How to prevent your competitors from seeing your advertising. (a.k.a IP exclusion / blocking)
We all know competitor research is par for the course.
If you're an email specialist, you're probably signed up for all your competitors email newsletters. Not with your company email address, I hope.
If you're a social media manager, you're probably following every single one of your competitor's social media outlets (never mind that extra +1 you're giving them, it's a small price to pay).
It's normal - you do it to your competitors, and they do it to you.
If you're NOT doing all of the above, I beg you to please do so. There are no ethical issues here, unless you're lying about your identity.
However, if you're involved in Search Engine Advertising, or PPC advertising, there is something you can do to throw your competitors off your scent... At least for a while.
Google AdWords IP Exclusion / IP Blocking
In this post I'm going to be sharing three things:
1.) What is IP Exclusion / IP Blocking?
2.) How do I use IP Exclusion / IP Blocking in my Google AdWords campaigns?
3.) When should I use IP Exclusion / IP Blocking?
Let's begin!
What is IP Exclusion / IP Blocking?
It's really as simple as it sounds. IP Exclusion or IP Blocking, is a feature in Google AdWords, whereby you can input a list of IP Addresses you wish to block.
Once you input these addresses, anyone accessing the internet from those IP Addresses will be blocked from seeing your advertising.
To be clear, they won't see an error or anything that will tip them off. They will simply be ineligible (by Google) to view your advertising.
That means they will never see your advertising, and never have the chance to click on your advertising. Similarly, that means you will never spend any of your advertising budget on them.
How do I use IP Exclusion / IP Blocking in my Google AdWords campaigns?
Here's the thing - there's a small feature hidden in the Settings of your Google AdWords campaigns that most people don't delve into.
Sure, there are a lot of settings there. Bid strategies, campaign automation, etc which we will talk about another time.
However, if you access the Settings of any of your AdWords campaigns, you will see only 7-8 very basic things you can change, such as Locations, Goals, Languages, etc.
Look closer and you'll see an Additional Settings you can click on to expand some previously hidden settings.
Once you've accessed all the usually hidden Settings, it's time to get cracking.
Take a look at the absolute last option you have there: IP Exclusions.
When you click on it, you'll be presented with a box to input as many IP addresses as you want to.
Whatever IP address you key in will be added to a block-list for this AdWords campaign. In other words, they will never see your advertising, if they are logging in from this IP address.
Now if you're wondering how you can obtain your competitor's IP addresses to block them from seeing your advertising, we've got a different blog post teaching you how to do so here.
When should I use IP Exclusion / IP Blocking?
Firstly, you want to identify your competitor's IP addresses, and block them. Post-haste.
That said, just to be clear, you'll never stop them all. If a competitor really wants to view your ads, they can disconnect from their company wi-fi and use their personal devices/networks to work around this.
However, unless you work in an extremely cutthroat industry, odds are, nobody actually has the time for this stuff.
Secondly, in certain larger companies, you may actually want to identify your own company's IP address and add it to the block-list.
WHY?
In certain cases, for example, when you're running a pilot advertising campaign with a small budget, or really, any kind of advertising campaign with a small budget, you want to reduce unnecessary wasteful clicks.
I personally guarantee you that if anyone at your company sees your advertising, 9 out of 10 times they will click on it.
What happens then? Depending on how much you are paying per click, every click may waste as little as £0.01 to £40.00 of your money. (Some Search advertising keywords can cost more than £40 per click!)
In case you're wondering how to identify your own company's IP address, it's just as simple as Googling it. Try it!
Now you know how to IP block your competitors, go ahead and get started!