Pepperjam Ascend (discontinued) vs. Post Affiliate Pro

For our business, affiliate marketing is by far the lowest ROI marketing channel. If you're looking to get products, brands, and offers listed on coupon sites, Pepperjam Ascend is a great tool. If you're looking to engage with influencers or drive sales without giving away margin, Pepperjam Ascend is likely not for you.

Incentivized

Post Affiliate Pro is suitable for any online business that's interested in more sales that come from affiliate partners (and are willing to pay them commission from sales).

Incentivized

• Lots of coupon sites.
• Enables different tiers of commissions.
• Can blast out newsletters to your network.

Incentivized

• Tracking works brilliantly.
• Split commission feature is great.
• Multiple tracking methods, SEO friendly links are included.
• SaaS version - didn't have to install anything.

Incentivized

• The dashboard/platform is the furthest thing from user-friendly. It looks like a high school student with zero experience designed it in excel and hoped for the best with the results.
• Reports are hit and miss. They may load, they may not! It's ridiculous, in my opinion.
• No mobile options whatsoever, everything has to be desktop. It's 2022, they need to catch up!

• Does not provide out of the box integration with Salesforce/HubSpot
• Requires knowledge of PHP in some use cases
• User interface and on-screen instructions are not always user friendly

Incentivized

It takes some time to learn how to use it. I do believe it could be a little more usable, but the support helps every time. Even new partners learn to use it relatively fast, and as the time goes by, you can help them yourself and they do not need to reach reach out to customer service.

Post Affiliate Pro has excellent support. It has improved over time and has a great customer support, if you have any problems. They respond quickly and so far have solved all of our problems. There could be more languages besides English, but it still works great. I can tell that the costumer service staff has a lot of experience.

Pepperjam Ascend's user interface is way behind these other platforms. It's not intuitive nor is it easy to create custom reports and engage with your publishers. We have been stuck with Pepperjam and many other affiliate networks have a very similar layout without much upside.

Incentivized

Basically both are great. Post Affiliate Pro has more integration features with CMS and Payment solutions (Joomla, Drupal etc.) but has the drawback of not integrating with Salesforce and required PHP knowledge in some cases. On the other hand, Referral Rock integrates well with Salesforce and required no coding knowledge as far as I know.

Incentivized

• I was hitting anywhere from $130 - $450 per month in commission payout before Pepperjam Ascend. Now with Pepperjam Ascend, I maybe get $40! I am still waiting on payouts from January.

• Started using it several month ago; I can see that I can profit
• Gained the trust of my customers, as they see it is rock-solid software
• It is very flexible; it can adapt to your business needs