Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns

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1 Weird Trick TO LOSE a Customer (51)

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Hi there STM Family. It has been a while.

Right now I am totally fed up with Thrive, since Clickbooth's takeover, the customer support has gone downhill, response times lacking, and I've experienced numerous situations where the server will go offline or some other issue will cause my campaigns not to track and load.

Most recently, yesterday, I needed my SSL certificates updated, as they had expired and my dashboard wouldn't load, but it took 24+ hrs to get it installed (a 2 minute job).

Now today, their devs pushed an update out that took out my tracking links, inbound and out, costing me to lose $x,xxx in rev and traffic costs.

So today, I ask, since I have over a years worth of valuable data, if there are some tracker recommendations the community can provide me that are reliable (NO CRASHING/DOWNTIME/AT LEAST HAVE SOME LOAD BALANCING/BACKUP IN PLACE), are suitable for high volume traffic (300-500k impressions daily) AND perhaps, may allow me to somehow import data from thrive, or at least, has the ability to do what Thrive does with branches, and their bot-filtering.

I had a quick look into BeMob, but I'm not so sure about it, it looks like a copy of Voluum with a slightly lower price tag.

Voluum, for that amount of volume, may end up being rather costly, especially if I scale past that (sometimes 1m clicks per day).

FunnelFlux is on my list of trackers to compare but I heard about stability issues, although, possibly solved now with their managed solutions.


Thank you fam!

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hey andy_d

i use Voluum but am looking to make the switch. running mostly pops so its becoming quite expensive relatively speaking.

@miteshmuley put together a list of alternative trackers here

hope it helps.

please report back and findings. its too bad Thrive is failing like this. seems like all these tracking companies keep dropping the ball.

I've also been looking into binom and bemob.

good luck fam!

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Yeah, the fact that they seem to push out updates without stress testing them, or even testing on a shadow-copy of a current install to ensure compatibility, seems mind boggling to me.

I mean, it's a live environment, where thousands of dollars are actively being spent on traffic, i understand development work is hard, and mistakes/bugs do happen, but i also used to be a dev, so I'm aware of the protocols to prevent this type of thing from affecting live environments, but I've seen them drop the ball numerous times with buggy updates.

Truly lost my patience now, have lost well over 5 figures in the past few years just due to these fuck ups.

The last time all I got was 50% off my next bill.. $125 in savings for an $x,xxx loss

Pretty awful.

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Hey Andy, I recommend you Binom.
I switched from Voluum to Binom myself when the cost got too high.
Send me a PM if you are interested then I can tell you about my exact server, tracker, CDN and DNS Setup that I run.
It doesn't cost too much but can easily handle high volume.
I also can assure you that Binom support is really good, never disappointed me.
Binom has an option to directly import all settings from Voluum, maybe the support has an idea how to import from Thrive as well.

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Not found anything that compares to Voluum.

Paying annually gets you 20% off, so the top agency plan would run at 800 a month. You’ll likely be fine on a lower plan also.

The auto optimizing offer feature is truly awesome however, so I’d argue that if your volume was sufficient it would pay for itself

Binom is solid, but you have to also factor in the infrastructure costs. You’ll want multiple installs, geo load balanced etc to get a true comparison... plus server headache is all you

Plus
- mobile app for reporting
- pulling reports is very very fast
- mobile responsive interface (Thrive is impossible!)
- beta landing page pixel works well
- nice extras like a dedicated tracking domain included
- live chat support
- well documented api

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Come on over to Prosper202 land

In terms of support, I will be your main point of contact.

It scales to millions of clicks a day, I just setup a server for a client, and it handles 1.2 million clicks per hour on a $40 a month server.

You only pay $202 a year for unlimited servers

The new proprietary purlink technology means that if you are running landing page campaigns you are guaranteed to get the absolute fastest redirects without setting up multiple geo located servers.

How? There are no redirects. Nothing from ad to lander and nothing from lander to offer. There’s a lot of magical secret sauce to make this all possible, and once I get 1.9.51 launch on Friday I will have some time to explain how it all works.

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When I decided to switch from Voluum I tested several other trackers (and also used other trackers before) and for Binom is just the best tracker I found so far.

