Hello everyone! The issue of protection campaign approaches becomes relevant after a new approach found by an affiliate begins to die in about 2-3 weeks. Campaign metrics start to go down, leads grow in price, and affiliates lose their profits, ending up closing their campaigns. it’s absolutely reasonable to ask why this happens. A good approach cannot burn out so quickly, right? That’s right, it can’t if it’s only you who are driving traffic to it, but if your pattern was found by other affiliates or a whole team of them and everyone started driving traffic with it all at once, it’s quite likely that approach will burn down.

Even some experienced affiliates do not protect their approaches. Let’s look at a simple example: a solo affiliate finds a link, uses it for a month, gets a good profit, but due to its sharp decline in metrics, they were forced to move on to testing a new campaign approach. If the affiliate had done something to protect that campaign approach, then they could have been driving traffic with it for like 3 months. Sometimes a campaign approach can live for a year. It’s a huge difference, as you can see.

There are a couple of simple ways to protect campaign approaches from spying services:

1) do not work with wide-use domain extensions;

2) write the text in transliteration, with symbols and hieroglyphs (if possible);

3) do not use text in your ad (i.e., no ad copy);

4) only drive traffic from rare GEOs.

Do not drive traffic from profitable Italy so that the campaign approach doesn’t get out there too soon – this is not quite the right decision. Not using text in the ad is also questionable. The copy helps to better convey the idea to the target audience and get targeted leads. And use quality domain extensions, if you drive traffic to .xyz, you won’t get much of it, while .com has trust in the eyes of FB.

These are some nice tips and the chance that your campaign approach will get into the spying service is reduced, but not fully excluded. There is another viable solution to the problem.

The key aspect of the bundle is the sites, i.e., your landing and pre-landing pages. They play a crucial role in the path of a potential lead to your affiliate network. If it is not possible to protect a campaign approach from a spying service, then try to at least protect that approach from other affiliates.

Make it so that they see the creative you use, but do not see the site itself so that they would only see your white page. In other words, we’re going to tell you how to protect a campaign approach from affiliates, from the living people. We will show an example using the Keitaro tracker, but you can implement the method in other trackers as well.

Traffic filtering will be general, it will include filtering Facebook bots and affiliates. Let’s start.

Setting up filters

Set the following filters in your Keitaro tracker:

1. Bot filter. Responsible for granting or denying access for bots on your white page. If some Facebook bot will follow your link, it’ll be run for the corresponding Keitaro base. The base is updated once in 2 weeks, so the probability that a Facebook bot will go around your filtering is very small.

2. IPv6 filtering. It’s responsible for granting or denying access to users that follow your links from the IP addresses of the 6th version. Providers haven’t switched to IPv6, which means that actual people (your target audience from Facebook) only use IPv4. If a person wants to enter using the 6th version, they will only see your white page because it’s likely that such a person isn’t your target audience, so they don’t need to see the black page.

3. Proxy filtering. Responsible for allowing or denying users who go online using proxy servers. Real Facebook users (the target audience) do not visit Facebook from proxy servers. A person who logs in with a proxy is a potential affiliate who wants to peek at your campaign approach. If they use a proxy address that has spam marks and other things, they will not enter the black page. Only a person who uses clean and unused proxies will be able to get to the black page. It’s pretty hard to find such proxies and they cost decent money.

Of course, if you log in from high-quality proxies, you can get to other affiliates’ campaign approaches, protection from such proxies has not yet been invented. But if the proxies a person uses are of low or medium quality, that person will remain on the white page and will not get to see your black page.

4. User Agent filter. This filter only works for bots, because only bots have such User Agents. The filter almost completely excludes Facebook bots from getting to your black page.

5. Filtering by GEO (countries). This one is also needed to filter bots. Previously (a few months ago), Facebook only had bots in the US and Ireland, at least the vast majority of them. Now there are bots in India and Brazil too. Therefore, the filter forces all Facebook bots to stay on the white page.

Setting up the filters

Here are all the filters we’ve just listed, all enabled and set for certain user agents and GEOs.

Filter relations for your black flow (the black page) must be set as ‘or’.

You can set different devices for your white flow, ‘phone’ or ‘computer’.

These were the white flow filters.

Black flow filters are set differently based on user devices, from which you’re accepting your traffic.

If the Facebook targeting is only set for mobile traffic, then you need to exclude desktop traffic for your black page. This way, all affiliates that’ll try to blow your campaign approach from their computers without decent mobile traffic emulators, will only be able to access your white page.

Or if your targeting is set for both desktop devices and mobile traffic, you need to set both for the black flow as well. If you exclude desktop devices, then all the leads that came to you from their computers will also get to the white page, and we can’t allow that.

Please note that if you drive only mobile traffic and completely exclude desktop traffic in the black stream, the protection of your campaign approach will be enhanced. It is generally difficult to blow content cloaking from a phone, and there are very few decent mobile emulators, many do not even know where to get them at all. Only a few anti-detect browsers have a mobile emulator feature, and these are actually in beta testing.

As a result, it turns out that only an affiliate with good proxies is able to blow your campaign approach. It’s not 100% protection, but the likelihood that someone will be able to break through your approach becomes significantly lower with these tips. Now let us show you how this works.

Let’s blow our own campaign approach

To do this, first, we’ve set our Keitaro black flow to accept Poland as a country and accept such devices as desktop, mobile devices, and tablets.

Then, we bought polish proxies and entered from a MacBook.

We were then redirected to the white page.

Therefore, we didn’t blow this approach. If we disable those filters that we’ve talked about in this article, the result will be the opposite.

We weren’t able to access the black page because of the proxy filter, even though we bought polish proxies. This means that filtering works correctly.

Here are some comments on this topic from a couple of experienced affiliates:

1. Timur Sharipov, the Avalon team owner

I won’t reveal all the tips but I have something to say about it. You can make it more difficult to blow your campaign approach by setting user agent and referrer filters in Keitaro. We only use Keitaro and no other cloaking services.

2. Daniil Alekseev, The Kreativy studio owner (the studio includes a media buying division)

We don’t protect our approaches in any way. For cloaking purposes, we use Keitaro and IM KLO, without thinking too much about this. We just use Keitaro as a tracker. All traffic filtering is set up using IM KLO.

Conclusion

Here’s how you can enhance the black flow of your campaign approaches and which filters allow adding extra protection from bots. Hope you found the article informative and useful and will get to test our tops out.

Best regards,

Webvork