Voluum

Voluum! An amazing site you’ve never heard of, because competitors have been beating them into the ground, just by existing. Ever heard of Google Analytics? Of course, you have. Well, Voluum is a miniature version of that site, but it comes with all the bells and whistles you’ve come to expect from your holistic marketing analysis platforms. Plus, it has a bunch of goodies that surprised even me. It’s a great solution by a small team who really did their homework. Well, they’re only small in comparison to the monopolies. There are over 200 people working on this bad boy and it shows. It’s a perfectly compact campaign optimization platform that integrates into all of your marketing campaigns seamlessly and gives you insights that you can’t do without.

On top of that, it seems to be an intentionally simplified version of more popular marketing campaign management programs. I immediately saw the appeal in this concept, because websites like Google Analytics give me absolute butt cancer. They’re not bad; they’re just too big. They’re impossible to find your way around unless you bring a map, a compass and a friend who’s been there before—using GA as a newcomer is an absolute nightmare. Voluum, on the other hand, can be used by people with zero experience in PPC and they can do wonders with this software.

All The Campaigns

If you’ve been following my advice about affiliate marketing and PPC practices, you’ll be in the process of getting several different affiliate marketing setups with different companies. The bottom line of having several different affiliate campaigns is all about not putting all your eggs in one basket. You want to have different types of products across different industries so that you can swap out the different ads across different audience types and see what works when and with whom. It’s like crop rotation or not sleeping with the same chick twice. You won’t know whether what you’re getting is optimal unless you try something new instead. Then, you’re free to go back if you’ve downgraded, or rotate again if you’re satisfied.

So, how do you keep several different affiliate setups with multiple campaigns neatly organized? You use Voluum, of course. You can pretty much integrate any kind of automated PPC campaign, whether it’s affiliate or not. Then, you define the terms of measurement and the differences between a conversion and an acquisition. You can pipe the pixel activity you get from your affiliate partner straight into Voluum and end up with one clean dashboard that covers every single marketing campaign you’re running across all of your sites.

With support for custom tagging and configuration, you can easily keep track of what belongs where. You can segment and group different campaigns and even generate automated end of cycle reports to see the performance of your various campaigns.

Simplified Bottom Line Metrics

I say bottom-line way too often, have you noticed? Voluum simplifies the actual stats that you see when you land on the dashboard. I think the appeal of this approach is that you log into this bad boy every morning and expect to see what’s changed, without having to dig too deep. You want to get the most important information quickly. That’s why you have metrics like revenue, cost, profit and return on investment percentage. These are the kind of metrics that tell you exactly what’s been happening while you’ve been gone.

On top of that, everything is color-coded and bolded where appropriate, to make sure your eye is always drawn to the most relevant recent information. You get a notifications section in the top right that lets you know whenever something noteworthy has happened. You’re free to set up your own little triggers and of course, these get sent to your e-mail and phone at the same time.

Perfect Interface

The current Voluum interface reminds me of the original Google Ads. I loved the original Google Ads. I could find where everything was without having a fucking stroke. I don’t understand the recent tendency by large companies to make everything look like a goddamn tablet surface. I don’t want big gaudy buttons with tons of redirects. I want a simple-ass list of all my campaigns with the relevant data. I also want to be able to filter through it any way I see fit. If I want to list all of my campaigns then filter them by country, that should be two clicks at most. That’s how it is with Voluum.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt that the entire site is cleanly white and grey with some gentle color thrown in to let you know when shit’s gone good or bad. Green is good, red is bad. That’s the kind of simple coloring I can get behind.

I can always find what I’m looking for on this site. There’s just no fluff to confuse you away from the shit you came to do in the first place. The dashboard gives you notifications on the newest shit with some summary metrics to show you how your profits are doing. Perfect. Then, there’s the campaign breakdown, which is, of course, a long list of campaigns across all of your affiliate campaigns. Next up, there’s the offers page. This is a list of all of your active offers, obviously. There’s a detailed breakdown by CPM, CPC and CPA, with the offer types and payouts. You get all of your information in one place.

Finally, there’s the landers section and it’s the best part. This is where you cross-reference AB tests for different landing pages. Affiliate marketers, especially in porn, usually give you tons of landing pages to work with. It’s on you to figure out which are the absolute best for your audiences. This tool helps you do just that.

There are also tabs for your traffic sources and affiliate networks, which are super useful sections for webmasters running multiple gigs with similar affiliate networks. If you’ve got multiple websites at a time funneling to the same campaigns, these sections are absolutely crucial.

Few Audience Options

As far as I can tell, there’s not much information on your audiences. The people that click your ads might as well be random robots. That kind of annoys me. I don’t want to use another tool to analyze my audiences. I’d rather get all of that information here. I can’t really find any section on the site that analyzes the clickers per-person. It’s all kind of conflated. However, you do get this thing called an anti-fraud analysis tool that analyzes your campaigns for fraudulent clicks. It’s basically weeding out spam-bots. You can use it manually, but I’m pretty sure that if the system notices that fake clicks are bombarding some of your campaigns, you’ll find out about it.

This tool basically gives you a breakdown of the traffic sources with a percentage between clean visits and suspicious visits. It does this by checking the OS versions of the users and their behavior, but it’s kind of unclear because you don’t get further information. You’re free to export this traffic log, but for the most part, I don’t see how you can weed out undesirables. Maybe I need to dive into their manual for that.

Promises of Optimization

You’ll probably have to crack open their manual as well, if you’re going to make maximal use of all of their offers. They boast some types of optimization systems that I haven’t quite heard of before. I understand them on principle, but I’m not sure how you’re supposed to implement them. They mention something called listicle tracking, which is supposed to extend the standard campaign funnel. I guess they mean they’re giving you traffic flow analysis and control to lower the bounce rate of your specific pages that have third-party links on them. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to optimize these metrics, though.

The standard approach would be to see which pages are underperforming and run an interaction analysis – basically, you want to figure out what people do on these pages that motivates them to leave. Maybe they’re bored; perhaps they’re distracted. Maybe, the content you’re showing is not their cup of tea. It’s not clear how Voluum is going to give you the answer. You might have to reach out to them. Speaking of which, you can reach out to them at any time you want, provided you have the right payment plan.

Paying for Voluum

They’re way too pricey. There, I said it. The lowest tier costs 69 dollars a month. They must be trying to appeal to the porn industry with a price like that. 69, wink wink. This is way too much money for 20 active campaigns under one domain. You get access to the atomizer tool, which lets you automate triggers, but that’s … not enough. For that amount of money, I could probably get a woman to actually 69 me. Wine plus a small dinner and a single night in a hotel room will still cost less than $69.

Next up, there’s the $132 tier, with 3 custom domains, unlimited campaigns and rule-based paths. That last part is basically pointless as far as I’m concerned. This is their standard package.

Then, there’s the $449 tier and my God, who the fuck would pay that much money for an analysis tool. You get unlimited campaigns, five custom domains, one dedicated domain as well as fraud detection and additional users in case your marketing experts want to chime in.

Finally, if you’re criminally insane, you can pay these people $999 a month for… I honestly don’t know. They have on-demand Skype support and fully customizable features. You also get 1,500,000,000 events with 24-month data history and custom-built features for just 24 thousand dollars a month. You heard that right. You can pay $999 to pay $24,000 to get custom features. Something doesn’t smell right.

Stick to the $132 tier, all right?