In this post, we have compared FunnelFlux vs Voluum which includes detailed insights into these Affiliate tracking tools.
In the market for a new tracker and not sure which to pick?
We don’t blame you. There are dozens of choices and if you search for tracking platforms on Google, every system is posting ads for why they are better than everything else.
In this article we’ll talk about how FunnelFlux Pro, our preferred tracker, compares to Voluum – the big incumbent that has been in the industry for many years.
Now, if you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing the reality is most trackers will do the trick. You’ll want something cloud-based so you don’t have to worry about server management, and they all do conceptually similar things when it comes to the basic landing pages and offers to track, redirects and report.
The key differences come down to what feels subjectively easier to manage for you, and what features you absolutely need.
But – there are some big conceptual differences between FunnelFlux Pro and all other trackers.
Most trackers have a very similar UI and approach to things. Almost like they clone each other. You make landers, you make offers, you select landers and offers, get links and then create a campaign for every traffic source, sometimes for every geo, and generate unique links.
Bottom Line Upfront: FunnelFlux Pro is the best choice for you because this platform is capable of tracking your marketing campaigns on big platforms like Facebook, Google AdWords, and many more. Voluum is also a great platform when it comes to tracking your ad campaigns but it has flaws and it lacks some features other than FunnelFlux Pro. It doesn’t hurt to give FunnelFlux Pro a try than Voluum.
Everything is linear and you can go lander > offer, or sometimes prelander > lander > offer (with split-testing of each). That’s great and all, but doesn’t give much flexibility for product owners or affiliates using real funnels, email opt-ins, the likes of ClickFunnels, etc.
Here’s where FunnelFlux Pro is different.
It has been built from the ground up to offer visual-based design of your tracking, as well as tracking “node to node” movement of users.
FunnelFlux vs Voluum: Overview
Funnelflux Pro Overview
Vollum Overview
What do I mean?
Well, imagine drawing a funnel on a whiteboard explaining how users will move between different pages, to upsells, downsells, one-time offers, email opt-ins followed by later pages sent via email, etc.
You’re basically drawing a flowchart right? Here’s what building tracking can look like in FunnelFlux Pro:
FunnelFlux Pro lets you draw these flowcharts as the way to design your tracking. This creates a “funnel”, and this funnel can receive traffic from unlimited traffic sources, campaigns and ads, and you grab URLs just by clicking a page and choosing a traffic source.
In virtually every other tracker, here is the process you go through when launching new campaigns:
- Create some flow or lander > offer combination in the tracker. Can usually reuse this.
- Pick a traffic source
- Sometimes pick a country
- Fill out other details
- Save
- Get some unique campaign link only for that traffic source > flow and possibly country
And then when you want to run another campaign on the same source, or another traffic source with the same flow:
- Duplicate some existing campaign
- Change the source or country
- Save it
- Get another unique link
- Go use that in your traffic source
Want to direct link? New campaign entirely, or add custom ever-expanding rules to a campaign to make it change flows for specific campaign IDs, sources, etc. The end result is hundreds of campaigns for every little thing and a lot to keep track of and lots of configs.
Then when you get to reporting, it’s often by campaigns first, then you have to drill down into each of them to break down by creatives, devices, countries, and other URL parameters.
Sometimes you can break down fully from traffic source > campaign > creative > etc., but will then run into limits to how many levels you can go to.
With FunnelFlux, here’s what you do:
- Create a funnel. It visually describes the flow of pages you expect a user to go through.
- Click on the traffic node > get links > pick source > copy link. That’s it, nothing to save.
- Go use that link in the traffic source.
Here’s what you do when you want to run a new campaign at the traffics source:
- Open the funnel or the edit dialog
- Click/select traffic node > generate link
- Copy > done
The links are dynamic and you don’t need to save them. You don’t duplicate anything, you just grab the same link and reuse it. Everything like URL params and campaign IDs are passed dynamically in the URLs using tokens, so there is so much less needless duplication.
Now when you want to break down data by campaign, you just group by the campaign parameter that was passed in the URL.
It’s so much easier!
As for the reporting breakdowns… you have two options, each which has advantages over other trackers:
- On any page showing your resources — like funnels, traffic sources, landers, for any row, you can click to open a quick stats overlay that lets you instantly break down that data. By source, location data, device data, URL fields, everything. Hella fast.
- Go to the reporting page and build a custom report. You can group by up to a whopping 20 attributes, and there are some special ones like “visitor journey” which breaks down the exact flow users went through and conversion rates, EPCs etc. at each level.
This is just one of the key reasons why we like FunnelFlux Pro more… it breaks away from the standard mold that all other trackers seem to follow and does things differently.
Differences can sometimes be more confusing to adopt if you’re used to the other trackers… but people felt the same about Slack vs Skype (and look how that went) or Uber vs Taxis. You have to do things differently to find a better UX.
Lets talk about some of the other cool things we like about FunnelFlux Pro:
FunnelFlux vs Voluum Data passing
I really like this one, because I know in the past, especially when I was new, I screwed up URLs often and made mistakes with tokens, copy/paste, and editing, and wasted countless hours trying to fix things.
Or worse, I ran campaigns for days with broken data that made it hard to optimize.
In most trackers, you fill out a URL and inject tokens into them. You get long URLs and they can be annoying to read, and it’s easy to make human error.
All it takes is putting ?something=x instead of &something=x and it all goes to hell.
In FunnelFlux Pro, you just put some base URL then build all this finicky data passing like this:
Another UX thing I like. You just put the fields/values here and use their dropdowns so you don’t make mistakes.
For offers these are templated too by the network config, so you never make rookie mistakes when adding new offer links and don’t have to add all this stuff every time.
Conditions
I like to figure out traffic optimization quickly and what landers, offers, etc. work best for different countries, devices, and so on.
