Google’s limit of 500 rows of IP exclusions is unethical and causes advertisers to waste too much clicks budget.
Google Ads is supposed to help advertisers benefit from quality clicks to their websites but (unfortunately for you), it doesn’t provide much in the way of help to ensure that you get the best results from your budget.
One method of trying to reduce poor-quality clicks is by excluding IP addresses (or IP address ranges) from seeing your Google Ads, which limits how many irrelevant visitors waste your budget.
These are the most common types of IP addresses that you may want to avoid clicking on your adverts:
The limit is 500 IP addresses (or ranges) per campaign you have in Google Ads.
If you wanted more than 500 rows then you’d need to have separate campaigns, but that’s painful and still doesn’t solve the real problems, which I’ll cover more further down.
Here’s an example that focuses on Anglia Ruskin University (also known as ARU), which has 21 blocks of IP address ranges …
Google will allow you to exclude a whole range, so you could enter each of those from the IP Medium Range column in that format (e.g. 194.66.160.*) and it would include all 256 numbers in the range.
So, if you really wanted to block everyone from that one university, then it would use up 21 of your 500 IP exclusion rows.
Look closer at the red outlined data in that table though – a range of IP addresses that effectively go consecutively from 194.83.41.0 to 194.83.47.255. That’s a total of 1,792 IP addresses. You’d think that Google would provide the flexibility to block them all as one of the 500 rows allowance.
Unfortunately not.
In fact, 500 rows of IP exclusions per campaign doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s needed.
Taking just the education sector for example, if your analytics data is showing many people clicking on your Google Ads and coming to your website from universities, colleges etc., you would never have enough rows of IP exclusions to block them all.
If you can identify the IP addresses of these types of visitors then yes, make use of as many of the 500 rows as you can:
Beyond that, the 500 rows won’t go far.
The image below shows the beginning of a huge list containing how many IP addresses there are within each higher education sector setting in the UK alone …
By the time you’ve added in IP address ranges for 14 of those education sector organisations (up to the yellow-highlighted one), you’ve already exceeded your 500 rows allowance.
Totalling up all the data in the spreadsheet that data came from (all higher education organisations in the UK – not even including schools), it came to 53,115 rows of IP exclusions that you’d need to exclude to cover them all (covering 8,364,694 IP addresses in total). That’s 106 times the 500 row limit that Google offer!
This means that you could never get anywhere at all by using the limited 500 rows of IP exclusions that Google allows you.
Google will allow you to add 500 rows of IP exclusions at both account and campaign levels. I’ll cover both here …
This will be easier for the majority of people because it allows you to add IP exclusions at the account level, which means that any campaigns you create will also avoid ads being visible to those IP addresses.
It has the same 500 rows limitation but is useful if there are IP addresses that you never want to be visible to (e.g. staff, competitors, education sector within your local target area).
Here’s how to add IP addresses at the account level …
Sign in to your Google Ads account.
Click on Admin, which will then display your account settings and you’ll see IP exclusions listed:
Click on IP exclusions, paste in your IP addresses/ranges to exclude, and then click on Save:
Although the majority of advertisers will only need account level IP exclusions, you may have campaigns that target different types of people, and so want to exclude visibility to different sets of IP addresses.
For example, you may sell a service to people in a few towns/cities and want to exclude IP addresses from educational establishments in those individual areas. Although still limited to 500 rows of IP exclusions per campaign, this method does allow you more flexibility.
Here’s how to add IP addresses for individual campaigns …
Sign in to your Google Ads account.
Click on Campaigns and select the campaign that you want to add IP exclusions to. You will see the option to click on Campaign settings:
After clicking on Campaign settings you will see this view and need to click on Additional settings:
Within Additional settings you then click on IP exclusions, paste in the IP addresses that you want to exclude, and then click on Save:
In my view, if Google Ads customers want to exclude numerous IP ranges, then they should have the choice to do so – to the level of allowing thousands of rows to be entered into a campaign.
Google would come up with some excuse why they couldn’t do that (lack of server resources is a typical one, which is pathetic considering how many billions they make).
