Overview

What is Adspect

Adspect is a powerful and flexible cloud-based service for protecting affiliate campaigns (CPA offers, landing pages) from unwanted traffic. By unwanted traffic we mean:

  • ad reviewers (moderators)
  • spy services used by competitors to steal your creatives and landing pages
  • bots of antivirus companies
  • click fraud
  • competing advertisers themselves
  • and other flavors of questionable or outright hostile visitors

It works as follows: visitors (traffic of any kind: ads, e-mail, organic, etc.) get their intrinsic attributes collected and evaluated by our special PHP script before getting to their final destination. Adspect runs more than a hundred checks on each click and produces a verdict whether a visitor is relevant or unwanted. Relevant visitors are brought to your actual money-making content (the so-called “money page”) whereas unwanted visitors are shown a different version of content that does not expose anything sensitive (the so-called “safe page.”)

You may find quick answers to frequently asked questions in our FAQ.

Traffic Sources

We work with all traffic sources, both existing and those that will appear in future–our filtering algorithms are perfectly universal and equally efficient across all possible origins of traffic. We support all the largest advertising networks, including:

  • Google Ads
  • Facebook and Instagram
  • Google Play (WebView and in-app)
  • App Store (WebView and in-app)
  • TikTok Ads
  • Microsoft Advertising (ex-Bing Ads)
  • Yandex.Direct
  • VK
  • Snapchat
  • myTarget
  • Taboola
  • Outbrain
  • MGID
  • PropellerAds
  • ExoClick
  • ZeroPark
  • TrafficStars
  • TrafficJunky
  • and many others–our filtering algorithms are universal

We also protect your landing pages and offers from various antivirus, security, and ad scoring companies, including:

  • Google Safe Browsing
  • GeoEdge
  • Confiant
  • AdSecure
  • The Media Trust
  • Ad Lightning
  • Integral Ad Science
  • Kaspersky Labs
  • Avast
  • NortonLifeLock
  • residential and mobile proxies, including Bright Data (Luminati) and GeoSurf
  • and many others

Integration

Adspect supports three integration types that differ in technical details and use cases:

  • Forward PHP integration via a standalone index.php file
  • Reverse PHP integration via including a filter.php file
  • JavaScript integration via <script> HTML tag embedding using a remote ajax.php file

See the Integration chapter for more details.

Prerequisites

Adspect is a self-serve platform geared toward webmasters, so prior experience with websites, domains, and hosting is expected.

System Requirements

Here’s a list of system requirements for using Adspect:

  • VPS, dedicated server, or shared hosting
  • PHP 5.6 or newer
  • php-curl extension
  • php-json extension

You may obtain information about your PHP setup using the following script:

<?php phpinfo();

Hosting

Adspect works best on VPS and dedicated servers. Most shared hosting providers are also supported, but we do not recommend using them due to various technical shortcomings of shared hosting.

We recommend the following hosting providers:

DO NOT use the following hosting providers:

CDN

Adspect fully supports CDN such as Cloudflare. We recommend always parking your domains on Cloudflare with proxying enabled (yellow cloud icon next to domain’s DNS A record); free Cloudflare plan is enough for this.

Please note that for Adspect to obtain real IP address of a visitor correctly your CDN must transmit it in one of the standard HTTP headers (in order of checking): X-Forwarded-For, X-Real-IP, Real-IP, CF-Connecting-IP. Cloudflare does this by default, no special configuration is required.

Workflow

Common Adspect workflow for affiliate marketing campaigns consists of the following steps:

  1. Create an Adspect stream for your campaign;
  2. Choose an appropriate integration method and follow instructions on the integration page;
  3. Set the stream to the All Money mode and test it to make sure that money page is displayed correctly;
  4. Set the stream to the All White mode and test it to make sure that white page is displayed correctly;
  5. Set the stream to the Filtering mode and test it to make sure that you get forwarded to money page without any errors (temporarily disable any manual filters that may block you);
  6. Set the stream to the On Review mode;
  7. Create an ad campaign and submit it for review;
  8. Wait for campaign approval and switch the stream into Filtering mode;
  9. Run traffic and explore statistics in the Reporting section.