This is one of those case studies that really brings us joy. It involves Ahmed, who has been managing his customers’ campaigns in Voluum since its beginning. Before that, he spent more than two years struggling with other tools, trying to run his business in the most optimal way.
He found Voluum and was able to scale up his business and we got a loyal customer.
Find out how Voluum helped him and maybe you will discover that the same problems you face were also Ahmed’s problems that were solved with Voluum.
The Business of Early-Days Performance Marketing
Ahmed is a native media buyer not tied to any vertical. In his words:
“If it makes money, it makes sense.”
Ahmed has been present in the affiliate marketing landscape since 2010. Back then, the industry was much simpler and you could get away with running unsophisticated traffic sources without proper optimization tools in place.
“Things were too simple back in the days”, says Ahmed.
Nowadays, a tracker is a must. With rising competition, each campaign has to be perfectly tuned to squeeze a small profit. So you launch more campaigns, which means more optimizations and more data to handle. Unachievable without a tracker.
The Pain Points
The challenge for Ahmed started to emerge when he had to accurately calculate costs for his customers, and at the same time, the number of campaigns was rising.
“I had to manually do the math, I had to clear my database in my self-hosted tracker and lose a ton of data that I can now use to relaunch campaigns that look promising.”
It was a ton of Excel files for Ahmed in a desperate attempt to salvage valuable data that his server couldn’t handle.
Sprinkle that with occasional server crashes that were causing data loss and a growing price for server maintenance plus the need of controlling hundreds of placements, you have a picture of a businessman that really needed a good tracker.
After trying two other popular trackers for some time, he decided to get Voluum.
How Voluum Addresses These Challenges
Voluum has been designed to be a flexible, problem-solving tool. Each feature was meant to address a specific affiliate struggle. This is what Ahmed got out of Voluum.
Automation
The general concept sounds simplistic: you connect your traffic source account with Voluum’s account and you get the information and control you have in your source inside the Voluum panel. You don’t have to jump between platforms, seconds saved.
Ahmed says: “It makes it much easier for me to perform campaign optimization and adjust campaign settings all in one place.”
But in reality, automation changes everything.
It’s not only about having all cost information correctly tracked and stored in one place, not only about the ability to pause a campaign or a single placement from within the Voluum interface, in the place where you get the clearest picture of their profitability. It’s about setting up automation rules.
The more campaigns you have, the harder it is to do everything manually. And working in bulk can only get you so far.
Most of the things you can do in Voluum can be automated. Our API integration module, Automizer, enables that – this is a gamechanger!
- Markers: You can assign Markers to concrete placements or offers manually but you can also create a rule that assigns a Mark to promising (or not) placements.
- Pause and resume: You can create complex conditions when whole campaigns or single placements should be paused.
- Alerts: You don’t have to be glued to a computer screen 24/7, you can get notified when something fishy is happening, for example, the level of suspicious traffic rises.
- Whitelists and Blacklists: Automatically save good or bad placements to lists, so you can use your past knowledge in your future campaigns.
For Ahmed, automation meant alerts:
“I can set up rules in campaigns to notify me when I get horrible placements in any given campaign, I don’t have to look thoroughly in my reports to figure out where I am losing the most.”
Server Setup
Voluum is a cloud-based tracker. It means that:
- You don’t have to set up your own server and install software on it, you only need to sign in to the platform and that’s it.
- You don’t have to rent servers around if you target global traffic. Voluum already uses an array of fast servers scattered around the globe, a few levels above even the most expensive dedicated server.
- You don’t have to worry about security or server maintenance. With uninterrupted server uptime since 2015, Voluum is the go-to choice for marketers that want to focus on what they do best.
Go to our article explaining differences between cloud-based and self-hosted trackers in detail to learn more. But the short summary is: it’s much easier to have someone else to deal with running servers.
Voluum can hold data for a long time and present it in a way that makes working with placement-rich campaigns easier.
- First of all, Voluum uses color coding to mark profitable and unprofitable placements. For a quick glance, looking for green placements is enough. For more granular (and colorful) control you get Markers. This feature allows you to assign meaningful icons to placements that fit certain criteria.
- Then there are bulk actions which make working with huge numbers of elements a breeze. Want to select all placements that have ROI below 1% to pause them all? That’s just 5 clicks and a keystroke (we’ve counted).
- For users that work with others or like to keep their data segregated for each customer, there are Workspaces. They enable users to keep their data nicely sorted among clients and teams.
- Lastly, there are these usual perks that you don’t often pay attention to until you lose them: up to 4 grouping options, 7 drill down levels and 30+ data points to tell you exactly what’s going on.
That’s not all Voluum has to offer to customers like Ahmed. There is also the Anti-Fraud Kit that allows you to check your traffic for suspicious activity. Ahmed says:
“I use the Anti-Fraud Kit if I’m suspecting that some of my placements are sending a high percentage of bot traffic or to gauge if the click throughs to my landing page are actually real if the placements have no conversions.”
What it Really Meant For Ahmed
As of now, Ahmed is able to improve his clients ROI by 100% on average, or even more in some verticals, like 240% on native ads, while lowering the cost of traffic at the same time.
If you want to get a taste of what Voluum can do, get it now!
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