Pepperjam Ascend was an affiliate marketing lifecycle management platform, supporting discovery, recruitment, attribution, commission, fraud prevention, and payment. Pepperjam is now part of Partnerize since the July 2020 acquisition.
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ShoutOut Global
Score 10.0 out of 10
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ShoutOut Global offers a multi-level affiliate software that helps improve traffic and sales. It is available for WooCommerce, Shopify, and Squarespace sites.
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.
If you are mainly using Instagram influencers to promote your business, ShoutOUT works excellent for that. Most of those influencers aren't very tech-savvy, so giving them a coupon code to track their sales and commission them off of that seems to work well. The mass payout feature is pretty simple to use as well, but I wish that you didn't have to do it on a 1-on-1 basis.
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!
Not a vast network of affiliates to choose from if you need them to facilitate that side of your business.
Sometimes the tracking by coupon code doesn't seem to work correctly, and the numbers don't match up with what we see on the backend of our Shopify numbers.
Could make it easier to add creatives and deep linking for affiliates.
It works perfectly for what we need it to do. It is very inexpensive, works well, and makes it easy for us to navigate and use. We can easily add new affiliates and create coupons for them to track their sales. For the influencers that are a little more inclined to post product links and go the more traditional affiliate approach, we can certainly provide that option for them and go that route as well. We like the ease and simplicity.
We only had to use it once, but they got back to us very quickly and helped us solve the issue that we had. So, ShoutOUT support is batting 1000% in our book, but that is only 1 out of 1 and may not be enough of a sample size to verify that they are as good as we think.
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.
We used Shareasale and Commission Junction in the, and they are awesome to manage your traditional affiliates that run blogs or email campaigns. We would still be using those if we did more of a traditional approach to influencers. But since we moved over to a more influencer based marketing approach, ShoutOut is fantastic and has made it simpler for us and our affiliates.
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.
Very positive right off the bat because we dropped our Commission Junction expenses and got most of our bigger affiliates to switch over to keep their sales.
Easy to use and much simpler for our affiliate manager to do her work.
