How do you protect yourself from people stealing creatives and landing pages? (6)

I have three motives with this thread, just to get them out in the open:

I'm hoping to get help with research on the topic of 'privacy' when it comes to PPC for a book that I'm working on. If you're going to tell me something you would hate to see written about in something that would be outside of this community, just please write 'tk' at the end of the post or something.

I hope this will be a great resource amongst the scattered threads on this topic. I've seen quite a few "Calling out XXX for stealing my landing pages" and I've also seen a few code snippets here and there you can use when people just duplicate your source code exactly.

It's no secret that I'm still a beginner when it comes to paid traffic, so would love to know what I can do for my personal campaigns (if anything).

For example, when I'm building up my networks in the SEO world I want to do things like:

- Edit my htaccess / robots.txt file to block tools like Ahrefs, MajesticSEO & Opensiteexplorer from sharing information to my competitors on my sites

- Mix up my WHOIS data so you can't just whack my name in Domaintools and see everything I'm working on

- Not host all my sites on the same IP address

I'm sure things will be quite a bit different in the PPC world, so I would love to see some discussion here.

Merci beaucoup in advance!

Preventing people from stealing landers is an absolute bastard to do - and preventing them from stealing creatives is basically impossible unless you're running Flash banners, IMO. After all, somewhere like POF or FB will only let you run plain ol' JPGs or GIFs, which are pretty trivial to Save As.

The most common stealing-prevention techniques in LPs mostly revolve around using obfuscated code in the lander that'll redirect visitors to your offer page regardless of where the LP is run, as you mention. There was an interesting discussion on this a while back - definitely worth a look! Other ideas that have been discussed in the past include using Flash for buttons and images to make it (much) harder to redirect their click targets elsewhere, although I don't know if anyone's actually done that.

Beyond those techniques, the best you can do is make sure people can't easily traverse your directory structure by using appropriate server configs and non-obvious LP names (LP43 and LP978 rather than LP1 and LP2, for example).

Originally Posted by ViperChill

I have three motives with this thread, just to get them out in the open:

I'm hoping to get help with research on the topic of 'privacy' when it comes to PPC for a book that I'm working on. If you're going to tell me something you would hate to see written about in something that would be outside of this community, just please write 'tk' at the end of the post or something.

I hope this will be a great resource amongst the scattered threads on this topic. I've seen quite a few "Calling out XXX for stealing my landing pages" and I've also seen a few code snippets here and there you can use when people just duplicate your source code exactly.

It's no secret that I'm still a beginner when it comes to paid traffic, so would love to know what I can do for my personal campaigns (if anything).

For example, when I'm building up my networks in the SEO world I want to do things like:

- Edit my htaccess / robots.txt file to block tools like Ahrefs, MajesticSEO & Opensiteexplorer from sharing information to my competitors on my sites

- Mix up my WHOIS data so you can't just whack my name in Domaintools and see everything I'm working on

- Not host all my sites on the same IP address

I'm sure things will be quite a bit different in the PPC world, so I would love to see some discussion here.

Merci beaucoup in advance!

Originally Posted by caurmen

Preventing people from stealing landers is an absolute bastard to do - and preventing them from stealing creatives is basically impossible unless you're running Flash banners, IMO. After all, somewhere like POF or FB will only let you run plain ol' JPGs or GIFs, which are pretty trivial to Save As.

The most common stealing-prevention techniques in LPs mostly revolve around using obfuscated code in the lander that'll redirect visitors to your offer page regardless of where the LP is run, as you mention. There was an interesting discussion on this a while back - definitely worth a look! Other ideas that have been discussed in the past include using Flash for buttons and images to make it (much) harder to redirect their click targets elsewhere, although I don't know if anyone's actually done that.

Beyond those techniques, the best you can do is make sure people can't easily traverse your directory structure by using appropriate server configs and non-obvious LP names (LP43 and LP978 rather than LP1 and LP2, for example).

No worries!

If you get into media buys and other things where you can use creatives beyond the basic GIF/JPG, things get a lot more interesting. I've tried decompiling Flash to change around link codes in the past, and it's an absolute bastard to do. It's possible to float an invisible object over a stolen Flash ad and use that to redirect clicks, but that's a) beyond the abilities of a lot of people and b) seriously unreliable without a lot of testing.

It's possible that HTML5 will bring in DRM we could use to secure landers, but that comes with huge problems of its own.

I think the good affiliates/marketers will tell you it's not about protecting things cause it's a fleeting task.

It's much more about staying in front of the competition. Constantly optimizing.

We put on a 300-400 person meetup a year of full time affiliates. And we put on stage some of our biggest media buyers.

One recurring theme you hear over and over again.

"I don't care if people steal my stuff, it's always old and out dated. I've already improved on ctr's or conversion rates another 2-10% by the time someone see what I"m doing. They're always playing catch up."