Copeac CPA Network Reviews

Although Copeac is one of the big CPA Networks, I never cared for them very much in the past. Luckily they seem to be improving and are doing a lot to have more offers, pay better, and have better communication. They’re not perfect yet in my opinion but they’re heading in the right direction. Copeac is one of the larger CPA networks and if you’re going to be in the CPA game, Copeac is one of the CPA networks you should sign up with.

Copeac generally pays toward the higher end of the spectrum as compared to other networks. Lately they seem to be very aggressively trying to compete with other networks and have been raising their payouts. I’ve received several emails from my affiliate manager telling that they’re determined to be the top network and payouts of course is a big part of what draws affiliates. In addition, I’ve never had a problem getting my payouts raised–some pretty substantially. Like I said, lately they’ve been very aggressively competing and trying to get more affiliates and better offers.

OFFERS

Copeac is showing 455 offers today. They have a pretty good selection of niches from health and beauty, finance, to dating. For the most part their landing pages tend to be pretty good. I have noticed that they are conscious of the design elements that improve conversions on landing pages. A lot of networks have no clue about this so it’s good to see some good landing pages.

SCRUBBING

This is a thorn in my side. I’ve never achieved close to the conversion rate that my affiliate manager says people are getting. I don’t know what it is. I asked him how much they scrub and he told me in no uncertain terms that they do not scrub. Of course there could be a lot going on with the merchant but that’s hard to prove.

So I can’t say for sure that there’s scrubbing going on but I suspect there is. Either that or they’ve got some major tracking issues. (See below about tracking.) Either way, as an affiliate it’s something you should be aware of.

AFFILIATE MANAGERS / COMMUNICATION (SUPPORT)

My affiliate manager is pretty proactive. I get their “what’s hot” newsletter weekly and and sometimes I get more weekly mailings than that. As I said earlier, my affiliate manager has never said no to a request to bump up my payout, so you gotta love that.

INTERFACE

They finally got rid of direct track. Thank god because direct track sucks. The interface is much improved. (Maybe they listened to all of my suggestions and bitching You can search for offers by category, country, type of traffic and banner sizes.

REPORTING

Again…it seems to be very much improved now that they got rid of direct track. But honestly, I haven’t done much with Copeac since the transition to the new interface and tracking system so I don’t have enough data to say how accurate it is these days. In the past with direct track it was absolutely horrible and inaccurate, so lets hope it’s much better now with the new system.

PAYMENTS

Net 15 for US affiliates, Net 30 for non-US affiliates and a $100 minimum payment. You can get paid by check or direct deposit. You can’t just set direct deposit up in your interface. You have to contact your affiliate manager to set it up.

My checks are always on time and that’s a big plus.

NON-US OFFERS

• UK – 59
• Canada – 82
• Australia – 70
• Germany – 16
• Kyrgyzstan – 16

Copeac passes the Kyrgyzstan test!

PROS

• Good payouts
• Aggressively working on improvement
• Good communication
• Net 15 payments

CONS

• Not sure about their tracking. It used to be horrible, inaccurate, and dropped a lot of leads (or there’s a lot of scrubbing going on (which they deny). Hopefully it’s better now with the new interface.

OTHER COMMENTS

Copeac has their pros and cons but since they are one of the largest CPA affiliate networks, it’s a good idea to join them. They have a decent number of offers and they are aggressively seeking affiliates and paying good payouts.

You can sign up for Copeac here.

MaxBounty CPA Network Reviews

MaxBounty is another of my favorite CPA networks. When I first signed up for MaxBounty I wasn’t so sure. Their interface looked kind of dated and I assumed that maybe they were a second-tier level CPA network. I was wrong. They have a lot of offers in a variety of niches. Their payouts are competitive and I’ve been able to get the payouts bumped up after I’ve produced a bit of volume. If you’re serious about CPA marketing you owe it to yourself to add MaxBounty to your arsenal.

