Hiding Your PPC Ads from Your Competitors – Consider These Two Important Tips. There are obvious benefits of hiding your PPC ads from your local competitors.
When using PPC ads, you’re not just competing with your immediate competitors but also huge advertisers, for instance, Amazon. This, alongside other factors, makes PPC advertising extremely competitive.
Hiding your ads from competitors to prevent them from copying your ads is, therefore, an excellent way of preventing them from studying your latest PPC strategy.
PPC advertisers are always looking for new strategies to market their business more effectively. Since it takes a lot of time, effort, and money to find an effective combination, it makes sense to prevent your competitors from copying your strategy by simply studying your ads.
The most challenging step is figuring out the best way to hide your ads from competitors. Below you’ll find two ways you can use to prevent your direct competitors from seeing your ads and ultimately stop AdWords click fraud.
1. Hiding Your Ads Using Geotargeting
You can use geotargeting to hide your PPC ads. While this option is not as effective as the second option, it is the easiest option to use and implement.
You’ll first need to know your competitor’s office location before using geotargeting. You can easily uncover your competitor’s location by looking at their Contact page and check their office location.
If it’s Virginia, for instance, then your geotargeting efforts should focus on Virginia.
After identifying your competitor’s office location, you now need to change your geotargeting settings to make sure your ads are not visible in areas that you would like to hide them.
Doing this is very simple. You simply go to the campaign level and select “Settings”. Following that you need to scroll down to find locations. Find the cities you are targeting to exclude them.
You’ll, therefore, need to do a careful analysis of the risks and rewards involved before using it. If your business will be much affected when you miss clicks from the location you’re targeting, use another option or reconsider hiding your ads altogether.
2. Using IP Address to Block Competitors
In this option, you’ll need to exclude the IP address of your competitor to prevent them from seeing your ads.
Google has an IP exclusion service to allow advertisers to hide their ads from specific IP addresses. IP exclusion is designed to block clicks from malicious sources that do not generate any conversions.
To use it, you need to first identify the IP address of your competitor. Once you know their IP addresses, you can input them in AdWords to stop them from seeing your ads. Your competitors won’t be able to see your ads from their office anymore.
As you can see, this option is more effective than the first one as you will block your competitors from seeing and studying your ads without blocking the entire city. Using this feature you can block any IP address (competitor or not) that drain your ad budget without generating any results.
How to Find Your Competitors IP Address?
Getting your competitor’s IP address can sometimes be a bit tricky.
The last thing you want is to misidentify a potential customer’s IP as your competitor and block them from viewing your ad.
One way to get to know your competitor’s IP address is by recording the IP address when you send an email to someone at the company.
While there’s a possibility that the IP address matches their office, it can also be from the email provider. No matter what you can simply block them as they can very well be the IP address of your competitors’ office.
One of the things you can do is check your website’s logs. Check if any of these IP addresses originate from the location of your competitors. This method, however, takes a lot of time and can give inaccurate results at times.
However, once you know which IP addresses are from your competition, you will need to go to the AdWords setting and put them in the exclusion list.
Blocking ads from competitors may seem like overkill. However, considering anyone can use click fraud bots to drain your marketing budget, you should take necessary measures. Some invalid clicks are fine, but when your competitors are using unethical means to put you out of business, you need to step and save your ads from being used against you.