Solo ads

Buying solo ads from South Africa

Your location decides how you pay. The seller's list decides who reads.

Two questions come up every time someone outside the US starts buying solo ads. Can I buy at all from here, and can I get US readers. They have different answers, and mixing them up is what makes people give up early.

Where you live affects payment, not audience

Marketplaces care about whether your card or wallet works, not about your postal address. The readers who receive the email are the seller's readers. So a buyer in Johannesburg selling to an American audience is buying exactly the same product as a buyer in Chicago, from the same sellers, at the same listed prices.

What that means in practice: do not filter sellers by your own country. Filter them by the country their traffic comes from.

Checking the traffic country before you pay

Seller listings publish the countries their clicks come from. Read that breakdown as a fit test against your offer:

• Selling a US-priced offer? You want a listing dominated by US readers, not a spread across a dozen countries.
• Selling something priced for a local market? A US-heavy list is the wrong buy no matter how good the seller is.
• Mixed list? Treat the effective price as higher than the listed one, because you are paying for the whole send and using part of it.

What it costs, and where that number comes from

Price is set by each seller and shown on their listing, so there is no single rate to quote. What we can show you is what the market looked like when we last ran the filter.

Work out your own number before you shop. If a subscriber is worth X to you and your page converts clicks to subscribers at Y, then anything above X times Y is a loss no matter how good the seller is. Do that sum first and the price column stops being the thing you sort by. The filter panel is here, with what each control does.

The payment side

You need a card or a wallet the marketplace accepts, and you need to think about the currency your card settles in. Cross-border fees on a small first order are not large in absolute terms, but they change the arithmetic if you are testing with the smallest lot on purpose, which you should be. Check what your bank adds before you decide the test was expensive.

Sensible first order from here

1. Filter by traffic country first, price second.
2. Read repeat orders and buyer-reported sales on the shortlist. See the three numbers.
3. Buy the smallest lot the seller offers.
4. Count opt-ins on your own page, not in the seller's report.

If you are still deciding whether solo ads suit your offer at all, start with what you are actually buying instead.