Targeting and Placement Tools

Overview of Placement Refinement Tools

AdWords offers two tools to help you better control where your ads appear across the Google Search and Display Networks. These tools are:

• The Site and Category Exclusion Tool
• The IP Address Exclusion Tool

About the IP Address Exclusion Tool

The IP Address Exclusion tool enables you to refine your targeting by preventing specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from seeing your ads.

In addition to controlling your ad placement through methods such as location and language targeting, the Site and Category Exclusion tool, and network distribution preferences, you can refine your targeting with IP address exclusion. This feature enables you to specify IP addresses where you don't want your ads to appear.

You can exclude up to 100 IP addresses, or ranges of addresses, per campaign. All ads in the campaign are prevented from showing for users with the IP addresses you specify, so we recommend you choose your list carefully.

IP Address Exclusion Best Practices

An important note about IP address exclusion: Some large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a range of IP addresses for all their users. If you exclude an IP address that is a proxy for many users, you could be blocking a large amount of legitimate, and potentially profitable traffic. Google takes no responsibility for this action.

Also, if you're considering IP exclusion as a way to prevent users in a particular geographical area from seeing your ads, you might consider using location exclusion instead.

Note that due to user privacy concerns, Google Analytics doesn't report on personally identifiable information, including a visitor's IP address. Instead, Google Analytics provides aggregated data to help you make informed business decisions. You can view the Map Overlay report (under the Visitors section) to look at aggregated geographical data about your visitors, or view the Network Location report (under Visitors > Network Properties) to see your visitors' ISP locations.