It’s been shown time and again that starting a business is not easy.
New companies open their doors only to close down a year later. Sometimes it happens in as little as a few months.
This fact has been known in the brick and mortar retail world for decades. But it’s proving just as true in the world of ecommerce.
In a world where the failure rate for U.S. companies after five years is over 50 percent, and more than 70 percent in 10 years, it’s no wonder that so many online retailers are failing to keep the doors open.
Image: Magento Extensions
Drop shipping appears to be in an even more precarious position, with only about 10 percent surviving their first year.
So, if you’re planning on opening your own online retail business, the odds aren’t exactly in your favor. Fortunately, there are a number of steps you can take to mitigate the risks that come with entrepreneurship.
Advertising has always been an important tool for businesses. It’s simple: no one is going to buy your product or service if they don’t know about it.
So of course you’ll likely be investing a fair portion of your hard earned cash toward your advertising budget.
But this isn’t always easy. You need to decide who to target your ads towards, which platforms will best promote your product, and come up with effective ad designs that can help drive conversions. And those are just a few of the things you need to worry about.
Because, even after you’ve made every decision, checked every detail, and sent your ads out into the world, you still need a way to know if your efforts were successful or not.
Determining which processes are the most helpful to your business will ensure you stay afloat, but it will also ensure your advertising costs stay affordable and you have a higher likelihood of success.
Given the overwhelming demand for solutions to these problems, it should be no wonder that so many companies have popped up to help online marketers track their advertising performance.
Today, we’re going to look at two of the more popular tools, Voluum and ThriveTracker.
What Is Voluum?
Voluum is a complete ad tracking solution that online marketers can use to manage, track, and optimize their ad campaigns from a single dashboard. Voluum brings with it experience. The company was founded in 2013 by Robert Gryn.
Given that it’s been on the scene for a relatively long time, Voluum has built a reputation for itself as a reliable ad tracking program.
Their tools allow you to view both organic and paid traffic. You can also monitor each event, click, and conversion with the goal of helping you make data-based decisions to help optimize your promotional efforts and improve your return on investment.
Of course, thanks to the company’s good standing, it can be a little pricey. We’ll discuss that a little further on.
Managing your affiliate campaigns was never easier. Voluum helps you to track, optimize and automate campaigns, giving you complete control of your marketing.
Features
Direct Tracking Pixel
Image: Voluum
Pixel tracking allows users to monitor the number of visits associated with your individual campaigns without the initial redirect.
This helps you by speeding up the process of redirecting visitors from the original advertisement to your landing page because there’s no need to set up a redirect page in the middle of the process.
Rather, your visitors are sent directly to your page, allowing you to view both the organic and paid traffic arriving at your landing page.
Impression Tracking
Image: Voluum
You can also track ad impressions using Voluum. One advertisement on a page counts as one ad impression.
This process involves enabling the feature on a traffic source (the website where the ad is displayed) and then configuring your ad campaign accordingly.
Voluum actually offers this ability for free and users aren’t billed for the event.
Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is an important part of the advertising process. Afterall, you need to be aware of exactly how much money you’re making.
This tool helps you keep track of any event that is generated by a user who is performing a desired action. For example, they may be signing up for a newsletter, installing an app, or making a purchase.
When a conversion happens, this is recorded by an affiliate network. In order to record the conversion within Voluum, the information needs to be passed from the affiliate network to Voluum.
This feature involves a bit of work to set up, but once it’s up and running, it can be one of the most effective ways to measure the success of a campaign.
Managing your affiliate campaigns was never easier. Voluum helps you to track, optimize and automate campaigns, giving you complete control of your marketing.
Invalid/bot traffic detection
Image: Voluum
Malware, malicious bots or scripts, and spyware are just some examples of the nefarious things floating around the internet that can slow down your campaign.
Voluum offers a monitoring tool to help you ensure your campaign is safe. It will notify you if it spots any suspicious traffic – that can include the aforementioned bad actors or suspicious referrers.
Whatever the source, there are things operating on the web that would try to impact your business and this tool helps you avoid them.
Voluum Marketplace
According to Voluum, this is “the world’s first offer marketplace built into a tracker.”
It helps Voluum’s clients by finding offers that they may want to promote. It also removes postbacks and offers pre-set URLs.
Currently, this is in Beta mode, and so some of the features could change by the time the full feature launches (at an unspecified time in the future).
As of now (and without spending too much time on technical jargon), Office Marketplace uses APIs to communicate with affiliate networks, according to Voluum’s website.
Depending on how much integration exists, it can fetch publicly available offers, show you private offers that would be available after integrating your own affiliate network account, and apply for others from within the same panel.
Voluum App Notifications (iOS/Android)
Unlike other ad tracking tools, Voluum has created a tool that allows you to get push notifications for a number of different events.
You can set up alerts for the first conversion of a new campaign. Maybe you’d prefer to receive a notification when you hit a specific sales target.
