IP exclusions limit of 500

ip exclusions

[2kegx]

We've accumulated over 500 IP exclusions in Adwords (those IPs cannot see or click on our ads), primarily a growing list of competitors in the field. We're maxed out and need to add another 100. I know it's a max of 500 per campaign and have we've already utilized all other tricks like geotargeting. Can anyone help us find a workaround for increasing that limit from 500? "Create a 2nd campaign" I don't think would solve the problem, since we'd really be stuck with the same problem. Even if we take half of our ads and put them in "Campaign 2", it just shuffles the deck and we have the same problem. Can a company pay to have that limit increased? Solutions genuinely appreciated.

[eWhisper]

There's not a quick way to do this. The best way is to see is if there are ranges you wish to block instead of individual IPs.

For instance, I often see companies start blocking every IP in a country, when its really the country's IP ranges they should be blocking instead.

[2kegx]

eWhisper--While I appreciate your response, yes, I've considered that and have painstakingly reduced all possible to a range in order to free up a few of those 500, before posting here.

[RhinoFish]

I ignored this post initially, thinking the effort itself is misguided (aka, not at all necessary) and a gran waste of time. I think G understands very well who is who and adapts to their behavior very quickly.

But eWhisper's someone I respect a great deal. eW, is this a common practice for you?

I assume you're blocking IPs to raise CTR and/or ROAS, but I know IPs for many competitors aren't the end all they used to be - mobile, travel, multi-devices, phones / tablets using wi-fi... some internet access being consolidated on non-geo specific IPs (like my central Florida access providers shows a Miami IP address regarding geo location... I can't help but think this is a huge time suck, and is also likely blocking people you don't want to block.

Perhaps this is an uber competitive niche [or your intended geo targets are someplace fraught with issues (outside of north america)] and you've got every other base covered completely... no accusation meant by this, but often when i see ppc folks chasing something weird like this, from experience in reviewing their efforts, they often have huge issues with their PPC on many other fronts, like keyword matching, and other basic stuff.

yes, it sounds like i'm saying you're chasing something stupid, i was thinking that before i posted, but now i'm wondering if i'm the idiot. :-)

eW, clue me in?

[2kegx]

Hi R/F. I understand and have thought of all those things. Thanks for taking the time to drop by. Yeah, it's a super competitive nitch, and there's a lot of click fraud (no Google doesn't catch it well. People just use proxies/proxy switchers and Google "can't help what it can't see" in my experience). However, we can see it using other programs and just patterns/search behavior. All that aside, I still have the same question and am looking for a solution because I know there are a lot of smart, helpful webmasters here: basically we're at our 500 IPs/campaign limit but need to add another 100 (wish we just had 2000 like Bing apparently has). Hopefully Google Adwords will consider this. We have 1 campaign only. I figured adding a 2nd campaign just to get "500 more" IPs to be able to exclude, if you think about it, won't really address the problem at all. Wondering if anyone might have any ideas that can help us in this predicament, because I have a list of culprits. I just can't add them because of the current max# limit. Hopefully someone will have a neat solution we haven't thought of. Obviously the simplest would be if Google increased to 2000, or even allowed it as a paid option, but as you can imagine, we're already paying way too much in ads because of invalid clicks that are not being caught because people aren't dumb enough to keep the same IP and understand the simple workarounds and time spent per page to avoid the filter.

[eWhisper]

There are usually three reasons I'll block IPs:

1. No matter what the settings I choose, I keep getting some visitors from countries I don't want to target. This is most common with international accounts; so I'll use IP blocking to block large ranges of country based IPs.

2. I have some competitors that try to click on the ads all the time. In these cases, I'll either block their IPs, or serve them a different landing page than what everyone else sees.

3. Its a large company and the sales or support staff often search Google for their own company to either see the ads, or to navigate to the products and they click the companies ads all the time. In this case, I'll sometimes block the company from seeing its own ads and then teach them about using the ad preview tool to see ads.

I can't say that I use this feature a lot; but there have been times when I have found it useful.

[2kegx]

Your #1 isn't a problem for us since we only show our ads, for now, here in US
Your #2 we obviously already do
Your #3 would be a simple solution to someone else's problem.

None of those present viable solutions for my question of course. Seeking solutions.

[RhinoFish]

Thanks all.

eDub: we don't see #1 (client lineup mostly north america, plus almost always use "people in" versus looser choices) and believe [perhaps wrongly (but if it's a problem, it's tiny)] that the conversion optimizer saves us on #2 and #3. we also tend to work with small folks, where #3 wouldn't crop up often at all. and if #2 comes up, we'd negative geo-target vs IP block - again, our clients tend to be small and sell nationwide, so if the "stop" training doesn't work or a competitor is being a pain, we might exclude their city or zip code.

All our (situation specific) reasons aside, if I believed what 2kegx does, I'd appeal to G, it's very likely they are able to extend the count. Note, I didn't say likely they would, but likely could. Convince them there's fraud, and I believe they'll fix it.

[RhinoFish]

Actually, let me re-address this:

"there's a lot of click fraud (no Google doesn't catch it well. People just use proxies/proxy switchers"

If I believed this was the case, I'd aim to prove it somehow, and get G to ban them forever.

[2kegx]

If it was that easy/obvious we would have done that already. Precisely because you can never be 100% sure is why the IP exclusions are there. Otherwise, people would have them banned. If competitors work around the exclusions by proxy switching, then it's nearly impossible to prove and all you can do is add them to your suspected list, ie the IP exclusion list...which takes us back to my original question: If Google Adwords IP exclusion list maxes out at 500 per campaign, then what can one really do? We have 100 IPs we need to add but can't. For more serious webmasters, to stay competitive with Bing's AdCenter, Google's going to have to increase the # of IP exclusions to 2000 or more, or at least, offer a pay-for-more option. It's easy for any webmaster, esp for a large business with a huge number of competitors, to get to 500 IPs. Currently, we're SOL and it makes it hard to compete since the whole system is fraught with fraud and parties benefiting from that fraud or pretending they didn't know. Along with my other Google Stats, like CPC, CPM, etc, I call this stat "IIB", short for "Ignorance is Bliss", which also stands for stupid money, which is one major form of Google revenue.