Sure, I can absolutely understand that arguement.
I am a completely noob myself when it comes to server stuff but it was no problem at all to get Binom running on a completely fresh server.
I have my tracker installed there and also save my landers on the same server.
The server costs me about $50 per month and can easily handle several hundred k visitors per day.
Besides that I also pay few bucks per year for DNS.
I also did 1:1 splittests between Voluum and Binom to compare clickloss and redirect speed and had no disadvantages there compared to Voluum.
So far I didn´t have any server headaches at all.
Apart from that the Binom interface was loading faster than Voluum (don´t know how it is with Voluum nowadays).

- Binom also has a mobile app
- Reports are also very fast, besides TXT and CSV export you can even copy the values directly to clipboard
- Interface is not completely responsive but I also check it very often from my phone and it´s woking very good
- Binom also has LP pixel, besides that it also has integrated landers for non redirect campaigns
- As many domains as you like (with and without SSL). In campaign setup you can even choose which domain to show as referrer when you use meta refresh
- Also very fast support, never had to wait longer than few minutes
- Binom API is so easy, you just add &api_key=YOUR_API_KEY to any page of the reports and get the stats in JSON format

You should check the Binom live demo if you didn´t do it already.
I was also sceptical before I switched but the support answered my questions very good and after I tested Binom myself I was fully convinced.
Also you don´t even need to setup anything from scratch when you switch, you just import all your campaigns, landers, offers and so on from Voluum directly to Binom.

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I'm so pleased to hear this! Also, thanks for the kind words Nick.

It took many many months for our data scientists to build this feature, the next iteration will be with LP/offer auto optimization, increasing ROIs in ways a human could never do. The name of the game for the past years has been creating as much granular real-time reporting as possible, now we are entering the era of automation as users are overwhelmed with all the data. Voluum has many thousands of reports that you can dig thru on any single campaign, we're now focusing on having AI to do the hardest part for you and to make you more money than you ever could manually. It's just the beginning.

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I think that it is not the infrastructure, that should be compared but the result itself. Most of our customers switched from Voluum, moved all campaigns and did not lose single percent of ROI/profit (initially, we developed own tracker for our team, so all speed issues were in priority). Clients are not stupid, to lose money just for fun. Also, a significant part of them works with pop-traffic, which is the most sensitive in terms of redirects speed. The thing is that the difference in most cases is not so big as to influence the result. Also, traffic source servers do not typically have a cloud infrastructure, even though they work with traffic from all over the world (hello, popads). Some customers take 2 servers, for example US and EU, or EU and Asia (especially in Thailand). All those manipulations do not cost them any significant amount of time, because we set up servers and trackers by ourselves, for free. And in terms of money it goes, sometimes, for 1-10 times cheaper than Voluum. In addition, people get functions that are not present in Voluum. All our customers aware of Voluum perfectly (I myself used voluum for a year), but they chose us. So there are reasons for that. People pay for the result, not for promises, beliefs or amazon web service.

As for the auto-optimization, I also think that this is cool, although in practice it is not always effective (often there are not enough statistics data for particular campaign). We have been privately working on this for about 2 years. In many respects the tracker was started for the sake of automated schemes, integration with sources, "money button". xD I believe we will show this functionality to all our customers in this fall.


In any case, we really appreciate Voluum, and believe that in some parts it is close to be ideal. We have never worked on the model "just copy and sell cheaper", Binom has lots of its own solutions and improvements. It is just if some UX-things we will do deliberately not as you – the will simply be worse. And we think about customers in the first place. You can also copy something from us For example Adsbridge lately took "import of campaigns from Voluum" (what a coincidence!), haha. But we do not mind.

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Out of interest, what are your customers typically spending for a three region geo setup?

Major costs I can see roughly
3 x VPS: 200 (prob on the low side)
Geo DNS: 50
Managed Geo DB: ?
Backup: 30
Web panels: 30 (serverpilot or similar x 3)

Still really interested in Binom, just a bit hesitant with infrastructure to make it comparible

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@nickpeplow
Just check my reply above.
I use one dedicated server for tracker and landers: about $50/month
DNS: don't know exactly but it's about $40 or $50 per year
CDN is free
No Web panels at all, had it running with Plesk before but Plesk made problems.
Now I run just the blank server but it's really easy to add and maintain new domains.
If you any questions just send me a PM.

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I'm thinking to switch from Voluum, since the costs are getting really high.