According to Voluum’s website, in terms of notifications, its Mobile App allows you to receive system notifications when one of the events listed below occurs:
- First conversion in campaign
- Conversion cap at 75% of daily limit
- Conversion cap at 100% of daily limit
- Exceeded the limit of events
- Twice exceeded the limit of event
- Payment failed
- Payment succeeded
The mobile app also allows you to create your own custom notifications.
Image: Voluum
Managing your affiliate campaigns was never easier. Voluum helps you to track, optimize and automate campaigns, giving you complete control of your marketing.
Customer Support
If you want to reach the Voluum customer support team for any reason, there are a few options you can choose from.
First, you can complete the ticket on Voluum’s contact us page. You can also get support through the Voluum online community that is present on Instagram and Twitter.
Additionally, Voluum gives support priority based on your subscription plan. If you are on the Grow plan, your queries will be treated within 4 hours. Likewise, Profit Plan users get responses within 12 hours, while Discover Plan users will have to wait for at least 24 hours.
Voluum Pricing
As we said earlier, Voluum has a certain amount of clout within the industry that allows it to charge a slight premium for its products and services.
However, it does still have a tiered system that can be useful for helping different users meet their different needs.
Here are the Voluum pricing plans:
- Discover – $89 per month when billed every month, or $69 per month when billed annually
- Profit – $149 per month when billed every month, or $119 per month when billed annually
- Grow – $449 per month when billed every month, or $349 per month when billed annually
- Custom – Individual contract
Voluum’s Discover Plan features one million events a month, one custom domain, one dedicated domain with SSL, and three months of data history. It also includes a Group Onboarding Webinar, Marketplace with exclusive offers, organic paid and pixel tracking, and the mobile app with basic notifications.
The Profit Plan comes with three million events per month, six months of data retention, three customized domains, and one dedicated domain.
The company’s most popular option, The Grow Plan comes with ten million events each month, two additional users, a year’s worth of data retention, five customized domains, and one dedicated domain.
Conversely, you can also create your own customized plan and save further with annual subscriptions.
Managing your affiliate campaigns was never easier. Voluum helps you to track, optimize and automate campaigns, giving you complete control of your marketing.
What Is ThriveTracker?
ThriveTracker was originally named simply Thrive and was founded in 2014 by Tom Fang as part of his iPyxel company. That makes it only a year younger than Voluum.
Fang started Thrive because he saw that the self-hosted tracking programs that existed weren’t up to snuff. Initially, the company only offered a self-hosted plan, but has since come to offer a cloud-hosted option that is powered by Amazon Web Services, according to Fang. This option has brought it into direct competition with Voluum.
In 2017, the company was acquired by Clickbooth, and was rebranded as ThriveTracker, but remained a stand-alone division within Clickbooth.
As a result of these movements, ThriveTracker has proven itself to be a fast growing and ambitious company. Let’s see how its features live up to this reputation.
Features
Perhaps the most interesting thing about ThriveTracker is that it is constantly being updated.
The company purports to have a dedicated team of developers constantly working on rolling out new features and ways to optimize the platform. Thrive makes use of a globally distributed AWS (Amazon Web Services) infrastructure and its own proprietary technology to provide its services.
Self-Hosted vs. Managed-Hosted
Image: ActiveCollab
ThriveTracker is one of the first platforms on the market to offer the option between self-hosting and cloud-hosting. That means that if you prefer the full control of the self-hosted platform, you can have it.
Or if you prefer to rely on the speed and versatility of the cloud-hosted tracker, giving you time to dedicate your energies to other important matters, then you can make use of that option.
You will need to have a fairly robust infrastructure already in place if you choose to host your own tracker.
LP Pixel
Image: ThriveTracker
ThriveTracker’s click tracking pixel can be placed on your landing page to help run traffic directly from there from your traffic source.
This allows ThriveTracker to track everything without a redirect, while still allowing you to split test offers, according to the company’s website.
The feature integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Google ads, and many others. That’s because your actual landing page is the final destination URL, which has the added bonus of decreasing latency and increasing performance.
It literally has a 0 millisecond redirect speed, meaning it isn’t possible to get any faster.
You simply enter the code into the body of your landing page. Once there, the code will dynamically pass any traffic source parameters to the appropriate variable in the landing page pixel. Just remember to read the instructions in the model that comes up after you click the button.
The pixel automatically recognizes which landing page in your campaign rotation to post the clicks to, and the Thrive landing page code will redirect visitors to the appropriate offer or offers in your rotation, according to Thrive’s site.
Track Multi-Step Upsell Funnels
Image: ThriveTracker
This is a unique way of tracking up-sells that ThriveTracker offers. It allows you to attribute upsell conversions to different offers.
So, for example, if you have an offer for the primary conversion and then separate offers for each up-sell, you’ll be able to see the conversions for each.
Essentially, ThriveTracker generates a unique sub ID for each upsell offer, even if it is converted within the same sub ID. That means each upsell conversion will be marked as a separate conversion and attributed to the appropriate offer, the company’s website asserts.
