually always be more than what you will pay for a saas solution.

Add to that the fact that php really isn't the ideal software for tracking, but in terms of ability to install, it's the easiest for self hosted.

Self-hosted trackers are a dead and dying breed. Don't take that lightly

I'm saying that as the owner of a self hosted tracker about to celebrate its 10 year anniversary.

The end has come for self-hosted as you've known it.

Things are going to move more to saas and what I'm calling managed private saas.

This is basically what you get when you are able to have all the benefits of a saas solution combined with all the self hosted benefits such as full control/ownership of your data and privacy of running everything on your own infrastructure or cloud account.

The data ownership and control part is big because we are operating in a world where data has become equivalent to oil, gold etc. The people/companies that are already winning big are the ones with the most data to work with.

A managed private saas is possible now due to the rise and improvement of docker and container orchestration tools such as kubernetes.

There are exciting times coming up for us as an industry. Tracking tools are starting to mature and get better and this is going to fuel growth as affiliates and performance marketers get the capabilities to easily market and scale campaigns in ways that were not possible before.

Looking forward to seeing what the FF team comes out with.

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Hi
Now, I am using managed service of Thrive, I have about 2-3M view/day, Please tell me Can I use your tracker and how is about hosting to serve 2-3M view /day
Thanks

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PHP 7 support is coming this month.

Concerning the 2-3M views/day, @goshev has run some extensive tests, he will chime in soon

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Ok some time ago I ran a lot of tests with live traffic to get information on what hosting packages will handle xxx/k or xx/m traffic per day. @hieu nguyen those are the results:

#2 mil/daily hits — The VPS used for the testing was Vultr — 160/mo VPS — 8 CPU Cores/16GB RAM/300GB SSD storage. The hits sent to the server within an hour was 15% over the hits it was supposed to handle. However with the spikes we simulated the server was still stable. No errors were logged from the web, php, mysql services. The server had only FunnelFlux installed ( No landers on the same ).

#5 mil/daily hits — ( Dedicated server ) Depending on the data-center this price may vary ( E5-16xx/E5-26xx or higher CPU class this should give you 6+ cores / 12+ threads ), 32GB RAM, SSD storage ( RAID if the fee gets into your budget )). I have used E5-2620( single physical CPU )/32GB RAM/RAID-1 2x120GB SSD drives on SATA ports ( not NVMe SSD ). The base price for comparison would be in the 400USD range depending on the data-center. You can get this pretty cheap with Hetzner, I would never use them for important stuff but still up to you. The hits sent to the server within an hour was 15% over the hits it was supposed to handle. However with the spikes we simulated the server was still stable. No errors were logged from the web, php, mysql services. The server had only FunnelFlux installed ( No landers on the same ).

( I did not allow more than 15% spikes on all tests over the calculated hits per second to avg the number listed above per day )

I have used LEMP stack with MariaDB for all the tests ( no caching , if you add opcache and/or memcache thie numbers will probably increase ). Note that the LEMP stack configuration depends a lot on your traffic and hardware. There is no perfect configuration that will work on any server. So for that much traffic ( 3M per day ) make sure you have someone to monitor the server at least for the first few weeks in order to ensure it is as optimized as possible. The php used for the testing was 5.4, 5.6 gives you a performance boost and soon when the 7.x support is available the traffic that the same hardware should be able to handle will increase.

All the tests were completed with directly linked real offers. The traffic source we used was PopAds (it allows traffic shaping so we can make sure specific number of clicks per second will "pop" ). The campaigns set were configured to get traffic from 2+ countries on each continent. Asia and US/CA were the biggest contributors in our testing .

All the tests outlined above for hits per month were completed by sending 1 hour of traffic. The traffic per hour has been calculated #/24(hours)/60(minutes per hour)/60(seconds per minute). It is important to get a hosting package that will fit you resources requirements and put 20% on top of that at least to ensure stable performance in case of spikes.

The traffic burst have been limited to the hits per second so no spikes were present ( except those we simulated ). If you expect spikes to appear the server should be monitored for such and when those happen calculate the number of hits you get per second ( average ) and move to a VPS/Dedicated Server package that can handle such spikes. Any move to higher package on a VPS/Dedicated server involves some downtime so think about the highest number of hits you may get and go for that instead of doing something that will cover only your current resource requirements.

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Hi
For 2-4 M view/day , Can I use vultr cloud compute ? 16 CPU- 64 GB RAM ( I don't seee stronger VPS at https://www.vultr.com/pricing/)
also, For mobile data, your tracker have it ?

Thanks

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Just came across your AWE/A? interview. Forgive me in advance for fangirling but...

Having used nearly every tracker over the last 6 years, this is super exciting news. You're truly building a "by affiliates, for affiliates" grade platform and it shows.

The effort you put into the documentation alone says a lot.

What really sold me was the baked in MVT tools, traffic filters, and rules-based multi-user support.... the value-add of those features can't be understated.

Needless to say I'll be switching over asap.

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Lots of new features continuously being developed, that is great.

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Hey guys - new coupons pls?

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Heya,

No coupons available at the moment, although we moved our introductory sign up offer to a $1 trial, so you could argue that you went from paying $297 over 3 months to $198, which is a 33% discount. Not bad? :-P

We are working on creating special offerings for STM members, as part of some bigger initiatives for you STM folk (not just with FunnelFlux...), so you'll see benefits in the future!

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Wait till you play with time on page tracking and see our new MVT changes that accommodate mixing of server-side MVT + client-side JS tracking. Some complex challenges borne out of my FunnelFlux sales page work, which will address tracking in tricky environments with a "best of both worlds" approach.

We're also looking at making our on-page JS let users pull all tracker data for use in landers, more or less turning your tracker into an API service for GeoIP, device and ISP data.

There's a lot lined up for FunnelFlux's future and we're in the final stages of testing a managed service that will blow some socks off.

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Wow, lots of cool features! Im going to sign up and have a go.. After running with Voluum for several years, and also trying Thrive for some months. I see that Funnelflux is focused on affiliates, so might as well give it a try

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Wow, this is exciting!

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I am looking forward to this. I loved using funnel flux. I just hated dealing with servers. I am looking forward to testing things out once it's released.

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Have to say I'm extremely disappointed with Funnel Flux. I installed it via LaunchPal and sent some very light FB + Native traffic only to have it crash overnight. This is after less than $2k total spend. Neither LaunchPal nor Funnel Flux know what happened.

While Voluum lacks tons of features, this has never happened in 3 years of using it.

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That sucks big time. They SSH'd into your server and weren't able to find anything useful in the error logs?

Any comment from the FunnelFlux team on what's being done to prevent something like this from happening again?

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It's unfortunate to have a bad first experience like this and we've been trying to resolve it, and working closely with Launchpal to do so. I believe at this stage the DB has been recovered.

It's not clear exactly what happened as the logs you would expect to be present were completely gone, leaving all tech staff unable to diagnose what happened. Very strange, but I don't think this is a situation where FunnelFlux itself was at fault, rather there seemed to be some anomalous event that corrupted the DB, logs were deleted, etc. No idea really, it is not a usual scenario.

On the bright side Launchpal has been investigating areas where they can enable more logging to help prevent issues like this, where logs in one area might get wiped out by an unexpected event.

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