After the rollout of the Placement Platform, Google Adwords is again proving that they are extremely focused on being innovative in the ever-changing online advertising space. The latest addition to Adwords advertising is the IP Exclusion Feature. Adwords has taken things a step further with allowing advertisers to have control over their advertisements, which is always a welcomed feature by the advertisers. Advertisers have always had the ability to control placements of their ads in terms of choosing language settings, geo-targeting settings, site exclusion settings, etcetera however now with the addition of the new IP Exclusion feature advertisers also have the ability to specify IP addresses where they do not want their ads to show. This is an amazing breakthrough in the online advertising world that will help to prevent click fraud. Advertisers however, should not get overly aggressive with implementing this new feature, as it may result in blocking a ton of relevant traffic.
As BizReport suggested, this feature may contribute in battling the click-fraud that advertisers face but usually do not have much control over. Click-fraud can be identified when an ad is receiving an excessive amount of clicks from the same IP address on a continual basis.
2 Ways to effectively use the IP Exclusion Feature:
Blocking Competitor IP addresses Blocking IP addresses from competitors could potentially aid in less click-fraud, which in turn may enhance the validity of reporting from Adwords by registering more of the quality clicks versus reports containing the fraud clicks and the quality clicks.
Fortune 1000 companies … Exclude yourselves Blocking internal IP addresses could also aid in preventing the accidental clicks caused by employees and agencies constantly checking the status of their PPC ads. We saw this happening firsthand with a client of ours. They found that 75% of their clicks on their branded keywords were from their own employees! Another feature Adwords provides for checking Pay Per Click (PPC) ads for employees and agencies to carefully avoid the accidental clicking can be found here.
The downside of IP exclusion is that if you block an IP address that uses a proxy, you may have succeeded in blocking the 1 or 2 people suspected of click fraud, but you may also be blocking hundreds and thousands of legitimate, quality clicks at the same time.
The IP Exclusion Features allows an advertiser to block up to 20 IP addresses per campaign. The IP Exclusion Feature can definitely serve as a benefit to Adwords campaign, but before you decide to enable the feature, be sure you have done your homework on the IP addresses you are about to block and the feature doesn't backfire on you!
