We asked Kirill Shkuratov, Head of International at Leadgid, some of the questions that come up most often among our affiliates. Read, save, and use these insights in your next campaigns
1. Leadgid works with 35+ GEOs. If you were an affiliate with a $500–1,000 test budget — where would you launch in the next 30 days, and why?
I’d go with South Africa, without much hesitation. If I had $500–1,000 of my own money to test right now, that’s probably where I’d put it.
Our finance traffic there grew four times in one year, and it’s still one of the least crowded markets we work with. And I don’t think that demand is going anywhere. Banks score very strictly, so one in three South Africans plans to take a loan from a non-bank lender within a year.
The good thing is you don’t need the whole $1,000 just to understand whether it works. I’d start with $300–500: three or four simple creatives, one audience, and a pre-lander with a couple of qualifying questions. We’ve seen that alone lift approval two to three times against the typical Tier-2 benchmark of 18–25%. And with CPMs on Meta still around $3–7, I think it’s a very reasonable market to test.
If finance is completely new for you, though, I’d probably start even simpler — with our Creditomax broker in Mexico or Spain. Those markets grew ×2 and ×1.5 for us this year, and the broker automatically routes your click to the right lender. So you don’t need to figure out the perfect lender from day one. You can basically go live the same day.
2. Based on your stats — at what stage do affiliates most often burn their test budget on international GEOs? What exactly do they do wrong?
Honestly, I’d say a lot of the budget gets burned before the traffic even starts.
The classic scenario we see is pretty simple: someone takes an expensive source, pairs it with the wrong offer, gets no conversions and decides the GEO doesn’t work. But quite often the GEO is fine — the pairing was wrong. And I’m pretty sure one message to your manager before spending anything can prevent a lot of these failed tests.
Then there are a few mistakes we see again and again. Too few clicks is probably the most common one. A hundred clicks with no conversions isn’t really a test — there’s just not enough data to make a decision.
Another big one is a heavy landing page. If it takes more than three seconds to load on mobile, you’re already losing people before they even see the offer. This matters even more in mobile-first markets like South Africa, where a lot of users are on budget Android devices and paid mobile data. So page weight can literally eat part of your test budget.
And then people sometimes change five things at once — the creative, audience, landing, offer, targeting. Maybe something starts working, but you have no idea what actually made the difference.
That’s actually one of the reasons LeadCore is useful here. You already have ready-made showcases, Smart Link, built-in TDS and 700+ offers in your Leadgid account. So instead of spending your first week building the infrastructure and making all these mistakes yourself, an affiliate can launch, get some real data and optimize from there.
3. Which currently undervalued GEO will become competitive within six months? Where is it worth entering now, while it’s still quiet?
I know I’m repeating myself here, but I’d still say South Africa. And I’m not saying that just because it’s a GEO we’re actively working with — the numbers make a pretty strong case for it.
The alternative lending market is worth about $1.2 billion and is heading toward $2 billion by 2029, growing roughly 14% every year. That’s nine years of growth in a row. At the same time, affiliate competition is still relatively low.
I think part of the reason is that many teams that could be testing finance there are still focused on betting, where every affiliate deal needs approval from a provincial regulator. Finance doesn’t have that same barrier — the lender holds the license, not the affiliate.
For me, the interesting part is that this window probably won’t stay open forever. When competition starts growing, rates and conditions change with it. So getting in while the market is still relatively quiet gives you more room to test, understand the audience and build working funnels before everyone else starts looking at the same GEO.
And I’d definitely keep an eye on credit cards and BNPL there. We’ve already seen how quickly those products grew in Europe and the US, and I think South Africa could be one of the next markets where they become much more interesting for affiliates.
We actually went much deeper into South Africa in our South Africa: Untapped Goldmine stream. The recording is on our YouTube channel, and we share market updates in Leadgid Global on Telegram.
