Launching a campaign: prepare your Cloudflare rules before the traffic arrives

Launching a campaign: prepare your Cloudflare rules before the traffic arrives

A paid campaign creates a traffic spike that looks a lot like an attack. Same landing page, same referer pattern, thousands of hits in minutes. If your rules were tuned for quiet days, they will fire.

A checklist for the day before launch:
— Raise or pause rate limits on the landing path. Better to let a few bots through than to challenge a paying click.
— Add a skip rule for the referer or the tracking parameter your campaign uses, so managed rules don't treat it as suspicious.
— Check that caching is on for the landing page. Most spike pain is origin load, not bad actors.
— Turn "Under Attack" mode off if it was left on. It shows a five-second interstitial to every visitor, and paid traffic doesn't wait.

After launch, watch Security Events for an hour. If your own campaign shows up as the top blocked source, you built the rule for the wrong day.