How to stop competitors clicking your AdWords adverts
I am often asked this question:
How can I stop my competitors from clicking my AdWords adverts and using up my budget?
This IS possible. And here’s how to do it.
Install a tracking software, such as Get Clicky.
Monitor the visitors over the period of a few days, or weeks. Now change the date selector to the correct time period, or the last 90 days. Now choose Most Active Visitors.
Most Active Visitors screenshot
You will note that you will be able to see many IP addresses, many of whom will have visited repeatedly. I would now suggest you go through and identify yourself, and tag yourself and ideally remove your IP address from this process. Otherwise you will never be able to see your own ads. Having said that – ideally you should be using the Google AdWords Preview Tool anyway….
Now start examining each IP address, 1 at a time, for suspicious behaviour. This might be repeatedly visiting your website for the same keyword, or different keywords, on different days. Note that this is not ALWAYS a problem, as some prospects may come back a few times before making a decision. Other things to look out for include the length of the visit, a very short visit may signify a competitor clicking your link then hitting the back button.
The next step is to write each IP address down that you regard as suspicious. You will then go and exclude these addresses from ever seeing your AdWords adverts ever again.
Open AdWords, and navigate to the Tab marked Networks. Near the bottom of the screen you will see a link marked Exclusions. Click the + next to it and now click the blue hyperlink in the bottom right hand corner marked Manage IP Address Exclusions.
Note that you will need to exclude all the IP addresses for each and every campaign in your account. Select the first campaign and then paste the IP addresses in one after another.
What will this do?
These IP addresses have now been banned from seeing your AdWords adverts, so as far as they are concerned, they will believe you have actually stopped advertising.
An alternative method is to use a package such as AdWatcher, however having tested this in the past, I found it rather excessive and difficult to use for large accounts with a lot of adgroups. This is due to the fact each URL in your AdWords account must be changed to an AdWatcher URL. Having said, in cases where you will have more than 20 competitors clicking your adverts, it may be needed and certainly is effective! It works by redirecting the IP address to their server and a message warning them their activity is being logged as suspicious.
Questions? Ask them here!
Does anyone imagine with all the technology at Google’s disposal, they could not have solved this problem. Might it be that a beneficiary of this malicious behaviour and has no interest in stopping it is ….?
Hiya
My own tests have shown that Google DOES filter out repeated clicks for the same keyword. The problems are those competitors who repeatedly click a couple of times per day, for different keywords. These ones can rapidly use up your budget.
It is amazing to me that there is a way to stop this behavior. Thanks!
so i should get my webmaster to install the software on my home page or what.
Ask them to install it onto every page ideally.
Wow, had no idea you could do this, although I had heard that you can only click on a competitor’s adword link for a certain number of times anyway (although that was a couple of years ago).
If you install tracking code on every page will you not get duplicates? If your competitors hide you with the same method, does using Ad Preview Tool reveal them?
No that wouldn’t happen, the same way as Google Analytics does not show duplicates. The ad preview tool will indeed reveal the ads.
If you have access to your web log, just use a text editor with a find. Each entry with a “gclid” is a unique adword click and matching ip is to the left. If you notice an ip repeats, you can find that ip and count how often it shows up. I wrote a php script that counts the gclid’s and matches each to an ip, then returns the number of instances of each ip’s clicks on an adwords campaign. Our Fort Lauderdale competitor may be desperate, because they clicked 236 times in past 28 days on two of my ad campaigns. They’re using a static ip so it wasn’t hard to identify them.
They have been excluded on our adwords, but are still clicking the ad. We just aren’t being charged, because when they clicked 91 times on monday our $3 budget wasn’t eaten up.