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How to Exclude IP Addresses in Google Ads

  • January 24, 2025
how to exclude IP addresses on google ads _ cover

How to exclude IP addresses in Google Ads

Follow these steps to add IP exclusions to your ad campaigns in Google Ads:

  1. Click “Campaigns” in the left navigation menu
  2. Select “Campaigns” again in the second navigation menu
  3. Select “Settings” in the tab menu at the top (note: you must select a Campaign in the top menu to see this option)
  4. Choose “Additional Settings” at the bottom of the page
  5. Open the “IP exclusions” section
  6. Enter the IP addresses you want to exclude
  7. Hit “Save”

Location of “IP Exclusions” targeting feature in Google Ads

Benefits of excluding IP addresses in Google Ads

Excluding IP addresses in Google Ads is a strategic move for several reasons, primarily aimed at optimizing ad performance and budget efficiency. Here’s why someone might want to do this:

  • Prevent Click Fraud: One of the most common reasons for IP exclusion is to combat click fraud. This occurs when individuals or bots maliciously click on ads without any intention of engaging with the product or service, draining the advertiser’s budget. By identifying and blocking the IPs associated with these activities, advertisers can reduce wasted expenditure.
  • Improving Campaign Performance: By excluding non-converting traffic sources based on their IP address, advertisers can focus their budget on audiences that are more likely to convert, thus improving the overall ROI of their campaigns.
  • Control Internal Traffic: You can avoid serving ads to employees to prevent them from inadvertently clicking on their ads. This helps in maintaining accurate data on campaign performance and ensures the advertising budget is used efficiently.
  • Reduce Irrelevant Impressions: Excluding specific IP addresses can help in reducing impressions that are unlikely to convert. This can improve the ad’s click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rates which is beneficial for the campaign’s quality score and can result in lower cost per click (CPC).
  • Prevent Competitors from Seeing and Clicking Your Ads: For strategic reasons, you may want to exclude IP addresses of your competitors to prevent them from seeing your messaging strategy. At Fraud Blocker, we also hear directly from clients that their competitors are actively clicking their ads in an attempt to drain their budget (learn more on how to stop competitors from clicking your ads). Excluding their IP addresses can prevent this abusive behavior.

In essence, IP exclusion is a valuable tool in the Google Ads toolkit, offering advertisers control over who sees their ads, enhancing campaign performance, and ensuring budget is spent on reaching the most relevant audiences.

Which campaign types allow IP exclusions in Google Ads?

Google doesn’t allow IP exclusions in every campaign type. It wants to simplify the targeting options for newer, less experienced users so it limits many of the advanced options.

These campaign types ALLOW IP exclusions:

These DO NOT allow IP exclusions:

It’s also important to know that some ad networks outside of Google Ads do and some don’t. For example, Microsoft Ads and most popular DSPs do allow IP exclusions, but Facebook Ads (including Instagram) and Amazon Ads do not. Those that don’t usually offer an alternative with custom audiences that you can exclude instead.

**Special note: you can also block IPs at the Account-Level. As of an update from Google on June 19, 2024, Google also allows services such as Fraud Blocker, to access these Account-level IP exclusions via their API, thus enabling Fraud Blocker to prevent ad fraud across Performance Max, Demand Gen, YouTube and others. Read more. 

Campaign types that allow IP exclusions in google ads

Campaign types that allow “IP Exclusions” in Google Ads

Automating IP exclusions can help prevent ad fraud

Most analytics platform’s don’t provide user’s IP addresses, including Google Analytics. Thus you will need to capture the IP address your self to know which ones to exclude. This usually requires a developer and can be technically difficult. 

By using an independent software, such as ours (Fraud Blocker), we can identify the IP addresses of your visitors for you so you can add them to your IP exclusion lists in Google Ads. 

We can also automate the process for you so we can detect IP addresses of bad users and then send them to your Google Ads campaigns in real-time, thus preventing bad actors from seeing your ads and wasting your budget. We are an approved API provider for Google and sync thousands of IPs every day to our client’s campaigns. 

Want to boost your ad performance? Let us automate your IP exclusions of bad users

We can help boost your ad performance by analyzing IP addresses of your visitors to remove fraud, bots, accidental clicks, and more from your advertising campaigns.

Try our 7-day free trial and see how much money we can save you.

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