Pepperjam Ascend vs. Referral Rock

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

Referral Rock is very relevant in cases where you already use Salesforce or HubSpot and want to integrate/streamline your Referral Marketing process with your Sales Management process (which is where Salesforce and Hub Spot are mainstream). Referral Rock might be less relevant if you don’t use Salesforce or HubSpot, but in that case, the pricing is also much lower, and you still get great value for the cost.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Onboarding support
• Ease of use
• The ability to automate referral payouts.

• 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!

• Just a few minor missing features that I have been told are on the roadmap. Certainly not blockers.
• Gift card payouts that work internationally, even if the currency selected is specific to a certain country (i.e. a $100 USD gift card payout amount should still result in the ability for the recipient to choose a gift card worth $100 USD, but available in their home country. Right now we are limited to only those gift cards available within the payout currency country).

Overall usability is solid. Their customer support and success team made it super easy for me to understand the software, how to use each feature, and how to get the most out of the product.

They are very responsive and prompt when we had questions come up. Support has been great.

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

Referral Rock is overall a better platform. It provides more and better-implemented functionalities. It also provides much better integration with Salesforce/HubSpot and better user support.

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.

• Helped fulfill referral rewards.
• Supported inbound and sales efforts.
• Multiple programs used by multiple teams.