You're Wasting
15-30% of Your
Ad Budget

Bot detection is the process of identifying non-human traffic (automated scripts, crawlers, click farms, and headless browsers) that visit your website or click your ads. Media buyers lose 15-30% of their ad budget to bot traffic on average. PureGuard uses a multi-layer server-side detection engine with 15+ proprietary layers that analyze every click in real-time — blocking bots BEFORE they consume your advertising budget, not after. This includes IP reputation checks against multiple threat intelligence feeds, User-Agent analysis, browser fingerprinting, network origin detection, and behavioral analysis.

Most bot detection tools (ClickCease, Lunio, TrafficGuard) focus on PPC click fraud protection for Google Ads and Meta Ads — they detect fraud after the click. PureGuard is different in three key ways: (1) Pre-budget filtering — we block bots before you pay, not after; (2) Server-side detection — no client-side JavaScript that bots can detect and evade; (3) Built specifically for pop, push, and native traffic — with native bridges for PopAds, RollerAds, HilltopAds, ClickAdilla, and 10+ networks. PureGuard also offers RTB pre-bid scoring (OpenRTB 2.5), zone intelligence with automatic zone blocking, and a self-hosted option for full data sovereignty.

PureGuard detects all major categories of invalid traffic (IVT): General IVT (GIVT) — known bots including automation frameworks, headless browsers, and scraping tools; Sophisticated IVT (SIVT) — bots that spoof browser headers, use residential proxies, or run on cloud/datacenter infrastructure; Ad fraud crawlers — ad verification and fraud crawler signatures; Click farms — detected via burst rate analysis and zone reputation scoring; Datacenter traffic — thousands of cloud and hosting providers identified via proprietary ASN intelligence covering 11,600+ hosting networks.

PureGuard makes bot/human decisions in under 15 milliseconds. Most requests are processed in 3-5ms. This is completely transparent to end users — the redirect happens instantly. For RTB pre-bid scoring, decisions take under 5ms. PureGuard is server-side only — no JavaScript is injected into the visitor's browser, so there is zero impact on page load speed.

PureGuard has native integration bridges for all major pop, push, and native traffic networks: PopAds, RollerAds, HilltopAds, ClickAdilla (with OpenRTB 2.5 pre-bid filtering), ExoClick, ZeroPark, TrafficNomads, PopCash, ReachEffect, and RichAds. Each source has custom parameter mapping, postback URL routing, and source-specific detection tuning. You can also add any custom traffic source via the API integration guide.

RTB (Real-Time Bidding) pre-bid filtering means PureGuard scores the quality of a bid request BEFORE you place a bid. In traditional post-click fraud detection, you pay for the impression first and discover it was a bot later. With PureGuard's OpenRTB 2.5 integration, dozens of signals are analyzed per bid request — including IP reputation, browser patterns, device validation, geo verification, and domain quality scoring. If the traffic looks fraudulent, PureGuard returns a no-bid response and you pay nothing. This can save 20-40% of your RTB ad spend.

Yes — PureGuard offers a free Starter plan with 100,000 bot checks per month, all detection layers, a basic dashboard, 1 traffic source, and full API access. No credit card required. The Pro plan ($79/month) adds 5 million checks, Zone Quality Engine, Sentinel live monitoring, early warning anomaly detection, blocklist export, and unlimited traffic sources. The Enterprise plan ($299/month) includes unlimited checks, RTB pre-bid scoring, custom detection rules, multi-tenant management, white-label options, and SLA guarantees. See full pricing details.

Yes. PureGuard's Enterprise plan includes a self-hosted deployment option. The entire detection engine runs on your own server — your traffic data never leaves your infrastructure. Requirements: PHP 8.1+, Nginx, SQLite (or PostgreSQL), and Cloudflare (recommended for edge caching and DDoS protection). Self-hosting gives you full data sovereignty, zero vendor lock-in, and the lowest possible latency.

A zone blocklist is a list of publisher zones (site IDs) that produce mostly bot or low-quality traffic. Media buyers upload zone blocklists to their traffic source (PopAds, RollerAds, HilltopAds, PropellerAds) to stop buying traffic from bad zones. PureGuard generates zone blocklists automatically using the Zone Quality Engine — multiple detection rules analyze every zone's traffic quality, including bot evidence, human evidence, accept rate, device diversity, and behavioral patterns. Zones that fail quality checks are auto-blocked. You can export the blocklist in campaign-ready format and upload it directly to your traffic source. No manual zone-by-zone analysis needed.

Popunder traffic from networks like PopAds, RollerAds, and HilltopAds often contains 15-40% bot traffic — automated scripts, headless browsers, datacenter IPs, and click farms. To detect and block these bots: (1) Route your traffic through PureGuard's click endpoint (takes 2 minutes to set up); (2) PureGuard's 15+ detection layers analyze every click in real-time — checking IP reputation against multiple threat intelligence feeds, validating browser authenticity and protocol consistency, detecting hosting networks, and computing a proprietary trust score; (3) Bots are silently blocked and only verified human traffic reaches your offers; (4) Over time, PureGuard builds zone quality scores and generates blocklists you can upload back to PopAds or RollerAds to stop buying from bad zones entirely.