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Blocking Spy Tools (WhatRunsWhere, etc) (7)

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How do you guys go about blocking spy tools from scraping your landing pages? I suppose you could make things difficult by blocking the whatrunswhere.com domain in htaccess, but what about blocking the WRW scrapers at the IP or useragent level?

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I don't care, spy tools are usually slow anyway so by the time my landers/banners get spied its too late

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That's actually a good point. I think a good strategy would be to change your landing page's URLs on a weekly basis.

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I compiled a list of bad ips/isps/servers that I thought were likely spy tools and blocked them in Voluum. About 75% of Box of Ads servers would hit my fake page, but he is constantly updating his servers, so it's really a game of cat and mouse. The guy that sells BoxBlocker® will have a loyal buyer from me though.

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I think it's a game not worth playing.

If you do volume someone will see your ads / landers anyway no matter what you do.

Better focus on squeezing what you can from your campaigns and move on when it dies.

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Changing your URLs on a weekly basis would be super tough. We do have a "honeypot" of IPs which we block based on certain rules, it's an 100% automated process.

Apart from that I think it's better to invest time into scaling your campaigns instead of hiding them from the never ending army of sherlock affiliates.

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Follow this advice otherwise you'll be chasing your own tail forever.

If you want to step things up, workout something that can't be easily copied.
ex: Custom deals, payouts, etc

Then no matter who copies you, you'll still be ahead

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