Udimi Review and Case Study: Do Solo Ads Work in 2018?

Want more traffic?

Build a bigger email list?

Of course you do. Everyone is looking for that.

You are probably familiar with paid traffic sources like Google Adwords or Facebook Ads.

But today, I’m going to tell you about Udimi, which is the best place to get traffic and build your email list from solo ads.

I’ll also share with you a cool little case study where I use these solo ads to generate leads for my ClickFunnels Business in a box system.

This traffic source is working great right now, and anybody can give it a go and make some money using it.

You just have to motivate yourself to take action.

What are solo ads?

You may or may not have heard of solo ads before.

They are very common in the make money online space.

A solo ad is an email advertisement that you buy from other email list owners. The owner will then send out an email on your behalf to a subset of their email list.

A good solo ad will get these subscribers to click on whatever offer you are advertising. And ideally, these clicks will turn into leads which you can convert into sales.

What’s great about solo ads, is that they are often cheaper than other paid traffic sources like Google Adwords or Facebook ads. And they have fewer restrictions on what kind of stuff you can promote.

But there is a downside to solo ads as well. Some list owners build their lists through various sketchy methods. So their traffic may not convert well or at all. I’ve even heard of solo ad providers sending fake bot clicks as well.

Solo ad traffic is also not going to work in every niche. You’ll have the most success using them to promote various affiliate marketing or CPA type offers.

So where do you find these solo ad providers? In the old days, you’d have to scour through various forums and other sites. But today, the best place I’ve found to get solo ads is a site called Udimi.

What is Udimi?

Udimi is a marketplace for solo ad sellers and buyers. The site is free to sign up and what I like most about Udimi is how fast you can get started with it.

Let me show you how to create your first solo ad.

Finding a solo ad provider on Udimi

First, click on the Find Sellers link where you will see a list of solo ad providers.

It’s important not to pick the first provider you see though.

You’ll want to take advantage of Udimi’s filters to pick the best ones.

The first filter you’ll want to use is the rating filter. Every time a transaction takes place on Udimi, both the buyer and seller get rated. So over time, a seller will accumulate a number of positive and negative ratings.

If you look at each seller profile, you can see clearly how many positive and negative ratings each seller has.

For me, I like to look for sellers that have at least 100 positive reviews and less than 2% negative feedback.

The next filter you should use is the % of buyers filter. When you rate a seller’s transaction on Udimi, you also get to mark whether you got any sales from the ad buy. So on the seller’s profile, you’ll see a little $ symbol with a percentage next to it.

So if it says 23%, that means indicates that 23 percent of buyers from provider reported a sale.

Now, this metric is definitely flawed, since there’s no actual verification that what the buyer is saying is true. So don’t take it as the absolute truth.

But used together with the rating filter, you can come up with a list of sellers that are likely to be reputable.

For me, I like looking at providers that have at least a 20% score or better.

Finally, the price is also important for any ad buy.

On Udimi, solo ad providers sell clicks from as low as $0.35 per click up to $0.95 per click. Keep in mind that lower is not always better, and often times you get what you pay for.

Once you’ve filtered down your list of sellers, click on their profile, and make sure to read it carefully.

Many sellers will tell you a little more info about their list, like where their leads come from and what niche they are from. You can also scroll down on their profile to read reviews from previous buyers.

Buying your first solo ads

Once you’ve picked the seller you want to go with, buying your first ad is very simple.

If you click inside any seller profile, you’ll see a box like this:

At the top, is a slider where you can indicate how many clicks you want the order from the seller. This is the minimum number of clicks you will get, although many sellers advertise you will get a certain % of over-delivery of your chosen amount.

Below that, you can choose what filters Udimi will apply to your traffic. All solo ads traffic goes through the Udmi base filter, which gets rid of bot traffic and other fraudulent clicks. This article describes more in-depth how Udimi filters work.

If you select the other filters, you’ll pay a little bit more, but the traffic quality should be theoretically better. I have the Prime membership, so I get the Prime filter automatically. I think you’re ok ignoring the other filters.

The most important part of the solo ad is your headline and email. You have two options here. If you uncheck ‘I have ad text’, you can have the seller come up with his own email, and link to your specified URL.

I don’t recommend this though since you’re dependent on the seller writing good email copy.