I'm planing to go on with binom, but main concern is the geo and carrier detection, as I usually have paths divided by carriers, so its important that the detection is accurate, and won't end up sending the users through the wrong path.
@twinaxe since you been working with binom, maybe could give an input on this? did you notice big difference between Voluum and binom carrier detection?

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Just wanted to post here, to be fair, and let everyone know that Stephen offered 3 months of free service for the issue mentioned in this thread. Not that it covers my losses or the stress, but it's a nice gesture.

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That's nice, sounds fair and definitely better than nothing.

Issues like this can drive us crazy.

Especially if the tracker is cloud hosted offered as SaaS I expect zero down times and no messing with servers at all (we have anyway mess with some many other things already).

Good luck Andy!

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Another follow up to this thread. I kept my silence recently, out of a mutual agreement with Stephen, that if he would reimburse my losses, I wouldn't bring it up, but now, another issue has cropped up (the THIRD one in a month's time) and I've lost my patience.

Edit: Taking out the SECOND issue that occured, since, a deal is a deal. Let's just say, the team was incompetent and didn't do something CRUCIAL that they said they would do, leading to more losses.

Now, my tracking links are just going to random shit. Old pages, random offers, you name it. It's not performing as it should.

It's Sunday night, I've been trying to rush to find other tracking software that can fulfil my needs however I am struggling to find one that can do what I can do with Thrive (in particular, with Branches, and rotating several 'groups' of offers) and now scrambling to find alternatives that can do the same thing.

I just don't trust the platform any more.

Bugs, issues, one after the other, costing me loads of money and stress.

Voluum doesn't seem to be able to do the branches, so I dunno, BeMob, Binom, Adsbridge, all seem to be clones of some sort and don't have that functionality either.

IF anyone can shed some light on this, that would be great.

Basically need a way to rotate offers on an offer wall, with multiple niches.

For example.

Offer wall has 5 CTAs, each for a different niche. Each niche has 5 offers you can split test each day and assign weights to.

Anyone know if this is possible with one of the RELIABLE platforms out there or am I out of luck here?

Ps: Just got informed that the tech team will be online in 2 hrs to investigate the issue. Great, it's only 2am over here where I am. Guess I'm not sleeping tonight.

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When I understand it correct you have your lander/offer wall with 5 different CTA buttons for different niches and all of them have several different offers attached that you want to rotate and set the weight per offer.
If this is what you want to do then check Binom.
Set up a path for each niche and add the appropriate offers there and set their weight for the rotation.
Then send the users for each CTA button to the appropriate path with the different offers.

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This is what I wasn't sure it could do.

Right now I've resorted to a fresh install of Thrive until their tech team can try and resolve the issue with my current install.

Will check out Binom also.

Paid for Voluum, for one month, unfortunately, don't think it's capable of doing what I need it to :-(

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You can consider https://peerclick.com/, it's a cloud hosted solution and their platform looks very similar to Binom too.

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@andy_d
If talking about Branches, Voluum can totally do that using pretty much the same mechanism called Flows. If you have any troubles setting this up, please, ping our support, and they'll get you covered.

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Any reasons why not Funnelflux? Would love to hear your considerations if you've had considered them as I'm also on the lookout for trackers.

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I think what you're trying to accomplish may be possible with Voluum.

You'd have to use the impression pixel to track LP visits, but then you could setup rule based redirects for each of the 5 groups, eg
eg voluumtrk.com/?campid=xxx&var1=group1 for your LP link, then setup the 5 landers+ offers or offers there for group1. I saw someone doing something similar recently but haven't tested it out myself yet.

Otherwise funnelflux can surely do that funnel you're describing and more. Can also auto-optimize for EPV at multiple branches of a funnel and has built in multi-variate testing features.

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I guess you're after something like this:



Where your wall has multiple links, each redirecting to its own set of rotations?

With FunnelFlux, you could even inject some auto optimization instead of random rotators, like that:



More details in this video.

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So quick little update here..

I got on a new install and everything was running smoothly until a few days ago..

Incoming traffic just goes to random offers in the offer list.


WIthout any apology or formal email to acknowledge this fuck up, which affected me and many others, they release a 'fix' a few hours later..

Well guess what ?

It's back.. the same damn issue a few days later..

What the hell is wrong with these developers?

Do they not realize the seriousness of releasing to the live environment.

