How to block an IP address in Google Ads

4. Click on “IP exclusions” at the very bottom to open the drop-down window

That is it! You have now successfully blocked IP addresses from seeing your ads. Repeat this process for every campaign you wish to exclude the IP addresses from.

Downsides of manually excluding IP addresses within Google Ads

Even if you can detect fake traffic with your own tools, this requires a lot of manual effort for various reasons:

• Constant monitoring: You would need to monitor your server logs constantly. That means in near real time. Bot traffic often happens within a short period of time. Once you’ve identified the IP address as fraudulent, the bot has either already moved to another IP address or moved on to another campaign.
• Time-intensive: You manually need to go through the data and identify patterns to find fraudulent traffic. After you identify the traffic as fraudulent, you also have to go to your Google Ads dashboard and exclude the IP addresses. This applies to each individual IP address you find in your data. You also have to exclude every IP address in each of your active campaigns, so the effort multiplies rapidly.
• IP changes: As we have mentioned in several places, bot developers are smart people. Even if they operate their botnet via a data center, the bots are programmed to change IP addresses constantly – sometimes they even use proxies with residential IP addresses so that they look like real people clicking on your ads. This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for you to detect fraudulent traffic based on the IP address alone.
• Reactive: When you manually block an IP address, you are always in a reactive position. Your advertising budget has already been drained and the damage has already been done because you cannot manually monitor your campaigns in real time.

Why you should automate invalid traffic blocking within Google Ads

With all the downsides of manually excluding IP addresses within Google Ads, one thing should be clear: you should not get your hopes up too early, as you simply cannot react fast enough to protect your campaigns from fraudulent and fake traffic.

This is where automatic blocking solutions like Fraud0 come into play. Once you insert our code into your website, our system automatically detects fake and invalid traffic, as well as low-quality traffic patterns, and excludes them from further viewing of your ads in real time.

With our solution, you do not have to worry about manually reviewing the huge amounts of data from your server logs or analysis, but can focus on your business and the next marketing campaigns. As a bonus, you will also save your marketing budget as invalid traffic will be automatically blocked from your campaigns.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial today and see for yourself.