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If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range th
by phenomen 22d ago
If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/ https://ipgeolocation.io/
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
- benoau 22d agoWhy doesn't Google do this automatically? /s
- xfour 22d agoIs there an open database of this?
- jasondigitized 22d ago+1
- nickabe 22d agoYeah if there's a DB that would be helpful - I'm not currently capturing the IP, but I'll see if I can add it in a future release.
- mr_mitm 22d agoThere is https://knock-knock.net/ https://knock-knock.net/, which is similar
- walrus01 22d agoThis is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg. You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
- nekusar 22d agoYep. And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free" Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy. And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
- gpt5 22d agoResidential proxies are achieved in many, many ways. The most common is simply people installing software and leaving some checkbox checked, or agreeing to it unknowingly. In the same way that smart TV downloadable apps and games tend to include them.
- ForHackernews 22d agoWait, so I can have free movies and subvert the adtech business model at the same time? What's the catch?
- dist-epoch 22d agoThese residential proxies are also used by scrapers. From scraping stores to scalp merchandise, to scrapers of data for AI training.
- mitxela 22d agoSounds awesome, what's the catch?
- Dylan16807 22d ago[dead]
- walrus01 22d agoYou also get to run credit card fraud purchases through your home internet connection, such fun times we live in.
- sidewndr46 22d agoCouldn't you just give up on the main business and sell this list as a service?
- harry8 22d agoWhy can’t Google do this? Surely their data is better than yours. They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
- n0us 22d agoTaking a blind guess here because I have never worked at Google, but I would assume there is one organization that has the data, and another organization that can block IPs from clicking on the ads and consuming the spend. There is a byzantine process preventing that second org from getting the data along with a lack of motivation because it would decrease ad-spend, which is one of their key metrics. Org2 which deals with people clicking the ads is a bad place to work and no one who is actually good sticks around long enough to navigate the process and implement this, so the can gets perpetually kicked down the road. Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.
- paimapi 22d agoit's also just flat-out unsexy from a product/MBA-brained perspective to push for something that will negatively impact metrics for your users. I ran into this when I was advocating for onboarding a third-party provider that would filter out automated/spambot email clicks thus decreasing the north star metrics our users had for engagement (even though it was truthier and would provide more accurate targeting and some of our most senior people had been advocating for for years) the only reason I got the go-ahead for the effort was because one of our upstart competitors who was handily eating our lunch had implemented this years ago, started advertising based on it, literally pointed to the fact that we didn't do this yet, and then this was followed quickly by all of our other competitors implementing this, too. at this point we were well inducted into the illustrious halls of companies who stopped giving a shit about their core product with leadership blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that we were churning faster than we were net-new-ing and even then it was a half-assed, resource-starved implementation that got dumped on regularly. have left the org since and couldn't be happier
- mitxela 22d ago
- inkubus 22d ago[flagged]
- rao-v 22d agoIsn't this the sort of thing Google is supposed to be doing for us?
- ricardonunez 22d agoI agree but that will eliminate a big cash cow for them.
- autoexec 22d agoWhat incentive do they have to do that kind of work? They get paid anyway and they've basically got no competition
- Culonavirus 22d ago"They get paid anyway" yeah not really. Businesses have margins and marketing budgets. There's only so much you can spend on ads and if those ads don't convert, you go elsewhere, you literally have to. You spends less on Google ads and more or Meta or other channels (influencers, marketplaces, etc. etc.) Google has to be careful, ads that convert less are less valuable (duh) and what happens is not "well the business will just buy more ads", but "well the business has a 35% gross margin and marketing expenses already account for 20% of gross profit, they can't just buy more ads"
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- MBCook 22d agoWhy would you expect the water company to check your water for poison?
- necovek 22d agoLiability when it happens? Don't all water companies do it? And while it may point at what we could do with Google and the likes, the risk profile is still a bit different (make many people ill or die vs "unknowingly" stealing some money).
- nla 22d agoThat should be an RPZ feed!
- varispeed 22d agoWhy Google can't detect it by themselves?
- gerdesj 22d agoI suggest that Google should be doing that job for you. It is absolutely ridiculous that you have been either victim shamed, blamed or simply neglected by Google into doing it yourself. In a mall, you expect to see mall cops ... where are they?
- cookiengineer 22d agoDo you have that bot ASN list somewhere? I am asking because I maintain botnet ASNs that are spamming/phishing/scamming our customers, and this would be a nice complementary category for it. Most often I realized that a lot of those "growth" companies have rotating ASNs that they go through after each larger spamming campaign. I'd assume they do the same thing in the admob/adclick world. [1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam
- brianhama 22d agoI maintain one: https://github.com/brianhama/bad-asn-list https://github.com/brianhama/bad-asn-list
- _s_a_m_ 22d agoShouldnt this be Google's job? They seem to profit from this scam. Fake clicks and traffik.
- GU_AI 19d ago[flagged]