Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns

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Horrible Experience With Voluum Looking To Switch (19)

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I was not sure where i could find other media buyers to get help with my situation and did a google search and found this forum.

I've literally joined this forum to get feedback from other media buyers on my problems with voluum.

I have been using voluum for years since probably 2014 or 2015 but its looking like this is going to end very soon.

The problems started when last month I noticed that voluum had lowered the price of my plan without automatically reducing the price of existing customers like me.

Basically, the plan i had been on for years had been lowered by $100 and voluum kept billing me each month at the same old price.

I literally spent $100 per month extra for a year for nothing at all.

This of course angered me but it was the 2nd incident that made me start looking at moving to a new tracker.

On March 14th, i logged into my account and noticed my account was deactivated and all my campaign links where down.

I immediately sent an email to support@Voluum.com and i messaged them from inside the account.

They replied around 24 hours later saying there was a bug that was causing issues when they tried to charge my paypal account and that there was a developer working on it.

it would end up taking over 48 hours for my account to be reactivated.

I had several campaigns at the time and lost a significant amount of money.

also, it was not until i managed to get someone from voluum on skype that the issue was resolved.

email support was 100% useless and basically did nothing.

once i got someone on skype, i told him i was going to make it known publicly about the situation and within 1 hour the account was reactivated.

once they saw they could get bad publicity from me they finally solved the problem and quickly.

The final incident occurred this week.

on Friday (04-10-2020) we noticed a significant amount of traffic inside our affiliate account had not been tracked by voluum.

all these clicks had the voluum click id but none of these clicks seemed to have been tracked inside the voluum account.

this was very strange since how could voluum send the click id to the affiliate account without also registering that the visit had occurred.

it made no sense so i immediately contacted support.

I sent them a file with all voluum click id in the affiliate account and asked them why none of this traffic had been registered inside voluum.

It took them 4 days to respond and the response as always with email support made no sense.

They sent a message basically saying that the clicks actually had been tracked by voluum.

I responded by asking what they where talking about since during that time period none of the traffic is seen in voluum.

that was more then 12 hours ago and nothing since.

I've had enough of this.

what is a better option then these guys?

I've lost thousands of dollars because of these issues and the support is useless.

what is a better tracking option in 2020 that is easy to switch to?

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Sorry to hear about your experience, I'm a Voluum user myself for years and never had any serious problems with them.

Sometimes, the data can be off for a short while, it's not a norm, but it has happened to me in the past. But it always corrected itself after a while, so I guess they might have been doing some DB updates or something. I know several other Voluum users, so anytime I see something weird, I just ask them to confirm there is something going on. Don't want to sound like an advocate for them, but as any product, voluum can run into a small hickup at times too. But like I said, this was always for a very short period of time. I think they had one bigger issues several years ago, but that got sorted out too pretty soon.

All in all, I'm quite happy with their product.

Not entirely fair for sure, but it's kinda standard with any plan based services... they won't lower your price unless you ask for it I went through this with hosting MANY times over the years, the general hosting prices were dropping year after year but of course, they were happily charging me the agreed initial price unless I contacted them and asked for a new quote.

One way or another, there are many other alternatives if you wanna switch... there were never more solid trackers than these days

binom, redtrack, funnelflux, bemob, kintura, adsbridge, prosper202, thrive... all of them can do the job, you just need to pick the one with the features you need.

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Hey @rr2020

Let’s clarify all issues you’re mentioning here.

Karolina

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Voluum response seems pretty reasonable.

I don’t think anyone would want to be “downgraded” automatically and loose out on features they are using.

Cutting off tracking links after 7 days (if this was the case) seems a little aggressive though. I could absolutely see someone going on holiday before billing fails and missing any alerts. 30 days working links, but with login disabled after 7 days seems more in line with other apps

In fact, I’m pretty sure in the past we’ve not paid Voluum and it’s been a months grace, with a banner at the top counting down 30 days. Perhaps it changed

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It used to be much longer (21 days) but we had many clients abusing it - instead of unsubscribing, they used the longer window to track for free for almost a month.

