De-cloaking
Who unmasks a funnel, and what stops them
Every filter is a claim about who is on the other end of a request. De-cloaking is the business of falsifying that claim. Here is each method, and honestly which of them CloakerHQ does and does not stop.
Four methods, and where each one lands
Bulk collection by spy services
Wide and shallow. In one fortnight of logs, a single cloud provider produced 864 visits from 613 distinct addresses across 62 unrelated sites, all sharing one headless browser identity and none carrying campaign parameters.
Stopped at layer one. Datacentre origin and no campaign parameters, on traffic that never clicked an ad.
Replaying the captured URL
Review systems open the exact URL captured from the ad, session identifier included, and that identifier belonged to a real customer who saw the ad earlier.
Handled by not doing the obvious thing. Visitors are tagged by address, never by the session identifier riding along in the link, so a replay cannot borrow a real customer's clearance.
Letting the domain classify itself
Two of the better-known domains in this category are already blocked by commercial security appliances, disguised as a browser timeout so it reads like an outage.
Not a filter problem. It is a naming and hosting problem, and it is the reason the script loads from a domain that does not announce what it is.
Arriving as the audience
Residential proxy, real browser, plausible referrer, a live click identifier. The expensive method, and the one that works.
Not stopped, by us or by anyone. The realistic goal is raising the cost of one successful attempt above what it is worth to the person making it, and past a point that stops being a filtering problem.
A filter has to be right about every visitor. A de-cloaker has to be right once. Any product in this category that describes itself as prevention is selling you the wrong shape of promise.
Pricing
Starter
$49 / mo
- 1 site
- 50,000 filtered visits a month
One offer, one landing page, one traffic source.
Growth
$99 / mo
- 5 sites
- 250,000 filtered visits a month
Several offers running at once, across more than one platform.
Scale
$199 / mo
- Unlimited sites
- 1,000,000 filtered visits a month
Agencies and media buyers running for more than one advertiser.
Questions
- What is de-cloaking?
- Getting a filtered page to show the version it is withholding. Competitors do it to copy a funnel, spy services do it to stock their creative libraries, and platform teams do it to enforce policy. All three use the same move: arrive looking like the audience the filter wants to please.
- What gives a cloaked funnel away?
- Usually the filter, not the page. A filter that treats every unusual visitor as hostile withholds the offer from large blocks of real consumer traffic, and a page that behaves differently for that many visitors is itself the signal. The second most common giveaway is a compliant page that cannot survive being read.
- Does CloakerHQ stop de-cloaking?
- It stops the cheap methods. Crawlers that announce themselves and scrapers running from datacentre ranges resolve at layer one; headless and automated environments resolve at layer two. It does not stop a competitor with a residential proxy driving a real browser, and we are not going to pretend it does.
- How do I know the filter is not eating my buyers?
- Because you can see it. Every filtered visit is logged with the reason it was filtered, so over-filtering shows up as a number instead of as an unexplained drop in conversion. That is the failure this category does not instrument, and it is the expensive one.
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