AdWords Quietly Rolls Out IP Blocking as a New Feature
Posted: June 15, 2007
- Have you ever wanted to block a competitor from being able to see your ad?
- Have you ever seen an IP address in your log files that seems to click your ad over and over?
- Have you ever said ‘I just don’t want people from these IPs to see my ads’?
The wait is over, now advertisers can block specific IPs from viewing their ads.
IP Exclusion
This feature enables you to specify IP addresses where you don’t want your ads to appear.
You can exclude up to 20 IP addresses, or ranges of addresses, per campaign. All ads in the campaign are prevented from showing for users with the IP addresses you specify, so we recommend you choose your list carefully.
An important note about IP address exclusion: Some large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a range of IP addresses for all their users. If you exclude an IP address that is a proxy for many users, you could be blocking a large amount of legitimate, and potentially profitable traffic. Google takes no responsibility for this action.
Source, AdWords Help Files.
How to Block IPs
To exclude IP addresses, follow the steps below:
- Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
- Click Tools at the top of your Campaign Summary page.
- Click IP Exclusion under ‘Optimize Your Ads.’
- Select a campaign, and click Go.
- Enter the list of IP addresses to be excluded.
- Click Exclude IP Addresses.
Once you’ve excluded IP addresses for a campaign, you can view or edit your list by following these steps:
- Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
- Click the campaign you wish to edit.
- The number of existing excluded IP addresses will appear beneath the campaign name and daily budget.
- Click View/edit.
Source, AdWords Help Files.
Wildcards are available
In addition, you can block ranges of IPs using wildcards. The wildcard can only be used for the last 3 digits of the IP address.
- 123.4.5.67
- 123.4.5.*
- 123.45.167.1
Request for Google
The next step in helping advertisers verify their IP blocking would be to add the ability to see ads by IP address in the Ad Preview tool.
A note of caution:
Some hosts don’t assign unique IPs per user. If you block an IP address for a host which gives all of their users the same IP address, you will block that entire user range.
This is an especially important note if you see a lot of visits from Reston, VA and try to block those ranges of IP addresses. It is possible to block all AOL dial up users from seeing your ads.
The tool is very useful for blocking specific IPs, competitors, etc from seeing your ad. However, as with any filtering tool, make sure that you see an account improvements in items like conversion rate and cost per conversion so that the blocking is having the desired effect on your account.
Related Information:
- IP Blocking Coming to AdWords...
- Combat Click Fraud By Blocking Low Quality Traffic...
- Step by Step Guide to Blocking Domain Parked Sites on Google AdWords...
- AdWords New Feature: Video Ads...
- Google AdWords New Feature: Choose Your Time Zone - Change Wisely...
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SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 15, 2007…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web…….
This going to be one feature that I’m definitely going to get a lot of use out of. I love the fact that I can block certain IPs, especially those that aren’t converting for me.
There are also those competitors that I will block right away, as well as some bots that I know are bugging the heck out me as well.
[...] eWhisper has further details this topic. [...]
[...] Posted on June 16th, 2007. AdWords Quietly Rolls Out IP Blocking as a New Feature [...]
We always try and block our clients’ internal call centers from being able to view our pay per click ads, it saves a little $ especially on branded terms.
[...] bgtheory.com reports that Google Adwords now enables you to exclude up to 20 IP addresses. [...]
Google Adds “IP Exclusion” To AdWords & “Allowed Sites” To AdSense…
Google has added two features to Google AdWords and Google AdSense that provides both with more control on where and which ads are shown. As Brad Geddes reports, Google AdWords has added an IP Exclusion tool. The tool allows you to block certain IP add…
[...] so much as a peep, Google launched their IP blocking tool. This post details how to use the tool function and list out possible [...]
[...] Brad tells us Adwords quietly releases IP blocking [...]