Hydra Network Reviews

(Note: Hydra Network was acquired by Adknowledge in early 2011. Practically speaking, nothing has changed except the name and the website, so my positive review still stands. FYI all links now go to the Adknowledge site.)

Hydra Network is one of my favorite CPA networks overall. They were the first CPA network I signed up with and they have been a consistent good performer. If you’re looking for a great network with low scrub rates Hydra CPA Network is for you. You can sign up here.

PAYOUTS

I find that Hydra Network tends to have payouts at the higher end of the spectrum.

OFFERS

Hydra Media has a wide range of offers ranging from financial, health and beauty, education, entertainment, etc. Hydra has a lot of zip/email submit offers but I find that a large majority can only be promoted by email. As of today Hydra network has 390 offers.

SCRUBBING

Hydra seems to have one of the lowest scrub rates of all the networks in my experience. This is an extremely important point that some people don’t consider. You’ll often see networks promising high payouts but then you find out they scrub the hell out of the leads and so you end up making much less than you would have with a more honest network like Hydra.

AFFILIATE MANAGER / COMMUNICATION

My affiliate manager is generally proactive and sends out a daily report of the days/weeks best offers including EPC and conversion rates. You can also sometimes get the EPC and conversion rate data broken down by different traffic sources (ppc, email, display, etc) if you ask, but someone at Hydra told me that breakdown numbers probably are not very accurate.

INTERFACE

The interface is really the only issue that I have with Hydramedia.

Simply put, their campaign/offer search is pretty bad. They recently created a brand new interface, and although it’s much improved, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched for offers by subject/keyword and nothing comes up. Then I’ll search for them by using the category pulldown and I get nothing there either. But if you look at the list of ALL campaigns, and scroll through all of the pages (it’s locked at only displaying 25 campaigns at a time so it takes a while) you’ll find offers that match your search. It’s usually too time consuming to look through that large list and so I’m sure that I’ve missed a lot of offers that Hydra had, but since I couldn’t find them I had to go with another network. I can only assume that whoever enters the offers into the database doesn’t do a thorough or accurate job.

Another complaint I have with the campaign search is trying to find non-USA offers. Simply put, you can’t do it. There is no country-based search function. All you can do is search the general campaign tab and scroll through page after page and hope that you find one in the country you’re looking for. But again, I don’t have time for that crap so I go to other networks. They really need to get this fixed!

REPORTING

Reporting is OK and generally gets the job done but it’d definitely not comprehensive. You can choose by date or date range on a calendar. You can also select by today, yesterday, week to date, last 7 days, this month, last month, and year to date.

The output of the search leaves a lot to be desired. It shows campaign id, campaign name, conversion rate, revenue and EPC. You can sort the list by any of these options but you can’t isolate specific campaigns, so you can only see all the results of all campaigns. All you can do is look down the list to find the campaign you’re looking for. When you’ve got a lot of campaigns this can be confusing.

This pain in the butt is amplified if you choose to show sub ids. You can choose to show all subids or only the ones which converted. That’s fine. But again, if you want to get subids for specific campaigns you cant. You have to sort through a list of hundreds or thousands of lines to find what you want.

Luckily you can download a CSV of these reports. This allows you to cut and paste certain campaigns or subids manually, but it would sure be nice if you could just get your data directly from the interface.

PAYMENTS

Hydra Network does net 15 payouts. You can get paid by check or ACH (direct deposit), wire ($10 fee), paypal for those in the US. Non-US affiliates can get paid via paypal or wire ($20 fee). Those in Canada can also choose to receive a check.

NON-US OFFERS

Really difficult to tell. (See my comments above about their interface.) I know Hydra has some international offers but it’s really too difficult if not impossible to know for sure!

• UK – ?
• Canada – ?
• Australia – ?
• Germany – ?
• Kyrgyzstan – ?

I can’t tell if HydraMedia passes the Kyrgyzstan test or not.

PROS

• Good payouts
• Low scrub rate
• Allow a variety of traffic sources
• Net 15 payments
• Direct deposit
• Lots of offers
• Good communication
• Rewards program
• Allow incentive traffic
• Allow pre-pop

CONS

• Offer search is cumbersome and often inaccurate
• Limited conversion/payment reporting
• Hydra Media is VERY selective of who they let in their network. If you haven’t been an affiliate for over one year and you’re not making at least $10k/month, they don’t want you.

OTHER COMMENTS

In my testing, Hydra CPA Network has consistently higher conversion rates overall when compared to many other networks. Several times I’ve split tested and compared the exact same offer from HydraNetworks with an offer from another network and almost every time my conversion rate / EPC has been higher with Hydramedia.

If Hydra would get their search and reporting interfaces fixed and/or upgraded they’d be great all around in my opinion.

But other than than that, like I said, Hydra Network is one of my top favorite CPA affiliate networks. I advise anyone interested in CPA marketing to sign up with Hydra Media. Their combination of high payouts, low scrub rates and good converting offers is hard to beat.