We changed it to 7 days and in most cases it's working fine. Learning from this situation, we'll consider it case-by-case and switch to 21 days where needed.


Karolina

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unfortunately, things seem to be getting worst.

on Tuesday i received a reply from a new person who pretty much contradicted what the first person said.

remember the first reply was that the clicks actually had been tracked by Voluum.

and now this person said the clicks had not been tracked because it was a bot.

the worst part is that it seems Voluum goes inside customers accounts.

when i logged into my account yesterday i noticed my columns visibility had been changed.

I've had the same columns visible for the past 3-4 years probably longer so as soon as i logged in i knew something was wrong.

this is extremely strange to me.

i do not understand why voluum is logging into my account without my permission

and worst i do not know why they are making changes inside my account without my permission.

this is crazy

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You are incorrect about past issues being a bug.

The person i spoke to on skype repeated several times that there was a bug and your developer was working on it.

thats exactly what he kept saying to me.

it took you more then 2 days to reactivate my account.

email support was completely useless and the issue was only fixed after i got someone on skype and told him i was going to post about the situation in public.

i had dozens of campaigns running and lost all that money.

regarding current problems.

i do not understand what you are talking about.

what do you mean by glitch?

who said anything about a glitch?

also, this supposed "bot traffic" was sent to several campaigns all using different traffic sources.

how can all these clicks from different traffic sources be bot traffic all at the same time?

i do not understand.

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hi there,

do you know of a credible place where i can find reviews of all these options?

is there one that seems to have a very good reputation from what you know?

i will of course start searching on the forum for this info as well.

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All the ones you posted are solid, there are just differences in the campaign setup sequence, the "logic" in every tracker might be a bit different but in the end, they all get the job done. There are differences when it comes to handling more complicated funnels, funnelflux used to be better for complicated funnels when I last used it... not sure about it now since I didn't check it for a while.

Then there is a difference between self hosted and hosted trackers... for Binom, prosper... you need your own host. For Voluum, redtrack... you don't, since it's hosted by them.

Another difference is in the billing, some charge per event, some charge a monthly fee... the plans can be quite different so it's important to choose the right plan.

But I guess you already know most of this.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any up to date review of all the trackers, but maybe someone else does... anyone?

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I feel like I explained this already. The clicks were tracked but excluded (filtered out) from your reports - that's why you're not seeing them. More on this in my previous post:
The columns visibility has changed because you downgraded to a lower plan that doesn't have all the features your previous plan had - for example our Anti-Fraud Kit. Since the AFK is no longer included in your plan, Suspicious visits, Suspicious clicks, and all other columns related to it are no longer there.


Karolina

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You are now completely lying and im happy i have screenshots and im saving emails.

To anyone reading, this Karolina person is now 100% lying and i can prove it.

first, you are lying about the columns.

My account was downgraded more then a month ago and the columns changed this Tuesday of this week.

secondly, i have an email from someone at Voluum where they directly admitted they went inside my account and where responsible for columns change.

I repeat, i have an email yesterday from someone at voluum admitting they went inside my account and made changes without my permission. I can post a screenshot of the email if you want. so do not lie that the columns where changed Tuesday this week because of an account downgrade 6 weeks ago.

finally, your explanation of bot traffic makes no sense at all.

This traffic that voluum did not track was sent to dozens of campaigns all receiving traffic from different traffic sources.

how could so much bot traffic suddenly have been sent to dozens of campaigns across several traffic sources?

how is this possible?

it does not make sense.

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Wow, how many things can go wrong at once in one Voluum account.

I don't want to take sides with anyone because I am not involved in the situation but Voluum is a very reputable platform and what I read here are pretty bad accusations that are only backed by your words so far.