This is generally considered higher quality data since you can run reports and analysis on the up-sells separately, which allows for more flexibility.
Image: ThriveTracker
This is one of ThriveTracker’s relatively new features, which supports the claim that their team is frequently updating the platform.
Rev-share, according to ThriveTracker, is designed to help you keep a portion of the total revenue private, reporting only the amount you specify to the source because you are collecting the remaining percentage.
This allows ThriveTracker users to reduce their visible revenue amount by a specific percentage when certain URL criteria are met. Ostensibly, you get to control how others see your revenue.
Dashboard
Thrive released a new dashboard in the last year with the intention of allowing users to see their most vital analytics in an advanced, modern display, according to the company.
The skeleton of the dashboard was unchanged, but the information was reorganized to make it easier to understand and provide users with all of their most valuable metrics at a glance.
The new update made the dashboard fully mobile responsive. You also gain the ability to view your top five best and worst performing offers, campaigns, landing pages, and traffic sources.
This is perfect for the online marketer who enjoys getting out into the real world.
Customer Support
If you have an account with ThriveTracker, you can contact their customer support team via email. However, if that is not the case then you are limited to just one other option.
If you are a first-time user on the platform, you can contact the ThriveTracker customer support team by filling the form on their contact page. You will be required to input details such as your name, company name, and email address. You can then submit your request.
ThriveTracker Pricing
ThriveTracker’s pricing packages are much more competitive than Voluum’s.
That could be based on the fact that this company has something more to prove, given that it’s been around for such a short time.
The company offers a sliding scale of tiers that is different from any other company we’ve seen.
Here are the ThriveTracker pricing plans:
- Cloud Lite – $39 per month for monthly subscription, or $35 per month for an annual subscription
- Cloud Classic – $99 per month for monthly subscription, or $79 per month for an annual subscription
- Cloud Pro – $275 per month for monthly subscription, or $249 per month for an annual subscription
- Cloud Entrepreneur – $425 per month for monthly subscription, or $375 per month for an annual subscription
- Cloud Enterprise – $899 per month for monthly subscription, or $799 per month for an annual subscription
- Cloud Elite – Custom
For example, at the low end of the spectrum is the Cloud Lite plan, which offers 100,000 clicks. The next step up is the Cloud Classic.
There’s also Cloud Pro, Cloud Entrepreneur, and Cloud Enterprise:
Basically, the company allows you to decide on your price range based on how many clicks you think you’ll receive in a given month. The granularity of the pricing scale makes this an attractive option for companies of any level.
Furthermore, this speaks to the company’s attention to detail and customer support.
ThriveTracker also offers a two-week free trial.
ThriveTracker vs Voluum – Pros And Cons
ThriveTracker Pros
- Filters out bot-generated traffic
- AI-powered optimization
- Fast traffic redirect
- Good customer support
- The pricing is affordable for most startups
- Supports multiple user access
ThriveTracker Cons
- The customers’ support system is limited and inadequate. There is no option for a live chat in case their customers have urgent issues to resolve.
Voluum Pros
- Voluum is relatively affordable for businesses
- Its tracking reporting system is comprehensive
- Easily optimizes ads performance
- Bot tracking solution and filtering
- User-friendly interface
- Scalable. You can easily upgrade or downgrade your plan
Voluum Cons
- Customer support is biased towards certain categories of user plan
- Support response time can be slow
Frequently Asked Questions
Does ThriveTracker Have An Affiliate Program?
ThriveTracker has an affiliate program called Thrive. You get to earn a 15% commission on your referrals for life. It does not matter what is being purchased, your commission comes in.
Does Voluum Have An Affiliate Program?
Voluum also has an affiliate program where you can get paid for referrals. But its program is based on the amount that comes in through you. You get to earn more as your referrals pay more.
What Are the Best ThriveTracker Alternatives?
Listed below are some of the best ThriveTracker alternatives tracking your affiliate links:
- Post Affiliate Pro
- Clickmagick
- Funnel Flux
- Mobidea Tracker
What Are the Best Voluum Alternatives?
The list below mentions some of the most notable alternatives to Voluum that you should consider.
- RedTrack.io
- AdsBridge
- Tracking Desk
- Binom Tracker
ThriveTracker vs Voluum – Which Is Better?
Based on this Voluum vs ThriveTracker comparison, it is evident that Voluum is the better ad tracking software.
Voluum has a long history of providing top of the line products and services to its customers and has built up a positive reputation as a result. The company has robust and unique features.
Not to mention, it has affordable pricing plans that can fit into the needs of any dropshipper or businesses.
So, for now, our suggestion is Voluum.
Tom loves to write on technology, e-commerce & internet marketing.
Tom has been a full-time internet marketer for two decades now, earning millions of dollars while living life on his own terms. Along the way, he’s also coached thousands of other people to success.