It's a shame because I love the platform, but this shit is just getting ridiculous now.


STOP RELEASING TO THE LIVE ENVIRONMENT, STOP PATCHING MY INSTALL WITH YOUR DAMN UPDATES THAT BREAK IT.

Oh on top of that, my tracker had a butt load of small outages over the last month or so, pingdom recording at least an hours worth of outages.

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Hey Andy,

sorry to hear that you have problems again.

Looks like you really like that tracker (which I understand, I also stick to tracker), but maybe you should test something else on the side?

Anyway, I hope your issue is solved now and it won't happen again.

But in general, there are so many moving parts in our business that it's sometimes magical that those fuckups doesn't happen all the time.

For me the problems are sometimes on the other side - affiliate networks scripts for sending postbacks are failing or having some tech issues, I do not remember how many time I had to alarm them to check it.

Stuff like this seems to happen all the time.

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I checked out 4-5 other platforms a few months ago and none could do what Thrive does for me.

1) branches
2) traffic filtering module
3) relatively mobile friendly
4) I have tied into the API to automate some stuff (probably doable with other platforms too, but will need work)

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Didnt get this. Able to elaborate?

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Funnelflux really sounds like your best bet overall. It can make extremely complex funnels, and can auto-optimize those routes. Last I heard Voluum had a funnels feature in the works but that was months ago.

On the flip side I don't recommend it if you're just running standard LP > offer type campaigns (Voluum or Binom is better there). The UI is not great for getting things done fast, and it's also frustratingly somehow the only tracker (unless Prosper202 remained unchanged) that isn't natively designed to track multiple campaigns using the same funnel/flow on a traffic source. Have to manually pass in campaign info to a url, and there's no quick way to get to said campaign reports. To me it's only worth the hassle if you're making non-basic funnels.

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I’d hit up quantox and get something custom made. Probably take a month to get something basic off the ground, should pay for itself pretty quick.

Seeing as you can point the developer to your existing setup, minimal input would be required from you.


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Just another fun update...

Thrive has had issue after issue for me, my install this week has for 4 days now, not shown correct stats and I've had to wait til the next day to get accurate statistics.

Crying shame.

I'm now looking at other platforms more and more and hoping I can find one that is suitable.

I think PixelK can support Branches, "Option Campaign".. but not sure about how reliable it is as a platform.. haven't seen many talk about it....

http://www.pixelk.com/docs/#url=%2Fdocs%2Fcamp-option

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OMG I just read this thread and I feel really sorry for you man, I understand your frustration and I can tell you from my experience that developers can sometime be "retards" when it comes to bugs like this. Also from my experience I would tell you RUN long time ago. I understand a serious problem like this can happen... once, but reading this thread it already happened like 5 times to you, you should vacate the ship long time ago and if you did not then do it NOW. I understand the pain of moving away from something that is familiar to you, that you know all the workflows and you feel comfortable with, but the sooner you move away the better for you, no more frustration and no more lost money. That said I strongly suggest that you try Binom, Binom never fails trust my words :-)

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Hey Andy, i moved to Binom and very happy with results. used to have only cloud trackers, but i hate when they limit viewing my past data.

i checked what branches are - and they also have MVT testing - https://docs.binom.org/mvt.php

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Hey bro, yeah I checked out binom, ran through campaign set up, it's *almost* what I needed, I passed on my suggestions to the team to see if they can implement something similar.

The MVT, ability to filter out by unique visits, and several other features seemed good.

I wish there was a entire section for creating "cloaking" filters / rules, that you could apply in bulk to several campaigns or globally.

i.e. A global bot filter/rule + specific rules for a type of traffic source or campaign.. rules such as IP range black/whitelisting, ISP black/whitelisting, url parameter true/false validation (and redirection), etc..

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You can create rotations.
These are basically sets of rules that you can apply to many different campaigns.

Edit:
Also pretty cool with Binoms rules is that you can use RegEx and comparisons

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they still seem to be having similar problems lol

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Yep, had an outage last week, have had several occasions where pingdom will report outages on either the dashboard or tracking links.

My profit is always inflated during the day, when recalculations occur, the end result is usually much lower. This is a bug that's being worked on apparently.