Most of the things you say are refuted by Voluum but their statements are also only backed by their words so far.

Such statements are a double-edged sword.

When you can prove it why don't you do it?

This could help a lot to strengthen your position but then your proof should be bulletproof.

Otherwise you risk to lose your credibility in a wink after such bold statements.

And one more thing, I saw it few times already in all the years where I am in the affiliate industry that someone pops up out of nowwhere, accuses a respected company of whatever issues he has with them, then he starts swearing and gets angry but eventually the situation is solved and the problem was on the users side.

Don't get me wrong, in no way I want to say that this is the case here as well because again, I am not involved in the situation and don't know any real facts about it apart from the statements of both involved parties.

And yes, such stuff can happen even with the best companies so it's possible that you are completely right.

But just accusing Voluum and calling them liars won't get you far.

When you have real and bulletproof evidence for your accusations post it and when you are right you can be sure that we try to find a a good solution together with you.

But without such proof I recommend to calm down a bit, stop swearing and calling the other people liars.
Otherwise you just create the impression of you not acting very professional and that won't help much to solve the issue.

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In the end, the thread was created to find another tracker. You've got a list of others, that should be it. Unless the real reason is to slate Voluum.

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because i do not think it is fair to post screenshots of a private conversation in a public forum unless absolutely needed.

i stand firmly by what i said.

Voluum did go inside my account and make changes to my account without my permission.

they have acknowledged this by email and i can prove it by taking a screenshot of their email.

i will wait and see what they reply here next and if needed i will post a screenshot of their email.

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As far as I know, this is a private forum, otherwise I want a refund

Voluum goes inside my account all the time and messes with my columns. It literally takes me two seconds to change the columns back to normal.

Granted, it's usually when I'm playing with a new feature or found a bug or some weird shit.

But I've never suspected anything nefarious, because... why on earth would they do that? To protect themselves from some tiny affiliate who pays them a few grand a year for a mid-level tracking plan? Doubtful.

They have way bigger fish to deal with.

It could be that that you got ignored and accidentally shat on because you're so small, and that would suck.

But.

They've always been incredibly reasonable whenever I had an issue with them. No need for name calling or being uncivil.

I get it, you're pissed. And I would be too if I lost a bunch of money. I'm pissed almost every day, then.

Attract more flies with honey and all that.

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Of course Voluum can go into anyone's account, that's how they provide the support they do. I requested assistance with some problems several times in the past and based on the communication we had, they were able to see my data and advised me on what to do. I'm pretty sure it's the same with any service (not just trackers) that are hosted and managed by a third party. They kinda need to have access in order to be able to guarantee the integrity of their service.

So the fact that they got into your account is not a problem imo. As for the changes, I'd say someone went into your account to verify the claims about the lost traffic that you made here on the forum and changed the view in the process? Maybe they did it to see other data that they needed or someone just miss clicked. Not sure how big of a problem this is, since it's just the columns and no changes to the actual campaigns...

I dunno man, it all started with your billing method failing and now you're starting all this havoc... I might be wrong, but looks a bit exaggerated to me.

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I'm definitely on Voluums side here, post your email "proof" or just drop it.

But for Voluum going into anyones account, completely not okay and should not be allowed. They should require permission first / request option before doing that. Employees at Voluum should not have that option. This is very standard to have the "give permission" button with lots of softwares these days. If they want to shut down access sure, but going into someones personal data, not okay.

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The problem I see with Voluum's employees seeing all your data (this is mostly when running DSP camps, so they give you some advices about it) is that they can see exactly what you are running and how.. and could pass that data to bigger affiliates spending a lot more than you on the DSP. This is pretty normal with some traffic sources.

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I've seen my share of weird things happen to my campaigns indeed, it's hard to know for sure... but when you see the most profitable placements disappear one after another, it makes you doubt the integrity of the source. It wasn't voluumDSP, just to prevent any confusion!

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