PropellerAds
Playbook · 2 min read

How to blacklist zones in PropellerAds

On PropellerAds the unit that matters is the zone_id — the specific traffic source behind each click. Here’s how to find the invalid-traffic zones and blacklist them yourself.

01 /

Find the invalid-traffic zones

Every PropellerAds click carries a zone_id. Score each visit 0–100, roll the invalid-traffic rate up by zone, and rank by bot rate and volume — the handful of zones doing the damage isolate themselves.

02 /

Blacklist them in PropellerAds

In the PropellerAds dashboard, open the campaign’s zone targeting and add the flagged zone IDs to the Exceptions / block list (blacklist). Save, and PropellerAds stops serving your ad on those zones. You can also pair the blacklist with PropellerAds' automated rules to pause zones that breach a threshold.

03 /

What ValidVisit does and doesn’t do

PropellerAds lets you wire up Automated Rules that pause a zone the moment it crosses a threshold — powerful, and exactly why ValidVisit doesn’t feed a zone into that pipeline on its own. A zone having one bad afternoon (a scraper crawl, a referrer spike) isn’t the same as a zone that’s bad by nature, and only a human — or a rule you’ve deliberately tuned — should be the one deciding which it is. ValidVisit’s job stops at the 0–100 score and the zone ID; whether that becomes an Exceptions-list entry or an Automated Rule is your call, made in PropellerAds.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Where do I blacklist zones in PropellerAds?+
In the campaign’s zone targeting, add zone IDs to the Exceptions / block list. PropellerAds then stops serving on those zones.
Doesn’t PropellerAds already filter bots?+
It applies its own filtering, but that’s the network grading its own inventory. ValidVisit gives you an independent per-zone measurement, so you can exclude zones that pass the network’s filter but still underperform on your traffic.
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