Voluum Review: The Most Atrocious Piece of Software I’ve Ever Used
I hate Voluum so much that it actually gives me energy.
Enough energy to dissect this piece of software – which I wouldn't actually want to spend a single second of my remaining life thinking about – in this review.
It is rare that I encounter software that gets under my skin as much as Voluum. From the platform itself, to the cunning support team, and the pricing that is so unreasonable you'd almost think it must be a joke: everything about this company provokes irritation, hatred, and contempt.
What you can say is that the company is at least consistent. And in a way, I do have respect for them. It's not just the level of shamelessness that occasionally made me tip my hat and say “chapeau” (like when it turned out that my current plan didn't include access to an extremely basic feature, and the team offered me the “solution” of upgrading to a plan four times as expensive), but also the fact that they haven't gone bust yet.
There are competing solutions that are 5x cheaper, offer 5x as many features, and are 10x easier to use (you'll read more about this later in this review).
But first: Voluum. What is it, what can you do with it, and how does it work?
Voluum: what is it and what should it do?
Voluum is a performance marketing analytics tool that focuses on affiliate marketers, media buyers, and agencies. It's a platform that allows you to oversee all your paid and organic sales from a single dashboard.
It is a Polish product that was acquired shortly after its founding by a company called Team Internet.
It offers integrations with advertising platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook, Propeller Ads and TikTok.
Voluum's customers are, according to their website, active in ecommerce, lead generation, and affiliate marketing – but the platform is primarily used by affiliates (especially of the grey hat/black hat variety, who operate in niches such as iGaming and dating).
What did I want to use Voluum for myself?
I wanted to run Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns on several product comparison pages of WebsiteGecko and track their performance. For this, I needed software that could detect when an affiliate sale was made through a paid advertisement and then automatically forward this data to either Google Ads or Microsoft Ads.
That shouldn't be too difficult to set up using a well-known software tracking tool.
Right?
How does Voluum work?
There are quite a few steps involved to make Voluum do the super simple thing I described above.
Compared to other tracking software that simply does all of this automatically for you (more on this later), Voluum guides you through an unnecessarily complex process where each step likely leaves you scratching your head.
It boils down to the fact that nothing can be understood without having to pore over the lengthy, often outdated documentation.
As I write this, I notice that I'm struggling to put into words exactly how their system works, because it's so non-intuitive and convoluted, and I still don't understand what purpose or benefit their chosen approach could possibly serve.
When you have a site where you want to track affiliate sales, Voluum asks you to first add specific pages you want to track sales from (“landers”) after setting up a campaign. Voluum then adds a specific tracking code to such a lander. When this code is missing from the URL, the affiliate offers no longer work.
This doesn't matter too much if your traffic only comes from paid campaigns (after all, you provide the URL of the page plus the special Voluum tracking code).
(Funny to mention: you only get ten of these landing pages in the cheapest plan. Indeed, that means it can only track 10 different pages of your site. Competing software allows you to track as many pages as you want – even with plans that cost just a few dozen dollars per month.)
These affiliate URLs cannot be your normal affiliate links, but must be added separately to Voluum.
I'll spare you the details, but to fully understand how exactly this works, you practically need a doctoral degree.
And there are countless other peculiarities in how Voluum works.
Adding affiliate networks? Prepare for pure pain when your partner affiliate network isn't integrated into Voluum by default (and this applies to many partners: in my case, Voluum didn't work with any of my partners). The documentation is completely useless and you can easily waste hours without progressing even a little bit.
You want help from support? Fine, that'll cost $149
Voluum's support operates in a very interesting way. They respond slowly and don't really want to help you, until they smell money. Then suddenly they're quick as lightning (think response times of less than fifteen minutes).
Consider this: the only thing I asked for here was help with integrating an affiliate partner who uses extremely popular affiliate software for which adequate documentation was completely missing at Voluum.
They not only asked me to pay $149 for help with something so basic, but they also wanted me to track down and provide the correct documentation.
To put this in perspective: a competitor of Voluum (which I now use – more about them later) simply helps you with these kinds of things free of charge (not that you need help with such matters from them, because they support many more affiliate networks, and the integration with them works 10x more easily).
Voluum plans and costs: the cheapest plans are completely useless
These are Voluum's cheapest plans and they are literally a waste of your money:
Meaning, they simply cannot be used for the purpose for which you purchase a product like Voluum.
Voluum's raison d'etre is to be able to track your paid advertising campaigns. For that purpose, you need to be able to integrate it with external platforms such as Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or whichever platform you're working with.
Voluum's two cheapest plans, Profit and Scale, don't offer this feature. And they didn't mention this in their specs list in a way that a normal person could understand. Instead, they call the feature “postbacks for custom conversions” – a term that obviously nobody understands.
Just to be clear: omitting this feature is like selling someone email software that can't send emails. It makes the software useless!
I presented this problem to Voluum. What followed was the email correspondence below.
You have to admire the company for their shamelessness at this point. You clearly indicate that you're not willing to pay for a more expensive plan. And not only did they suggest a plan that was roughly 4 times more expensive than the plan I had, but also a plan that was 12 times more expensive than what I had.
No refunds
I knew of course that whatever I would say, Voluum wouldn't give me a refund.
Let's just try it for fun anyway.
The email exchange regarding this looked as follows:
What do users think of Voluum?
On G2 and Capterra, you'll find deceptively high average review scores. A possible explanation: my own negative review was initially not published on both platforms. On one of the two, it took several weeks with multiple revisions, and on the other platform, the review still hasn't been accepted.
The TrustPilot reviews seem much more reasonable in that regard:
Voluum alternative: tracking software that doesn't make you want to throw your laptop out the window
I finally switched to WeCanTrack which:
- Is much easier to set up (doesn't need to take more than half a day)
- Has many more features
- Lets you track your entire website instead of just a handful of pages
- Has a support team that actually wants to help you (and doesn't ask for money to do so)
- Is much cheaper
The qualitative difference between these platforms is obscene; it's ridiculous that these two products can exist within the same universe.
Plus, you can try WeCanTrack for free for two weeks.
P.S. I would appreciate it if you could try WeCanTrack through my affiliate link, should you be in the market for affiliate tracking software. It would help me compensate for the small fortune I've wasted on Voluum. 😉
