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Much better IP exclusions than relying on manual IP lookups

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People use manual IP lookup tools because they’re free.

A1WebStats provides a much stronger solution that easily pays for itself beyond the free trial.

Your time is better spent on website success activities other than basic IP lookups

 

What do you use IP lookup tools for?

Many people use IP lookup tools to find out (for free) more information about visitors to their website.  Tools such as:

IPAddressGuide

IP Checker

IP Tracker

Ripe

Site24x7

Ultratools

Whois

… and numerous others.

The reasons are varied, but are mostly:

  • Finding out more about an IP range to potentially exclude (e.g. exclude Google Ads clicks from unwanted people).
  • Trying to link an IP address back to an identifiable company
  • Trying to find the IP addresses related to a domain

If you’re interested in the second and third points above, please see our page https://a1webstats.com/resource/ip-address-manual-lookup-go-beyond-free-tools/.

If you’re interested in finding IP addresses to create IP exclusions (e.g. within Google Ads) then please read on …

 

The trouble with manually looking up IP addresses

Our page https://a1webstats.com/what-it-does/marketing-roi/google-ads-ip-address-exclusions-limit/ focuses on three typical IP exclusions scenarios that you may have:

  • Excluding Google Ads visibility/clicks from people within the education sector (e.g. universities and colleges).
  • Excluding competitors & suppliers from seeing/clicking on Google Ads.
  • Excluding your own staff from triggering Google Ads.

Links from that page focus on the pitfall of finding an IP address to exclude (within Google Ads IP exclusions) but then not realising that there was a bigger range of IP addresses that needed to be excluded!

Taking the example of a university that has been seen going to your website …

  1. You could use manual IP lookup tools to get free access to a range of their IP addresses.
  2. You could enter those ranges into your Google Ads IP exclusions.

The problem with the above is that universities have many IP ranges and they’re not often consecutive.  Here’s an example of that:

ppc education 6

This means that the information gained from the manual IP lookup tools are only solving part of the problem.

 

So what’s the answer?

If your interest in IP address ranges is so that you can identify opportunities to exclude people from seeing and clicking on your Google Ads, then you may be aware (if not, see https://a1webstats.com/what-it-does/marketing-roi/google-ads-ip-address-exclusions-limit/) that you have a very limited number of rows (500) you can use within Google Ads IP exclusions.

So this is what we recommend:

  1. Identify your competitors (A1WebStats can help with that).
  2. Identify your own staff visiting your website (A1WebStats can help with that).
  3. Create Google Ads IP exclusions for those groups.
  4. Then use A1WebStats to identify education sector clicks that you don’t want to be getting and utilise our data (see https://a1webstats.com/what-it-does/marketing-roi/use-ip-exclusions-stop-google-ads-clicks-within-education-sector/ for more details) to save wasted Google Ads budget.
  5. Feel happy that you’ve effectively utilised the 500 rows of IP exclusions that Google allows.

 

Ready for more?

Using manual IP lookup tools has some value, but doesn’t provide enough information.

A1WebStats shows every historic visit from an IP address, and what that visitor looked at page by page.  Wherever it can be identified (by IP address or geolocation), you can also see which company visited.

If gaining more results from your website is high on your agenda, then we’d welcome you to look at our page https://a1webstats.com/2020/12/14/top-reasons-why-people-use-a1webstats/.   That page shows that it’s impossible not to benefit from A1WebStats, when you’ve seen how much it can do.

Fancy taking a free 30 day no-sales-pitch trial?   All you have to do is click here.

We know what you’re thinking: “how much does it cost if continuing after the trial?”.  The good news is that it’s a month to month (no contract) arrangement, and the very small costs as shown on our pricing page are outweighed by the substantial benefits to your business.

 

Got any questions?

Whether it’s about IP lookups or anything else related to your website success, please do contact us if you have any questions at all that we can help answer for you.

 

 

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