Warning: Adwords IP Excusion tool is not 100% accurate!

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August 15th, 2008 by Geoff

If anyone is worried about invalid clicks through PPC then I want to give everyone a bit of assurance on the matter and warn you that the Google Adwords IP exclusion tool is definitely not 100% accurate.

We have a client spending a fair size per month on Google and is concerned by pay per clicks that are invalid. Recently we identified an IP address through our Click Forensic package clicking multiple times on our ads. They were unusual click patterns and they were always deemed as invalid.

We then entered the IP into the Google Adwords exclusion tool, but after reviewing this in the following weeks the IP was still accruing clicks on our ads. Therefore, do not trust the Google Adwords exclusion tool.

The facts:
Since 2006, the percentage of invalid clicks has decreased. Between the three major search engines, it has fallen from 14% to around 10%.

But what are invalid clicks and how do you deem a click invalid? Very difficult to do because how do you know what the intent of the user was? Well, Google have their own click fraud monitoring department and they are able to split click trends down into four categories – positive positive, negative negative, positive negative, and negative positive. Very, very boring, but believe it or not there are 26 people employed by Google UK to monitor this.

What can be done to prevent invalid clicks?
1. Click Fraud Monitoring – escalate externally by logging the details of the IP, finding the source and taking that person down a legal route if necessary.
2. Whilst IP exclusion is not 100% accurate I would still recommend using it, it is just important to note that it isn’t going to block all traffic from that IP
3. Google have an invalid click fraud department which claim to pick up 99.2% of all invalid clicks.

Get as much protection as possible and speak to your PPC management company how you can do more to improve this.

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