Google knows exactly which IP addresses relate to each searcher in Google. That includes the education sector, as shown in this example (taken from the software I use):
And Google can also identify other types of visitors, such as this company that was identifiable by IP address (again, from the same software):
Google could even totally dispense with the idea of IP exclusion ranges and actually try to innovate.
The sad reality is that Google make billions of revenue purely from clicks that the advertisers never wanted in the first place – advertisers who would have liked a choice to exclude more junk traffic.
However, IP exclusions aren’t the definitive answer.
The answer is for Google to step up …
These two options are my view of what Google should be offering, and are very much possible to do within the existing data and tech they have available …
I’m in the UK so using a UK example here, but the principle applies worldwide.
Let’s say I want to block Google Ads visibility from anyone in the University of Kent area (CT2 4NZ), because I don’t want clicks from students.
Google knows where people are located when they are searching Google, but they don’t allow you to be specific about the postcode area(s) you don’t want to be visible to.
The current position is that you can only exclude Google Ads visibility within a broad postcode area (such as CT2), but not a more specific area within that (e.g. CT2 4NZ).
The problem with a broad area (CT2 in this example) is that it would exclude ads visibility to everyone in that area, where there could be potential customers in other parts of CT2.
It’s not hard for Google to allow people to enter as many specific postcode areas (to include or exclude visibility to) as they want to.
But they won’t do it because they make plenty of money by persistently failing to be focused on the value gained by their advertisers.
Google knows the organisations where people are searching from.
From larger organisations (e.g. a university, an energy company, or Amazon) through to smaller organisations (e.g. a solicitors office or a small engineering business).
What Google ads advertisers are crying out for is the option to enter numerous types of industries that they don’t want their adverts in front of (or, on the flipside, industries that they only want their adverts in front of). These could be very broad, such as:
… or more niche, such as:
Google have that information, but they will never implement such a capability because it would massively reduce their revenues if advertisers had such useful targeting options.
It’s a stupid mindset for Google to have though – if advertisers started getting more of the clicks that they actually want (and those people convert to business), then advertisers will spend more on advertising.
I imagine that even if Google made such visibility/clicks much higher cost to the advertiser, then advertisers would still prefer that, compared to the scattergun visibility that has been the same for so many years now (as at 2025).
Hopefully it will.
If people have alternative ways to search for answers online (e.g. chatGPT, Perplexity, etc.) then they will have less reason to ‘Google it’.
Less people using Google equals less visibility of Google Ads, less clicks, and less revenue for Google.
It will be interesting (as at 2025) to see if other AI systems start to introduce paid advertising models, and how flexible they would be in allowing advertisers to exclude visibility to certain types of people (or allowing granularity to include only the right people). I suspect they won’t innovate to that depth but if they did then it would force Google to respond in some way via making Google Ads more flexible on targeting.
If I could do target paid advertising in this way ….
Show me ads to people who are:
Only working within these industries OR definitely not in these industries …
… not located outside of these geographical areas OR only in these specific areas …
… would I pay chatGPT, Perplexity, and others more per click than I pay Google Ads?
Absolutely!
For example, I want ads to be visible only to people who have searched for what I offer and are:
Working in small businesses … that sell B2C … that are in postcodes CT1 CT2, CT3.
The focus there is more on inclusions than exclusions of course, but I may still want the option to add some negative filters to further segment within that. For example, I may want postcode area CT2 but want to exclude CT2 4NZ.
The key is giving the paying advertiser the flexibility to get very granular in where and to who they want their ads to be visible.
Although the 500 rows Google Ads IP address exclusions limitation is extremely weak, IP address exclusions aren’t the answer.
They are just a sticking plaster approach to limit wasted budget before something more innovative comes along.
Any advertising supply business (Google or others) should be able to facilitate these types of innovations that enable their paying customers to benefit more from their click budgets:
Monopolies like Google are dangerous to the welfare of businesses that rely on their advertising platform offerings because they have few other choices.
The other players (e.g. Bing) are pathetic in their inability to innovate and fight for position, which means that Google can carry on with it’s complacent raking in the billions of revenues.
Maybe one day things will change, but I’m not expecting it to be anytime soon.
If you’ve got any thoughts about this topic, please enter them below or contact me to discuss further.