What a Good Solo Ad Opt-In Rate Actually Looks Like

Everybody wants a number for a good solo ad opt in rate, and I understand why. You want a line to measure yourself against. The problem is that the number depends almost entirely on things that are yours, not mine, and it is easy to judge yours off a sample too small to mean anything at all.

Let me give you a useful way to think about it instead of a made up benchmark.

Your Opt In Rate Is Mostly About Your Page

This is the part buyers resist and it is still true.

The traffic decides who shows up. Your page decides what happens next. Two buyers can run identical orders through me on the same day and post wildly different opt in rates, because one has a single field and one promise and the other has a four field form under a paragraph of explanation.

So when somebody tells you a specific percentage is normal, ask normal for whose page. The number is not a property of the traffic.

The One Real Data Point I Have

I will not invent statistics, so here is the one verified number I can put in front of you.

Remy LePage ordered Mixed Tier, which runs 90% or more Tier 1. His traffic came back at 98% Tier 1 and his opt in rate was 40%, at about half the per click price he had been paying before. He ran thousands of clicks, so that is not a lucky handful. Full breakdown here.

Forty percent is high. It is at the top end of what I see, and I am not going to tell you it is typical, because promising you Remy's number would be exactly the kind of claim I spend these articles warning you about.

What it does prove is that the ceiling is higher than you might assume, and that hitting it does not require paying for a premium tier.

Why Your Number Might Be Lying to You

Before you judge your opt in rate, check whether you have enough data to judge anything.

If you ran 100 clicks, your opt in rate is noise. A few opt ins either direction swings the percentage by a wide margin. You cannot tell a page problem from a normal fluctuation, so any decision you make off it is a guess.

500 clicks is the minimum that gives you viable data on both opt ins and sales. At that volume the percentage settles down into something you can act on. This is the entire reason I recommend it as a first order, and I go through the full reasoning in How Many Solo Ad Clicks Do You Need.

Judge your rate at 500. Not at 100.

What a Good Solo Ad Opt In Rate Depends On, In Order

Number of fields. One. Email only. Every additional field costs you opt ins and the name field buys you almost nothing. This is the single biggest lever and it is free to pull.

Clarity of the promise. One thing, above the fold, stated in a sentence. Solo ad traffic arrives from an inbox and decides fast. A page that requires reading to understand has already lost.

Exits. Navigation, footer links, social icons, anything clickable that is not the form. Remove all of it. Two options: opt in or leave.

Match between the ad and the page. If the email that brought them promised one thing and the page presents something adjacent, they hesitate, and hesitation kills opt ins. I write the email for every order myself and I write it toward your page, which is why I ask what is on it. Here is the process.

Load speed and mobile. A lot of your traffic is reading email on a phone. If your page is slow or awkward on a small screen, you are losing people before they see the promise.

Notice tier is not on that list. Buyers reach for a tier upgrade to fix a low opt in rate constantly and it almost never works, because geography was not the problem. More on that here.

The Number Nobody Tracks and Everybody Should

Here is the thing I would rather you measured than your opt in rate.

Open rate on those new subscribers over the following 30 days.

A high opt in rate from low intent traffic is a mirage. You collected email addresses from people clicking reflexively, and every one of them goes silent in week one. The percentage looked great. The list is worthless.

A somewhat lower opt in rate from people who actually open your emails is worth far more, because those subscribers are where the sales come from. Seth Johnson's point about my traffic is exactly this: the subscribers he gets actually open. That is what produced $965 in commissions from a 500 click order over roughly a month.

Track both numbers. The opt in rate tells you about your page. The open rate tells you about your traffic.

What to Do If Yours Is Low

Work in this order and do not skip ahead.

1. Cut the form down to one field.
2. Cut the page down to one promise, stated once, above the fold.
3. Remove every link that is not the submit button.
4. Check it on a phone.
5. Run 500 clicks and read the new number.
6. Only after all of that, consider anything about tier or volume.

Most of that list costs nothing but an hour. Buyers skip it and buy more traffic instead, which is a more expensive way to get the same answer.

And Then Mail Them

Whatever your opt in rate turns out to be, the rate is not the outcome. What you do with those subscribers is.

Have the follow up written before the traffic runs, because clicks start arriving within 24 hours of the order. Mail new leads twice a day for the first 30 days while they still remember opting in. Sales come out of the follow up, not click day, from emails you wrote in advance.

Seth's and Remy's results are their own. Your results depend on your offer, your page, and your follow up.

Order 500 clicks and get an opt in rate worth reading.