Do solo ads work? Yes, and I would say that even if I did not sell them, because the answer is not really about solo ads. It is about whether the thing you are sending them to works.
I have been doing this for 12 years and served more than 4,000 customers. Eighty five percent of them order again. That number tells you solo ads work for a lot of people. It does not tell you they will work for you, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Here is the honest version.
A lot of the time, "do solo ads work" really means "will I make my money back on the first order." Those are different questions and conflating them is where buyers get burned.
Solo ads reliably do one thing: they put targeted people on your list fast. That part works. If it did not, I would not have lasted 12 years.
Whether that turns into profit depends on your page, your offer, and your follow up. Traffic is an input. It is not a business.
The most common reasons solo ads fail for a buyer are: no squeeze page, no follow up sequence, or an order too small to tell them anything.
I will not invent statistics, so here is what I have.
Seth Johnson has been running solo ad traffic to his offers since 2007. He tested me with small orders first, then ran 500 clicks to an aggressive squeeze page and made $965 in commissions over roughly a month, tracked in his own tracking. The full breakdown is here.
Remy LePage ordered Mixed Tier, which runs 90% or more Tier 1. His traffic came back at 98% Tier 1 with a 40% opt in rate, at about half the per click price he had been paying before. That one is here.
Two different buyers, both got results. Neither of those numbers is a promise about your campaign. They are proof that the mechanism works when the rest of the machine is built.
Solo ads work when you are selling into a market that reads email and buys from it. Make money online, business opportunity, affiliate marketing. That is the lane.
They work when:
That last one is not filler. I recommend 500 clicks as a first order because it is the minimum that gives you viable data on both opt ins and sales. Below that, you are guessing with extra steps.
Solo ads do not work if you are sending traffic straight to an affiliate offer with no opt in. You pay for the click, the visitor leaves, and you own nothing. Clicks are rented. Subscribers are owned. If you skip the squeeze page, you rented something and threw it away.
They do not work if you have no follow up. Most sales do not happen on click day. They come out of emails you wrote before the traffic ever ran.
They do not work for local services, physical products with thin margins, or anything where the buyer needs to see and touch the thing. That is not a knock on those businesses. It is the wrong traffic for them.
And they do not work if you expect the first 100 clicks to fund your retirement. That is not a traffic problem, that is an expectation problem.
Two reasons, and only one of them is about the traffic.
The first is quality. Cheap clicks are usually cheap because the intent behind them is low, and low intent traffic produces opt ins that never open anything. I broke the whole economics of this down in Cheap Solo Ads. If you bought $0.30 clicks and got nothing, you did not learn that solo ads do not work. You learned that those clicks did not.
The second is that they could not see what they bought. If the only number you ever get is the one the seller tells you at the end, you have no way to separate a bad campaign from a bad seller. Every order I run has a live stats page from the start, showing unique clicks and geography, because the numbers should not be something you take on faith.
In order of impact:
Your squeeze page. One field, one promise. Every extra field costs you opt ins. This is the biggest lever you have and it is entirely in your control.
The email that goes out. I write the ad for every order myself, so the person clicking already has a rough idea what they are walking into. A click that arrives warm converts differently than a click that arrives curious.
Your follow up. Written before the traffic runs, mailed twice a day for the first 30 days. New leads are at their most responsive in the first few days and then they cool off. Mail them while they remember who you are.
Your order size. Big enough to read. 500 clicks minimum.
Notice that three of those four are yours, not mine. That is the real answer to whether solo ads work.
Do not take my word for it and do not take anyone else's. Run the test properly once.
Build a one field squeeze page for your offer. Write at least a week of follow up emails before you order anything. Order 500 clicks. Count your opt ins. Then watch what your follow up does over the next month, because that is where the sales live.
If you want more detail on the whole process before you commit, read Buy Solo Ads: What to Know Before You Spend a Dime.
Clicks start arriving within 24 hours of the order, and you can watch them land.
Seth's and Remy's results are their own. Your results depend on your offer, your page, and your follow up.
Start with 500 clicks and get your own answer.
A solo ad is you renting one email send to somebody else's list and paying per click. Here is how the whole thing works, who it is for, and what to have ready before you order.
September 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Twelve years of selling solo ads, condensed into the conversation I wish someone had with me before my first order. What you are buying, what it should cost, and what to do with the clicks.
September 23, 2026 · 10 min read