Tip of the Week: Blocking Competitors from seeing your Ads
Do you have a sneaking (or not so sneaking) suspicion that your competitors are click click clicking away on your keywords? Even if it’s just a click a day the cost and negative ROI adds up quickly.
What’s a marketer to do? Well, luckily, our friends at Google have an answer for you: IP Exclusion.
Simply log into your account and go to the “Tools” section of campaign management then follow the steps for IP Exclusion.
This will prevent any of your campaign’s ads from showing up on this IP address. Competitor click fraud is one reason, but also preventing your competitors from getting a good read on your bid strategy, ad copy, etc. is another good reason. Additionally, if you are an agency, this is a good way to make sure your clients are not wasting money by testing ad functionality; however, the client will then be required to use the Google Ad Preview tool because they will not see the ad on the search engines.
All in all it is a very quick and easy way to increase ROI with just five minutes of work.
Yahoo!? MSN? I don’t believe they offer it, but correct me if I’m wrong.
~porter32
on May 5th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
hmmm, this seems to fall into a grey area – perhaps being a bit cloak-and-dagger, or “black hat” PPC. but I like it.
and I have several clients who are very interested in competitor tactics such as this one.
on May 5th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
From what I understand Yahoo and MSN do not offer this level of blocking yet. Ideally it would be great if we could get a report from Google on the IP’s through the reports interface, I know where I am employed we collect that data through third party tracking, so we can gather that information and run a sort functionality to montior any suspicious IP activity and block it. Naturally completing a lookup as to who’s IP we are blocking first.
on May 6th, 2009 at 11:26 am
This is a great post, any tricks on identifying the IP addresses of the clickers burning through budgets?
on May 6th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Some people do not know how to find their IP address and always wonder what it is. I used what is my ip address and it shows their ip.
The problem you may find with blocking one ip address is that they have a router so each time they log on they have a new ip address. One way to block this is use regular expressions and block a range of ip addresses.
on May 7th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Tim,
Unfortunatley neither Adwords nor Google Analytics provides an IP report. My company, Location3 Media, uses a technology that logs IP reports and flags suspicious clicks. There are a number of different companies out their focused on click fraud that provide that sort of software. ip2location3.com is one that I know of.
Alex