Excluding an IP address in AdWords will make sure that the IP in question will not get to see your ads. There will be no impression, therefore there will be no click.

If you’re looking to exclude IP address in AdWords it’s probably for one of the following reasons:

  1. You want to blacklist your own IP, so you/your boss/your wife will not click on your ads and cost you money.
  2. You are considering foul play, in other words, competitor click fraud.

PPC campaigns can be costly if you have a few click monkeys trying to kill your budget, luckily, there are two ways to exclude IP address in AdWords.

  1. Manually exclude IP address.
  2. Automatic IP Exclusion with anti click fraud software.

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How to exclude IP addresses manually:

  1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
  2. In the page menu on the left, click Settings.
  3. Select the campaign you want to exclude IP addresses from.
  4. Scroll down and expand the “IP exclusions” section. You may need to click Additional Settings first.
  5. Enter the IP addresses you want to exclude from seeing your ads. Note, you can only manually enter 500 IP addresses/IP ranges.
  6. Save. You have now excluded the IP address/es from your list.

This method of excluding IP addresses is great if you are interested in blocking the occasional personal IP address that is associated with your household, workplace or familiar surrounding. It is not recommended if you think you are dealing with click fraud.

Why is manual IP exclusion useless when it comes to click fraud?

  • Click Velocity – A fraudulent IP clicks on your AdWords ads more than once, and often multiple times a day. If you are manually excluding an IP the majority of the damage will have already been done.
  • Wasted Money – By the time you will have identified a fraudulent IP, the competitor or bot will have wasted a healthy portion of your advertising budget
  • Time Consuming – Going over your web logs, discovering which IP addresses need to be excluded and then manually excluding them is a time hog.

Exclude IP address automatically:

Using third party software  it is much simpler to perform the detection and automatic exclusion of an IP address.

How does automatic IP exclusion work?

When it comes to click fraud, there are 3 steps for automatic IP exclusion.

  1. Monitoring: Adding code to your AdWords campaign and to your landing pages will let the anti click fraud software collect the necessary data points.
  2. Detecting: Now that you have collected the data, the anti fraud algorithm can do it’s job. Many data points come into the decision making of what is and what isn’t fraud.
  3. Blocking: Once the fraudulent IP addresses that need to get blocked have been identified, they are instantly inputted into your AdWords excluded IP list.

As we have seen, the exclusion of an IP address is simple, whether it be done manually or automatically by a third part such as ClickCease. What you really need to ask yourself is WHY you are blocking an IP. Most of our customers would be right to assume that other businesses that are bidding for the same keywords as them are in fact also clicking on their ads. If your industry or keyword is competitive it would be wise to check out what level of fraud you are facing on your AdWords campaign, and then decide if you want to block manually or automatically the IP addresses moving forward.