In many trackers, this can be a little annoying especially if you want to do anything other than lander > offer flows.
In FunnelFlux Pro you can add condition nodes anywhere and create rules with their own names and visually see how things are routing. Like this:
I find this much easier than lists of landers/offers where I create rule after rule. Here I can visually map things out.
I can add these conditions anywhere as well too… so I can add a geo routing condition before landers, then another one on clickthrough to offers, and so on. Users move from node to node in the funnel and you can control decisions at any point.
Not only is this freakin’ cool, but I think it lets you dream up ways to get out higher ROI that you didn’t think of in other trackers.
Quick stats
Just one of my favorite features because of the speed…
I go to the traffic sources page. I want to analyze a specific source. I click the quickstart button:
And boom, and overlay opens breaking down the source by funnels. I can then jump to location data and in seconds get this breakdown:
For me this is gold. Drill down via a fast overlay. When I close it, I am where I was before, I don’t have to jump between pages or open multiple tabs. Just feels more responsive and like the UI can keep up with my thought process.
Javascript and no-redirect tracking
One last thing…
A lot of marketers now are direct linking to pages and using javascript to do their tracking.
It’s a must on platforms like Facebook and Google where they don’t like redirects (not necessarily banned) and marketers are afraid of using redirect links if it could risk account bans, ad disapprovals, etc.
Most trackers offer Javascript tracking, and FunnelFlux Pro does too. But here is why I think it’s better:
- It’s kinda like Facebook JS, so it’s familiar. You place a global include then fire events like page view on your pages, conversions elsewhere. The view includes a page ID and is the same for that lander no matter what funnel it is used in or campaign is involved.
- You can embed defaults like funnel and traffic source, so organic traffic defaults to something you choose
- Their javascript is super smart and automatically injects tracking data into links, so that stuff doesn’t break even when cookies and referrers are blocked. This alone makes it more reliable than other trackers, especially if running on Facebook where their mobile browser blocks most third-party cookies
- The javascript lets you use any tracker data — IDs, traffic source data, country, device model, etc. You don’t have to pass this in your URL! You can directly source it and use it in your page, JS functions, etc. I haven’t seen other trackers provide this.
- Because of the way it works, you can easily integrate with Google Tag Manager and use their lookup table feature to map out all your pages, and now you don’t need to place JS on pages at all, just GTM and add a page ID to the GTM setup. It can be tricky at first if you’re not used to GTM, but later it makes everything easy
- Lastly, and this is super cool, you can link directly between pages (like on a Shopify site or product site), without using tracker links, and the JS will intelligently create click events in their system if the pages are connected by an action! This is great as it lets you track CTR without having to change links in your website. For Ecom platforms this is critical as you often have no control over the links
FunnelFlux vs Voluum Cost comparison
Both these trackers are SaaS that have scaling plans with usage.
FunnelFlux Pro charges you based on unique visitors, regardless of how many events they create or complexity of funnels.
Voluum charges you based on every event (visit, clickthrough, conversion), but has cheaper initial overage costs if you go over your quota.
Here’s a direct cost comparison, all shown excluding any discounts that might be available:
| FunnelFlux Pro | Voluum |
Plan 1 – Core
| Plan 1 – Discover
|
Plan 2 – Growth
| Plan 2 – Profit
|
Plan 3 – Scale
| Plan 3 – Grow
|
FunnelFlux vs Voluum Pros and Cons
With pricing, one big aspect stands out — with FunnelFlux Pro the pricing just increases with the visitor quota. So you get the full platform on all plans.
With Voluum, you’re locked out of many features, some of which are basic needs for affiliates, until you upgrade.
For example, using meta refresh redirect modes, basic rules, or drill down reporting is disabled on the basic ($69/mo) plan making it useless for most affiliates, along with limits on concurrent campaigns, forcing you into the $149/mo plan to have a “functional” affiliate tracker. So the low-cost plan is misleading, Voluum is not the “cheaper” entry-level tracker for affiliates.
As well, using their anti-fraud markers, multi-user access or traffic log requires a hefty $449/mo plan, so if you need these features, you have to pay a lot even if you don’t do it anywhere near the plan’s 10 M a month events quota.
On the other hand, Voluum is the more mature tracker so has more overall features — like anti-fraud, shared workspaces, alerting, multi-currency support, etc. So if there are absolutely critical features you need that FunnelFlux Pro doesn’t have, Voluum may be the better choice.
I expect FunnelFlux Pro will catch up quite quickly as the development appears more active, with new features launching every month or two from their small but dedicated team.
FunnelFlux vs Voluum: Testimonials
Voluum Customer Review
Quick Links:
- Affiliate WP vs Cake Affiliate Tracking 2021: Which One Is The Best? (Pros &Cons)
- AffiliateWP vs ClickBank 2021: Which Is Better For Affiliate Marketing &Why ?
- WeCanTrack Review 2021 Is This Affiliate Tracking Platform Worth The HYPE?
- Trackier vs AffiliateWP2021: Which One Is The Best? (OUR PICK)
Conclusion: FunnelFlux vs Voluum 2021
In this battle I think it comes down to whether you want the most mature, oldest tracker and can deal with its price-locking of features, or want the cheaper, more flexible FunnelFlux Pro and are OK with it not (yet) being as feature rich and being new to the market (as a SaaS offering at least).
FunnelFlux can fundamentally track more situations and complex funnels than Voluum and has a different approach to tracking. If you like the visual aspect and want to build funnels, like their UI, link generation approach etc. then go for them.
Our recommendation goes to FunnelFlux Pro since it is cheaper for most, has a newer and more flexible approach to tracking, has good support, is fast and importantly doesn’t force you to upgrade (sometimes to almost $500/mo) just to have some of their features.
