False click from schools and colleges

[superclown2]

Many of the useless click I get are from school and college kids researching for projects. Does anyone know of a UK database of IP addresses from these institutions so I (and we) can block them all? The product I'm promoting will never be bought by a student so I shan't lose any business and I reckon that a lot of us will be in a similar position.

[tangor]

Is this activity on a single page or general for the entire site? If localized on one or two pages then remove the ads from those pages and problem is solved. (Not a happy answer but is a good one)

Blocking edu type sites/visitors is not a good idea. I certainly would never do that.

[superclown2]

I haven't blocked them from the site, I've blocked them from seeing my Google ads. When these cost £25 a click just to get on page one I don't want a load of kids using them for research.

This is a problem I've seen for years. I remember packing up advertising on Yahoo (remember them?) a decade ago because of constant clicks from a certain UK 'university' that they were unwilling/unable to block.

If I was selling products that would be bought by students then, yes, it would be crazy to block them. But I'm not.

[tangor]

A short look at Bing "uni name ip addresses" provides quite a bit of info. Is it complete? Probably not but is a place to start. Might have to track the edu ips down one at a time but once that is done you'd be the go to guy for that!

I don't see a master list anywhere.

[ogletree]

You can get a list but it will be too big. Google won't let you list more than 500. You can get a list of colleges and bulk upload them as location exclusions.

If you still want to try ip exclusions you can get a list from i-blocklist. You will have to figure out a way to reduce the size of the list. You can exclude entire blocks but you will still run into the 500 limit.

[ehorvath]

I would consider adding negative keywords too. I know your question was about exclude IP address, but:
- IP addresses won't help you when students searching from home
- How you know they are students when Adwords & Analytics won't give you IP addresses?

Suggestion one:
If you have the IP address which seems coming from EDU you can do a 'whois' search on Linux/Unix/mac and this will give you information about the IP and the IP range as well.. so if you see this IP is coming from EDU etc.. than you'll see the IP range or a portion of IP range that this specific EDU owns so you can exclude it.

Suggestion two:
Leadforensics has all the IP datas... you can test your theory by signup for Leadforsenics for a week. Well, it's pretty inverse use of leadforsenincs but could work.

[superclown2]

- How you know they are students when Adwords & Analytics won't give you IP addresses?

Server logs do. I gave up on Google Analytics years ago.

In the end I did it the hard way. I downloaded lists of every university and college in the UK and looked up their IP addresses. Interestingly I settled on Bing for my search, Google was throwing up too much commercial clutter. Luckily most of the newer ones are issued in blocks by a central authority called JANET but a lot of those that were early onto the web were outside it. I finished up with about 60 IP entries ranging from single IP addresses up to /14 blocks so well within Google's 500 limit. It also includes a lot of libraries too, these are places that my target clients will certainly not be researching from. Anyone who needs to go to a library to search the web is not someone I want clicking on my ads. Others blocked by this list include local government offices - no problem there but there are probably others so I may lose a bit of business but when clicks are costing me around £25 each it's a price worth paying.

I am only, of course, blocking them from seeing my Google ads. They can still visit the site if they find it through the SERPs.

Result? I reckon it will cut my adwords bill by around 20%, going off past experience.

I cannot remember a longer and more boringly tedious project in my life, but it will be worth it.