• 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:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click Tools at the top of your Campaign Summary page.
3. Click IP Exclusion under ‘Optimize Your Ads.’
4. Select a campaign, and click Go.
5. Enter the list of IP addresses to be excluded.
6. Click Exclude IP Addresses.

Once you’ve excluded IP addresses for a campaign, you can view or edit your list by following these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click the campaign you wish to edit.
3. The number of existing excluded IP addresses will appear beneath the campaign name and daily budget.
4. 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.

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