A Primer on Solo Ads

A Primer For Solo Ads
Introduction:
Using Solo ads is a way to drive traffic to any page or website using email lists. The vendor sends an email to their email lists using an autoresponder (called a solo email or campaign, hence the name, solo ad).
The simplest form of this is a solo ad between two people—the buyer and the vendor/seller.
The buyer purchases a set number of clicks—say, 100—from a solo ad vendor and sends them the URL they would like to get traffic on. This is likely an opt-in page, though sometimes it may be a simple landing page that redirects to an affiliate link.
The vendor has an email list of people who’ve opted in to receive emails from her. She’ll send out an email with the buyer’s link in the email.
Both the vendor and buyer need to track how many clicks were sent to the URL, which is where tracking software like ClickMagick come in.
How Do Buyers & Sellers Track Their Clicks?
The buyer creates a tracking link with their landing page as the Primary URL (let’s call it Buyer Link 1). The vendor takes that tracking link and uses it as the Primary URL for a tracking link in their own account (let’s call it Vendor Link 1).
The email “blast” that the vendor sends out will have Vendor Link 1 in the message, which will redirect to Buyer Link 1.
The vendor will send a Public Stats link for Vendor Link 1 to the buyer, so the buyer can see the vendor’s stats. The buyer can compare the clicks on that page with the clicks showing up on Buyer Link 1 in their own account. This is often where a stats discrepancy may come in, but I’ll talk about it later.
How Solo Ad Vendors Send Traffic To Multiple Buyers?
Usually, the vendor won’t send out the direct tracking link in the email, since they are likely selling a lot of clicks to different customers and they cannot control how many people actually click on the link.
For example, a list of 50,000 people might lead to about 1,500 clicks for each email sent. The vendor would want to sell those 1,500 clicks for each email blast.
She may sell it in groups of 100 clicks or 250 clicks or even do packages of different clicks (100, 250 or 500 clicks), each with different pricing.
Once someone purchases a clicks package, the vendor would ask the buyer for their link. She’d have 4-5 or even more different URLs that she needs to send traffic to at this point.
How can she now send traffic to each URL with one email? This is where ClickMagick comes in.
Rotators let you add any number of URLs to them and rotate the clicks through those URLs. You would then use the URL of the rotator in the email. When people click on the rotator link, it will send them to one of the URLs in the rotator.
How the clicks are rotated is determined by the type of rotator or rotator modes. Here are the 4 modes that ClickMagick offers:

|  | What are the 4 different rotator modes?

In that FAQ, note which ones are recommended for use with solo ads and which aren’t.
Each buyer has bought a certain number of clicks from the vendor. When you add a URL to a rotator, you can choose how many clicks would be sent to that URL. Once that limit is reached, the URL becomes “inactive” and no new clicks are sent to it.
That’s how you fulfill orders from multiple buyers. Every day, you send out email blasts to your lists with the same rotator link and the URLs that are active will keep getting clicks.
Each URL in a rotator has its own Public Stats page URL, which the vendor will give to the buyer to check their stats.
Solo Ad Add-Ons:
Vendors want to maximize results for their buyers to make sure they purchase clicks from them again. They do this in 2 ways.
First, they will promise a certain bonus on top of the clicks someone buys. So if you bought a package of 1,000 clicks, the seller may promise a 10% bonus. That means you can expect to receive at least 1,100 clicks, possibly more.
To achieve this, the vendor will simply add the URL to the rotator, specify the minimum clicks as 1,000 and then set a bonus percentage of 10%. ClickMagick makes this very easy.
Second, they may promise a minimum of T1 Traffic.
Traffic from different countries has different “value” in the online marketing world. Tier-1 countries are the most valued as they convert better.
The Tier11 countries are: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand
For details on T2 and T3 countries, see this FAQ:

|  | So what exactly are the 3 “tiers” of traffic?

Vendors will promise, say, 80% T1 traffic to the buyer. So if you bought 1,000 clicks, they will make sure you get at least 800 clicks from those 5 countries only.
Again, ClickMagick makes this easy to deliver. The vendor just adds the URL to the rotator, specifies a minimum of 80% T1 traffic and boom! ClickMagick will make sure that at least 80% of the clicks are from those countries. This can be combined with the Bonus percentage above too.
Where Do Click Stats Discrepancies Come From?
Solo ad vendors and buyers may often contact our support desk asking why they see 1,000 clicks sent but only 890 clicks received.
The most common reason for this are different Filter settings. Say, the vendor has set Anonymous clicks (like, clicks from a proxy) as “Nothing” and the buyer has set those to “Block”. When an anonymous click comes in, the rotator will send the click as is to the buyer’s URL, but the buyer’s tracking link (assuming they’re using ClickMagick, which they usually are) will ignore that click (you can find a list of blocked clicks on the Public Stats page). The result is that the rotator URL shows 1 click, but the buyer’s link doesn’t.
The canned response we use for this is Blocked Clicks Discrepancy, though it’s good to make sure this is actually the case.
Another reason clicks on the vendor’s side and buyer’s side may not match is bots. Bots will hit the rotator link and the rotator will show it as a click. But, bots won’t follow the redirect through to the actual URL, so no clicks would be recorded there.
To see how bots cause discrepancies, read this FAQ:

|  | How do “bots” cause problems with tracking statistics?