'Net Features : hydra

Keeping up with Keywords

Allison Howen — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:30:00 GMT

Keywords are a crucial part of digital marketing campaigns, yet identifying the words consumers are most likely to use when searching is something that digital marketing teams have difficulty with.

According to a white paper published by Hydra, digital marketing teams don’t have the resources to conduct thorough investigations, which lead to more successful keyword results. Additionally, a bigger problem may be monitoring and keeping up with terms that change so frequently.

“Keyword research makes the difference between the vendor’s goods and services being immediately visible to the searcher or their being swallowed up and lost in the myriad of returned search results,” says Ruth Zohrer, solutions consultant at Hydra. “Ultimately, the lack of thorough keyword research can prove costly as it leads to vendors failing to maximize on the online opportunity both in terms of directing potential sales leads/traffic to their site and garnering revenues from the online channel.”

According to a Hydra survey, less than half (42 percent) of digital marketers felt they were keeping up with key word trends. Furthermore, over half of the study’s participants (55 percent) claimed they don’t know which new words or expressions are worth spending time and money on. Yet over 70 percent of participants agreed that they would spend more time on reviewing keywords and phrases if possible.

Solutions from Hydra’s white paper includes beginning new natural search projects with a discovery phase that includes keyword research and keyword-mapping, which shows how sites connect with target keywords as well as any gaps that may need to be fixed.

After each keyword’s demand is known, they can be prioritized based on the results.

One (All-in-One) Platform from Hydra

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:39:00 GMT

SaaS marketing solution provider Hydra conducted a survey of 300 UK marketers recently and found that a third of respondents said less than 50 percent of their needs are being met by their current marketing toolset.

The survey results were announced in tandem with the release of Hydra’s One Platform, which enables marketers to manage and optimize digital performance in natural search, paid search and social media. While powerful tools exist for each of these channels, few are available which do all three well. There might just be a spot at the table for Hydra’s platform if it fulfills its promise.

Several features make the platform stand out including its central feature in WordBank, a keyword research tool for all three primary marketing channels (social, CPC, and organic), and a Natural Search module which provides site specific recommendations of keywords. The platform also provides a competitor analysis tool – something we at WM believe to be an essential component of integration marketing software.

“Companies have multiple people, doing multiple tasks, in different ways, across the same set of words, all with the same goal of acquiring customers and engaging them in the language they use. The One Platform brings synergy to currently fragmented work streams”, says Martyn Jobber, Hydra Chief Executive Officer, formerly a member of the Omniture (an Adobe Company) EMEA Executive team. “We have listened to digital marketers’ needs and the One platform is our response. It is unique to the market and has specifically been developed and tailored to address and solve the pain points they have told us they routinely face.”

Adknowledge Acquires Hydra to Form Largest Affiliate Network

Linc Wonham — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:27:00 GMT

Adknowledge has acquired Hydra in a move that will eventually create the online advertising industry’s largest affiliate network. The purchase, Adknowledge’s eighth acquisition in three years, comes three months after Hydra cut 15,000 publishers in an effort to increase the quality of its network.

The deal provides a boost to the inventory of Adknowledge’s auction-based platform called Bidsystem, in which more than 50,000 advertisers bid for traffic across the company’s cost-per-click network. Hydra affiliates will gain immediate access to Adknowledge’s more than 6,500 advertiser campaigns, and affiliates of the combined ecosystem will be able to choose from more than 7,000 of the industry’s highest-yielding offers following full integration.

The move pushes Adknowledge closer to its goal of creating a single marketplace for advertisers looking to expand beyond Yahoo!, Google and AOL.

Hydra Fires 15,000 Affiliates

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:00:00 GMT

Performance based advertising platform Hydra just gave the boot to 15,000 affiliate marketers and publishers.

The company decreased its base of active publishers from 17,000 to less than 2,000 of its best performing partners in a bid to increase quality.

"While performance-based CPA advertising networks have always paid lip service to quality concerns, they generally have been rather permissive in admitting publishers in order to pump up distribution. But the reality is that it's impossible to maintain quality control monitoring on tens of thousands of active publishers. We've made the strategic decision to only rely on publishers with proven capability to deliver high volumes of high quality results for our advertisers. Enabling us to offer far greater compliance and quality control than has traditionally been the case in CPA advertising, with this move we hope to win over more of the mass marketers and their agencies who are attracted by the no-risk performance pricing model, but who have been hesitant due to quality concerns," stated Zac Brandenberg, CEO of Hydra.

Don’t expect the affected affiliates to raise much of a ruckus about being booted. With hundreds of advertising networks available, they are sure to find a home somewhere.