Keltex Blog

There are two things that your online competitors are probably doing right now:

• You competitors are clicking on your AdWords ads.
• Your competitors are looking at your AdWords ads to figure out how to improve their online campaigns (and trying to take market share away from you).

If you don’t believe it’s likely, then don’t read any further. But if you think either is possible, then read on.

Somebody is Clicking on my Ads

It’s a niggling feeling. You have no definitive proof. But you know in your heart that every day your competitors are clicking on your ads.

One of the biggest frustrations with Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) is click fraud. Click fraud is when either a human or automated script generates a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link.

Google claims that they have many automated click-fraud detection systems in place. So the actual amount of invalid clicks that get through are quite low. And we can trust their automated systems.

Do you Trust Google’s Click Fraud Detection?

Matt Cutts of Google (the guy in charge of their web spam team) had an interesting post the other day. Google uses automated tools to detect web spam in the same way they use automated tools to detect invalid clicks. His post was titled Calling for Link Spam Reports. And what he’s asking for is for us (webmasters) to report what we think is link spam, links that are meant to game Google’s organic search.

Question #1: Why would Google want us to manually report report link spam?

Answer: Google recognizes that their automated systems are imperfect.

Question #2: If Google’s automated systems for detecting nefarious activity are imperfect, does that mean that their click fraud detection system might also be imperfect?

Answer: It’s a strong possibility.

Personally I prefer to do what I can from my side to minimize the clicks coming from my competitors.

Your Ads are Free Competitive Information

Let’s say you come up with a brilliant new PPC marketing plan. Maybe it’s new ad copy, keywords, promotion or a landing page.  The moment you go live with your new plan on Google Adwords, your competitor is going to see it.

I’ve seen this happen many times. We come up with some new ad copy tweak and 24 hours after we go live to test it our competitors are using the very similar ad copy. Wow that was a waste.

I’ve also seen a change happen on the website which is then reflected on the ads. Perhaps a new promotion or new landing page. Why give your competitors a free heads up on your current marketing and sales plans? Make them do a little of their own work!

How to Block

OK, I’ve convinced you. You’re going to block them. But how do you go about doing this? There are two things that I do to block them:

• Block their IP address(s)
• Block them by location

Neither are totally foolproof, but both can go a long way towards reducing your competitor’s clicks.

Blocking Competitor IP Addresses

Blocking a competitor’s IP address means going into Google AdWords and excluding  their IP address or IP address range. AdWords lets you pick up to 20 IP addresses or address ranges and blocks all your AdWords ads appearing to those IP addresses. Google says this feature is primarily meant to block ads that are visible to you. For example, so that your employees don’t accidentally click on your ads. (Why their automated invalid click detection can’t detect these clicks is beyond me). But blocking clicks from competitors seems far more useful to me.

AdWords buries this capability. In fact there’s no menu choice to get there. You have to search for instructors on this help page:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click this link to visit the IP Address Exclusion Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/IpNegativesStartWizard)
3. Select a campaign, and click Go.
4. Enter the list of IP addresses to be excluded.
5. Click Exclude IP Addresses.

Actually figuring out your competitor’s IP address is another matter. I’ve got some ideas for you that I’ll post in an upcoming blog.

Blocking Competitor Locations

Another way to block competitors is through blocking their location. Let’s say that you know your biggest competitor is in San Antonio, TX. Why not just block San Antonio? You can do this by explicitly blocking the location on a per AdWords campaign basis (instructions may be found here):

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. On the “All Online Campaigns” page, click the name of the campaign you wish to edit.
3. Click the “Settings” tab.
4. Click Edit next to “Locations.”
5. Click “Exclude areas within selected locations.”
6. Browse the list of available areas and select those you’d like to exclude.
7. Click Done excluding.
8. Click Save.

There’s a surprising amount of granularity you can apply when excluding a location. So you don’t have to exclude all of Los Angeles, CA. You can just exclude Agura Hills.

The Location Disinformation Trick

One trick you can perform with location blocking is to create an additional campaign made just for them. This campaign is targeted at the very locations your real campaign blocks. Maybe you pay less for those ads, or you’re missing some keywords or maybe the copy isn’t quite your A game. But this way you have some control over the flow of information that your competitor receives.

The advantage of this trick is that it makes your competitor a lot less suspicious of your actions than having all your ads suddenly disappear from his browser. Also if you still have some potential customers nearby your competitor, you haven’t completely eliminated ads showing for them.

Some Cautions

Both blocking techniques have some drawbacks. Namely blocking ads from appearing for potential customers.

I don’t worry about this two much for IP address blocking. So, you accidentally block your ads for a single individual or company will probably not kill your business. But you should be cautious of IP addresses that are proxies for larger groups of people. For example, you wouldn’t want to block the IP addresses for AT & T’s wireless services and not show your ads to iPhone users (if this is a target market). It’s always best to do a reverse DNS lookup to find out who’s at the other end of the IP address and decide based on the results.

For location blocking, a lot depends on where your competitor is located. For example if they are coming from a relatively small area such as Durham, NC, maybe it’s not a big deal. But if they are in a large metropolitan area such as New York or San Jose, then there is a large potential loss of customers.

Also location based ad serving is not as exact science as it sounds. For example, the city where it reports my IP address to be is 15 miles away from the city where I live.

Blocking Ain’t Foolproof

While in theory it’s easy to block your competitors, the reality is that it’s not foolproof. People often use internet access from multiple locations… their work, their home, via their wireless provider, or at a WiFi enabled location like a coffee shop. So with any blocking that you do, there’s a way to get around it. Somebody really sophisticated could use a proxy service and get around it completely.

But if you competitor has to work a little harder to figure out what you’re doing or to click on you, maybe it’s worth it anyway.