Overall, though, it has been more stable (in 2019, at least), but I am considering Binom again, only that, branches still aren't a thing and I'd have to set up multiple campaigns to emulate the same functionality

I know RedTrack has a similar function, but I don't know much about them, only that Atilla has mentioned them several times.

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@andy_d

Did you explore funnelflux? Their feature set is really unmatched from everything I've tried, although wasn't a big fan of navigating their UI. They're working on a new Saas version however (forget name) and re-doing things from the ground up its looking pretty slick from last I saw in their email and at AWAsia.

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I wouldn't be surprised if it goes down some day and stays down with all this Amazon survey stuff going on.

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Yeah I gave it a try a while back and i personally didn’t like working with it, the visual building of campaigns just isn’t something I enjoyed working with, great concept but I prefer the old school way.

It also weirdly messed up my landing page functionality when I tested it, couldn’t figure out why.

Otherwise the platform does look mega powerful and I’m sure it’s awesome for certain campaigns/users - just not sure it’s right for me (looking forward to the new version though, I’ll check it out then)

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Ah the branded flows?

Yeah they could lose their AWS license I’m sure, need to be cautious.

Depends if the complaints go up the chain and report tracking domains though which doesn’t
Happen often.

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I have been using Thrive since before Clickbooth and have found the exact same thing. Buggy and slow support since the sale.

Recently we were having issues where redirect rules were not firing. Support could not help us. So we tried a double filter, i.e. the user goes through some heavy filters, then depending on the outcome, goes into another rotation with some light filters. STILL the redirect rules did not always fire. Support could not solve the problem, so we are currently testing Kintura.

So far I have to say I am impressed. Especially if you require good proxy / bot filters. Kintura is just worlds apart from Thrive. It picks up Luminati visitors for example.

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Wow. That just sounds bad.

When you're done testing Kintura, come on board Voluum - not that long ago we've introduced our proxy reports, and also proxy rules to redirect that traffic accordingly. Not to mention our AFK capabilities with suspicious visits/clicks.


Karolina

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Yep..

Support hasn't been as quick to address issues it seems.

So many issues have popped up, and are yet to be resolved.

I can't do exports of aggregated data for example right now if the data is too dense, I have to stick to smaller time frames.

That data was expensive to acquire and I can't even use it. No idea on when it'll get fixed either.

Their branches have an issue now where you can't select multiple offers and change their weighting.

I get downtime issues every now and then still, but they're short lived (1-10mins usually).

My revenue is always inflated and thus stats are always off until it recalculates.

Fun fun

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After all the trouble you are still using it?

I thought you wanted to switch to Binom some time ago already.

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Nah, nobody has implemented the branches yet, working with Voluum this week to figure out a workaround

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There is a workaround to achieve what branches eventually give you so let's hope for the best. Keep us updated.


Karolina

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Another update for you guys!

After the third attempt at updating my install to their all new amazing version (sarcasm), they knocked my redirects offline AGAIN.

Last week my redirects went down for 6 WHOLE HOURS.

Today they didn't even bother to properly check redirects.

Clickbooth, can you guys please fire the team of developers you have and hire capable ones?

Cheers

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Why are you still using their product after so many problems ... is there a particular reason for that?

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Oh dear, the thread started more than 2 years ago and you still have such issues and you still use the tracker.

Are there really no alternatives for you?

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I was going to say the same thing. There must be a feature that Andy really likes on their side for which he's not giving up after losing so much money in a few years because of their problems.
Personally, I wouldn't have the patience to go through with it. I admire him for still sticking to them through and through

- Leo.

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He should get an award for being the most loyal client

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Well, being a tracker ourselves - let me share some unbiased inside experience:
If you are happy to handle all the hardware, servers, related headaches and rely your tracker performance on your own "infrastructure" performance - go with @Binom - I would say they are the best at self-host.


If you are looking for SaaS tracker (and quite a few of fellow SaaS trackers have already added to the discussion)
I suggest you do this - ask each of them for proof-of-concept - let tracker teams help you set-up your campaign or two before paying anything This will show you two things:
- their team commitment to have you as a user longterm and the level of support you can expect
- the set of features that you need for your specific case
- and only then consider the price - paying for something that does not meet your needs does not make sense.

It would be great if you add RedTrack (https://redtrack.io) to this experiment - setting up POC for our aspiring customers is something we do regularly, so would be interested to learn about your overall experience if you will go this way.

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