Cloaking in Traffic Arbitration

05.08.2020

There are 3 main cases when cloaking significantly helps in traffic arbitration (when you need to hide the page content from one category of users and show it to another):

It is necessary to hide from the advertiser that traffic to his offers is attracted from sources that he has banned;

It is necessary to hide profitable creatives and bundles from the advertising network or other arbitrageurs (so that they are not stolen);

It is necessary to hide the contents of the page from spy resources so that no one finds out who exactly uses monitoring systems on a particular site.

Regardless of the purpose of using cloaking, you need to work in this direction as carefully as possible, because otherwise blocking is inevitable. For example, if an advertiser realizes that you are draining traffic from some prohibited source, then you may be permanently blocked in the CPA network.

The principle of cloaking
To implement cloaking, you need to use multiple copies of the same web page:

The first one will contain text that is optimized for search engines and is "liked" by their robots;

The second one will display the text that the visitors of the page should see. In order for the server to understand exactly when it needs to show a specific text (that is, who is watching it specifically right now), it must use special functions that will use 2 groups of data:

IP;

User-Agent.