Instead, I always make sure the I have that box checked so I can put in my own headline and ad copy.

What’s nice is that Udimi saves all the solo ads that you order. So the last one you use will automatically appear in the box, and you can switch between old solo ads you’ve done using a drop-down. This saves a bunch of time when ordering from multiple providers.

Once that’s done, you’ll see the total price you’ll pay (including Udimi’s $3 fee) and add to cart to complete your order.

After your order has gone through, the seller will need to approve your solo ad. Once that happens, they then have 100 hours to start delivering your order.

When your order starts, you will be able to view your stats. You can see how many clicks you’ve received, and what locations the clicks are coming from.

What I Got For My $476 on Udimi – A Case Study

So can Udimi help you make money? I decided to give Udimi a try by promoting my ClickFunnels business in a box (BiB) sales funnel.

There are lots of variations of the BiB that CF affiliates have had success with, but the one I’m using for this Udimi case study is the one created by 2 Comma Club winner Rachel S. Lee, founder of Daily Commissions Club.

The first step of the business in a box is a simple squeeze page, which captures the user’s email.

It then takes you to the main page which explains the entire BiB system, and how you can make money from it by swapping in your affiliate links and promoting the system yourself via solo ads.

It’s basically a self-contained ClickFunnels share funnel, that anyone can do if they put in the effort. Even better it comes with an entire email series for your autoresponder, and emails swipes you can use in Udimi.

It took me about an hour to setup my own BiB. I used ClickMagick for all my affiliate links and I loaded all the emails into ActiveCampaign.

Then I was ready to buy my ads on Udimi.

To find providers, I looked at both number of ratings and % of reported sales.

I picked 5 different providers ranging from $0.35 a click to $0.60 a click and used the same ad copy for each. The only thing I changed was the ClickMagick subid for my links so I knew where my traffic was coming from.

I purchased a total of 925 clicks for $476. But I actually ended up getting 1102 clicks total.

Here are the results.

Out of those 1102 clicks I got 389 subscribers for an opt-in-rate of 35.3%. This comes out to $1.22 a lead. I also got 9 ClickFunnels trials and 2 Udimi referrals.

Looking at my email follow-up series, the first email in my series got a 27% open rate and a 10% click-through rate. Subsequent emails are getting between 7-15% open rates and a 1% click-through rate.

Overall, I was very happy with my first tests with Udimi. It is really simple to get started with, and you can get traffic really fast.

I wasn’t expecting the lead quality to be great, but I think it’s pretty reasonable for what you are paying. Udimi is definitely not going to work with all niches, but for the make money online market I think you can do well with it.

Obviously, the ultimate success is to see some of these ClickFunnel trials convert into paying subscribers.

In total, I need those 9 trials to stay on for 12 total months (at $38.80/mo commissions) to make my money back on this particular campaign. I think that’s definitely possible.

I also have a list of 389 subscribers which I can continue to promote other offers to. This is extremely valuable with the right email sequence.

If you’re looking to promote ClickFunnels, then promoting these affiliate business in a box offers definitely does work. I’m just using one variation, but there are several others you can try and I’m curious to experiment with in the future.

I think I would also see better conversions if I recorded my own videos and made things more personal on my business in a box page. But I’ll experiment with that at a later time.

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking for traffic, then solo ads are definitely a traffic source you should take a look at. You can get traffic for reasonable rates, and if you’re creative, you can definitely make money off of them.

Plus, solo ads don’t have the strict approval processes that you have to through if you use something like Facebook ads or Google Adwords.

Finding good solo ad providers is difficult. That’s why a solo ads marketplace like Udimi is so essential.

Being able to search for providers in one place is super useful and its rating system allows you to get a better understanding of the quality of any solo ads provider.

So if you’re looking for a cost-effective way to build your email list, then I highly recommend giving Udimi (and solo ads) a try.

Buy your first solo ad with Udimi Today

Udimi Pros

• Easiest place to find solo ad providers.
• Can filter providers by ratings, price and sales conversions.
• Get random $5 discounts as you buy ads and rate people.
• Are your solo ad messages are saved and can be easily re-used.
• Will normally get overdelivery of clicks from sellers.

Udimi Cons

• % of buyers reporting sales metric is not too accurate.
• Have to pay extra for more advanced filtering.
• Most sellers are in the make money online niche.