When you use the Internet Protocol (IP) exclusion tool, clicks from excluded IP addresses may still appear in your web logs. There are several legitimate reasons for this:
- Some Internet Service Providers continuously rotate users' IP addresses. For example, suppose you've blocked IP address A. A user performs a specific search query while assigned IP address B, and your ad shows. However, when the user clicks on your ad, the IP address has changed to A, so your ad registers a click from your excluded IP address.
- Some Google Network sites don't provide IP information, so users with your excluded IP addresses may see your ad on these sites. We can't guarantee there will be no clicks from a particular IP address. In the event that a site shows your ad for one of your excluded IP addresses, any impressions and resulting clicks will be reflected as regular performance statistics in your account.
- When reviewing your web logs, it is important to understand that the referrer URL for a click on both the organic Google search results and an ad will be the same. Because IP exclusion is only applicable to ads, it's possible that the click that you're seeing actually originated from our search results. To make sure that you can accurately analyze clicks coming from our organic versus paid results, we recommend that you implement tracking URLs. For example, if your ad's landing page is www.yourdomain.com, your tracking URL could be www.yourdomain.com/?source=googleads.
Google automatically and proactively filters invalid clicks from your account. You don't have to do anything in order to receive this protection. However, you can use the IP address exclusion tool to gain additional control over the placement of your ads.
If this does not answer your question, please contact us.
