Cloaking is one of the black hat internet marketing techniques everyone has heard of but knows so little about. Marketers practicing it and cloaking service providers don’t usually talk about it much. This leads to a lot of confusion around the meaning and purposes of cloaking, as well as to the existence of myths surrounding cloaking and cloaking software. Thus, this article aims to clarify the very basic things about ad platforms (e.g. Google Ads and Facebook Ads) cloaking.
When is it necessary to do Cloaking?
Before we proceed with the definition of cloaking, let’s figure out in which cases one needs to cloak ad platforms. As we all know, each advertising platform has its own policies advertisers must comply with. For ad campaigns to go live, they have to pass moderation and be approved.
Ad platforms always make sure their rules are adhered to and limit unwanted content by blocking it. So what if one needs to promote a niche that is restricted or prohibited from being advertised on a certain ad platform?
Do these restrictions make it impossible to use the platform in question as a traffic source?
Not at all! This is just the case when one needs to think about implementing a black hat cloaking technique.
What does Cloaking stand for?
Cloaking is a means of bypassing ad platforms’ restrictions for the sake of being able to advertise restricted or prohibited products and services. In particular, the act of showing one landing page with safe content to ad platform moderators, and a different landing page to the rest is called ad cloaking.
Which ad platforms are the most commonly cloaked?
Google, Facebook, and Bing are the most popular platforms for cloaking because they offer the highest volumes of quality traffic. The scope of cloaking ads is not limited to them though, as any other traffic source can be cloaked too.
How to cloak?
To do ads cloaking, you’ll need special software. You can either purchase it or develop your own one. However, it is a mistake to think that finding good software is all that it takes to run successful cloaked campaigns. Software is just the tip of the iceberg and there are dozens of other details you need to be aware of to launch cloaked campaigns and keep them live for a decent amount of time.
Cloaking is usually mastered by trial and error. This process is costly and time-consuming, which is why you won’t find a lot of relevant information on how to do cloaking on the Internet. No one is just willing to reveal the information they learned the hard way and their secret tricks. In case you don’t want to invest your time and funds in learning, the alternative option would be to hire a professional black hat cloaking specialist to handle everything for you.
Is cloaking worth trying?
The definite answer is YES! Without a doubt, cloaking brings huge opportunities, like access to massive traffic sources, a chance to occupy the highest positions in organic search results, and thus acquire high-quality, good converting, targeted traffic, etc. You should just decide for yourself whether cloaking could help you in pursuing your business goals and be ready to invest in it if you decide to give it a go.
In no way is cloaking a means of earning easy money without investment, it is also not a gold mine for newbies in cloaking ads and CPC marketing as they usually lose much more than they earn, and give up before they come up with a cloaking strategy that would work for them.
Please, bear these things in mind because so many people mistakenly consider cloaking a magic bullet. I sincerely hope this article was informative and helped you get a better understanding of what cloaking is and whether it would be a good fit for your business.
If you are interested in getting professional help with setting up and running cloaked campaigns, feel free to get in touch with us.