Hello,

dear friends.

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After our last article “How to make your landing pages load faster” we want to continue with another curious topic.

Today’s material is about how to protect your landing pages from spying tools and manual spying. Of course, those methods will not cover your landing pages 100%, but they are better than nothing. 

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Run campaigns on unpopular GEOs:

When your competitors are spying on other’s media buyers' ads and landing pages, they often spy only on the English-speaking GEOs - The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. and exclude Tier 2 and Tier 3 countries. 

That is an excellent reason to start with an unpopular GEO – try some African or South American countries and your campaign will start under the big player’s radar for a few weeks. 

Narrow targeting:

Try to run your campaign with the narrowest targeting: for example, make a classic push campaign and target only 1 browser, 1 Android version:

In the example above, we are showing how to run a campaign only in Nairobi (Kenya) and our target is only people who use Android phones on the latest Android versions and Google Chrome browser. 

Because of the low traffic volumes, most probably the bots of the popular spying tools will not notice the campaign(s) and you can make profits without worrying about the competitors.

The downside of this method is that you have to create more campaigns to make up for the volumes, but life can't be perfect.

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Use expensive but unpopular domain extensions:

Yes, we know you hate to buy expensive domains, but sometimes it can pay off – the usage of a “strange” domain name will keep you lower on SERP rankings and this is good for every media buyer. Why? Because most advertisers are spying on the domains with higher SERPs and after 200-300 creatives they just stop to search more, and if your creatives are around 500-700 places it's close to impossible for someone to steal it. 

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Show a “fake” landing page to the Spy Tools:

Usually, Spy tool bots do not visit your landing pages daily – most probably they will visit them 1-2 times monthly or even less.

In that case, you can start your campaign with a SmartLink and send all the traffic directly to it – without any pre-sales pages. After 1-2 days, check the spy tool you are using, and when you found your domain, just replace the SmartLink with the landing pages you want to test and use for this particular campaign. The spy tool will show the outdated link for some time (or even forever) while you are running your campaign and making profits. 

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Use a tracker and 3rd party solutions to hide your pre-sale pages:

In general, with the proper setup, you can hide your landing pages from the bots (but not from all bots that crawl the internet).

With  Keitaro it is a piece of cake to make a simple “bot trap”:

When you are creating a campaign click on the  “Create a flow” button, from the “main” tab choose “Forced” flow type, name the flow and the click on the next tab “Filters”:

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After that, choose “Or” for logical relation and choose IS Bot for a filter. For additional filters, you can set up Country, City, Browser, OS version, etc., and every click that does not match one of these conditions, or it’s a bot will go to a SmarLlink or any other link you have selected. Add smartlinks from the “Schema” tab and the “Add offers” button.

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We can hear your logical question, “How Keitaro will know a particular click is made by a bot?” The answer is simple – they have an integrated bot base that is updated often. 

The creators of Keitaro also provided an option to add your own bot list: 

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Go to the “Settings”, and “Bot Lists” tab and click on the Add button for the “Additional Bot IP” list. 

Luckily for us, that is not all, because Keitaro is fully integrated with the Hide.click solution – a next-generation cloaking tool. The owners of Hide.click say their software is based on machine learning, and they support almost every traffic network on the market. 

Here is the price list, but we are recommending starting with the 3 days free trial and buying the standard or advanced package after. 

Ask the Keitaro support if you need any help with hide.click integration, and they will provide you with all the info.

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IP Intelligence:

IP Intelligence is a service that determines how likely an IP address is a proxy / VPN / bad IP using advanced mathematical and modern computing techniques. 

This is a fantastic web-based tool that detects bot, proxy, and VPN traffic.

Some of its benefits are:

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- Greatly reduce fraud on e-commerce sites (anti-fraud)

- Protect your site from automated hacking attempts such as XSS, SQLi, brute force attacks, application scanning, and many others

- Protect your site from crawlers that steal your content

- Prevent users from abusing promotional offers / multiple sign-ups / affiliate abuse

- Stop bots from scraping your content or bots spamming your website

- Serve traffic/content to real users, not bots. Reduce fake views, clicks, and activity that results in click fraud and view fraud (anti-bot detection)

- Prevent trolls/people that are trying to bypass a ban

- Adjust your system to limit access (such as not allowing them to change their password, their email, etc) to prevent account hijacking

- Since the system returns a real value and there are different flag options, you can customize the level of protection for a particular time frame and adjust accordingly

- Use it with a combination of other fraud prevention services to make it even better. Some fraud prevention services do not explicitly look for proxy / VPN / bad IPs

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To check your visitor's IPs with this tool, you can use API – it's free for 15 requests per minute and a maximum of 500 requests per day. If you need a bigger package, just send a request to the owners.

Pro-Tip: Connect Keitaro’s API and IP Intelligence's API and make them work together (that is the beauty of a self-hosted tracker)  it's highly customizable, and you can add tools according to your needs. 

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Ok, friends. Let's summarize what we have till now:

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1. Driving traffic to unpopular GEOs - Tier 2 & Tier 3 countries – will keep your landing pages under the radar, at least for a few weeks

2. Launching several campaigns with very narrow targeting is a good idea if you want to hide your pre-sale pages from the spy tools bots

3. Use rare domain extensions and have “bad” SEPR rank

4. Use a tracker like Keitaro to hide the landing pages from the competitors

5. Use 3rd party tools combined with the tracker to filter your traffic on a higher level.

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Stay safe and profitable. See you soon.