PAYOUTS

Payouts tend to be higher at MaxBounty than at some of the larger, more famous networks. I’ve generally been able to get my payouts bumped up once I produce some volume on an offer.

OFFERS

MaxBounty has a lot of CPA offers, around 500 at last check. They range from simple zip and email submits to higher payout health and beauty offers. They offers tend to pay as good as and sometimes a little better than some of the larger and more famous networks and they can usually bump up your payout once you show some volume.

The one complaint I have is with their graphic and/or landing pages. In a word – amateur. This is not the case for all offers but enough for it to be quite noticeable. If a banner doesn’t look good then it’s usually going to get clicked on less than a better looking one. I was running an offer recently and the faces of the people on the creatives were blurry and pixelated. That’s not good.

The same applies to landing pages. If a landing page doesn’t look reputable then less people will complete the offer. Some of the landing pages just don’t look professional and/or they aren’t laid out in a way that will maximize conversion. They really need to get a new design team.

SCRUBBING

In my experience MaxBounty has a low scrub rate. I’ve split tested the same offer with MaxBounty and with other networks and generally find that I have more conversions with MaxBounty. Even if another network has a higher payout, if they have a high scrub rate you’ll usually end up making more in the end with a network like Max Bounty that doesn’t scrub your leads.

AFFILIATE MANAGER / COMMUNICATION

I have a pretty good affiliate manager. He sends me notices of new offers he thinks I might be interested in or ones that are similar to what I’m already promoting. He’s always been pretty responsive and has generally responded on the same day that I contact him.

THE INTERFACE

As I mentioned, their interface isn’t flashy but it does everything it needs to do.

Searching for offers is pretty easy. You can search by keyword, category, country which are all pretty standard. They also have a couple of other options that are pretty unique. You can also search by offers that allow search (PPC) and/or incentivized. The name of the offer, payout, start date, and EPC are all shown on the main search.

One thing that’s missing is a direct link to see the landing page. This is a great feature that some networks have. It saves you from having to click into the offer and then on the landing page link. It’s a fairly minor thing but it’s one that saves a you lot of time.

REPORTING

Reports are pretty easy and are fast. It’s also easy to get subid reports and download them into a CSV file. You can only choose reports by entering the exact date or date range which is a small gripe of mine. It would be nice to have a pulldown with “today”, “yesterday”, “this month”, etc. That would save a bit of time.

PAYMENTS

Payouts are net 15 which is pretty standard. You can be paid by check, automatic bank deposit or paypal.

NON-US OFFERS

Not bad. As of today…

• UK – 70
• Canada – 61
• Australia – 41
• Germany – 23
• Kyrgyzstan – 11

MaxBounty passes the Kyrgyzstan test!

PROS

• good payouts
• low scrubbing
• good communication
• good report and offer search interface
• net 15 payments
• lots of offers (500 or so at last check)
• allows incentivized traffic
• allows iframes

CONS

• (minor) no link to landing page from offer search interface
• landing pages and creatives are often not so good

OTHER COMMENTS

MaxBounty seems to be pretty good in regards to scrubbing. I don’t get the feeling (and the numbers don’t show) that there’s a lot of scrubbing going on.

One thing that I have mixed feeling about is what they call “MaxBounty Mail”. They send you notices about payout changes and campaign cancellations in this mailbox which is within your account. It’s something that I usually forget about and so I miss a lot of messages. They do send you a reminder to your real email address every so often that you have x number of Max Bounty emails to read. That at least reminds me to check it, but it would be better in my opinion to send you messages about offers payouts and cancellations to your real email address instead of one you have to log into your Max Bounty account to check. On the positive side, I guess this ensures delivery and you can’t tell them you didn’t know about something if it’s in your Max Bounty mailbox.

Overall MaxBounty is one of my favorite CPA networks. They offer good payouts, don’t scrub much, and have a lot of offers to choose from. MaxBounty is definitely a network that you should work with. You can sign up for MaxBounty here.

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.