Can advertisers "block" clicks from a particular country?

[farmboy]

One of my sites deals with a topic that only concerns businesses in the U.S. I see on my site stats and newsletter subscriptions a number of people visiting/subscribing to that site from India.

I have no idea why these people are visiting and even less idea why they would want to subscribe to my newsletter. The information is of no value to them. It certainly makes me wonder if they are visiting for less than honorable intentions.

Suppose an advertiser on my site is getting clicks on ads from people in a country that really has no use for the product or service. Can that advertiser designate clicks from that country as blocked somehow and get a refund? Would a click from a blocked country be considered click fraud?

FarmBoy

[Hobbs]

Not an Adwords expert but from what I hear, advertisers can select all or just specific countries for their ad to be displayed in, hence no chance for a refund request by an advertiser, and no chance for your becoming liable for click fraud.

[Green_Grass]

Advertisers can simply opt not to show their ads in any country they choose (in adWords). They can opt in a set of countries.

Howeever frequently they select 'the whole world'.

They end up paying more in adwords cost and also get untargetted traffic and then THEY complain. Hardly the fault of Google or the publisher.

[graeme_p]

I can think of a lot of legitimate reasons why people from India might visit a site that is apparently only of interest to Americans. Without knowing your topic, I do not know if any of these apply, but obvious ideas are:

1. people with investments or business interests in the US
   
2. people with personal connections to the US
   
3. employees of an American business
   
4. of-shore out-sources for an Amrican business
   
5. contractors doing some sort of monitoring, research, whatever
   
6. students
   
7. people in the same line of business in India, who think they can learn from how things work in the US
   
8. just plain curiosity
   

I am pretty sure that Google would tell anyone who had a problem with clicks from the wrong country to just use geo-targetting next time.

Lots of people do have very strong connections to some country other than where they live. 10% of British citizen's live abroad. The proportion of Americans is probably much lower, but I it is probably still a lot of people.

[jetteroheller]

I insert the AdSense code by SSI.

The SSI can decide based on all the information available at the server to show or not to show.

But top level domain names like com net org can be from everywhere.

[BrandNewDay]

It is indeed true that Adwords advertisers, like myself, can select the countries/regions where their ads are shown. The default however is all countries.

[cgiscripts4u]

I insert the AdSense code by SSI.

The SSI can decide based on all the information available at the server to show or not to show.

But top level domain names like com net org can be from everywhere.

You could incorporate a lookup against a free IP-Country database such as the one at [maxmind.com...] rather than going by their domain names.