Hydra Network ReviewsHydra 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. PAYOUTSI find that Hydra Network tends to have payouts at the higher end of the spectrum. OFFERSHydra 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 well over 1000 offers. SCRUBBINGHydra 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 scub 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 / COMMUNICATIONMy 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. INTERFACEThe interface is really the only issue that I have with Hydramedia. Simply put, their campaign/offer search is horrible. 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 (1000+) 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. This is nearly impossible with their interface. Granted, if you look at the list of all campaigns, there is a tab with only UK offers on it (but what about all of the other countries). But if you’re trying to use their “advanced” search it’s a pain in the butt. Here are the regional options: All Region Types Say I want to look for a Canadian offer. You’d think I could just choose “Canada” and see all of the offers, but no it doesn’t work like that. If I choose “Canada Only” then I’ll only see offers than are show in Canada only. If an offer happens to be valid in Canada and the UK then it won’t show up. If it’s valid in the US and Canada or Australia and Canada then it won’t show up either. So to be sure I see all of the offers available for Canada I have to do 8 separate searches. That’s just too much of a pain in my opinion. And given the inaccuracy of their search function that I mentioned earlier, it’s likely that many of the available offers aren’t showing up anyway. They really need to get this fixed. REPORTINGRerporting is OK and generally gets the job done but it’d definitely not comprehensive. You can choose by date or date range with pulldowns. 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 see all the results of all campaigns. All you can do is look down the list to find the campaign you’re looking for. 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. PAYMENTSHydra 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 OFFERSReally 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!
I can’t tell if HydraMedia passes the Kyrgyzstan test or not. PROS
CONS
OTHER COMMENTSIn 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.  Tags: Affiliate Manager, Affiliate Marketing, Beauty Education, Best Offers, Campaigns, Conversion Rate, Conversion Rates, Cpa, cpa marketing, cpa offers, Education Entertainment, Financial Health, Health And Beauty, Hell, Hydra, hydra cpa networks, Hydra Media, hydra network, hydramedia, hydranetworks, Important Point, Interface, Network Communication, Spectrum, Subject Keyword, Traffic Sources |
Posted on 20:53, June 8th, 2009 by 
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Hi, I am new to all of this. I tried some affiliate junk through FB and PoF, with no luck at all. I came to your site when I was researching ‘CPA instruments’. For a beginner, would you suggest starting with Hydra or something like CPA Inst? Anything else? I really don’t understand everything, but am looking for just a little income supplimentation right now. Thanks!
Hi Chris,
In my experience, FB and POF are hard nuts to crack. You can’t go at the niches straightaway, you have to use some creative thinking to reach the potential targets.
Plus POF is CPM pricing which means you’ve really got to test a lot and get some high CTR ads to make it work.
FB works similar in that way. Even if you’re doing CPC pricing (which I recommend) you still have to have a great CTR (generally over 0.6% or so) to get the cost per click down and also so FB will keep showing your ads. They’ll stop showing the ads if the CTR drops. I wouldn’t use CPM pricing with FB anymore since they changed the way the show the ads a few months ago.
If you want to run FB I’d try to run non-US traffic. It’s a lot cheaper and less competitive.
I’ve had the most success with yahoo PPC lately but since bing is taking them over we’ll have to see how that plays out in the future.
Overall, hydra has always been a great network for me. Especially since they got the new interface a couple of months ago and you can now add your pixels manually. (although they don’t always work and sometimes you have to have your aff mgr do it.)
Hope that helps you out!
Good luck!