Ditch Your Competition From Spying On You

[ompundit]

Quick tip for going stealth in Google, which is great if you don't want your competition learning about your program and possibly even copying the success your having from your hard work and effort. Another added benefit, since google is a bid type system, if they can't see your ad on their personal level, they assume they are number one and that keeps them from raising their bid and starting a bidding war, which keeps your costs down, but the rest of the world views you as number one because you in fact do have the number one position.

Ok so Google gives you two ways to accomplish this. The first is through geo-targeting, which works very well if your comepitition is in a less populated area where you can block the specific region or location from displaying your ad. If they are in a large population area like New York, Atlanta, Etc..., you have to take into account using this method would also block a large portion of traffic, so you have to consider that before automatically choosing this method.

Method number two is IP Exclusion, Google buries this little gem so it's hard to find, but here's how to get there:

1. Click Tools at the top of your Campaign Summary page.
2. Click IP Exclusion under ‘Optimize Your Ads.’
3. Select a campaign, and click Go.
4. Enter the list of IP addresses to be excluded.
5. Click Exclude IP Addresses.

Once there just add your competitors IP address or range and stop them from seeing what your doing in Google. Just make sure the IP's you use are limited to the competitiors company, don't turn off whole cities or states.

I can see it now, someone will ask "But OMPundit, I don't know what my competitors IP is, how do I find out"?

There are a ton of ways to find out, easiest is to email them and ask a question that requires a respones, for the love of god though, do it from a personal email and not through your companies network, or you just gave them your IP if they are smart enough to figure it out. Once they respond, just look at the IP it was sent from and bingo you have their IP. Of course like anything web related there's always 10 ways to skin a cat as the saying goes, so google how to find an IP and you get a whole little list of tricks and tips you could use.

[jamie_g]

Thanks for these tips

[thai mlm]

Very informative. I didn't know that we can hide our ip until I read this. Thanks anyway.. Try this tips you're telling here.

[Gate2Shop]

Very helpful, thanx for the information.

[ompundit]

This little trick can be a very good tool for your marketing toolkit, so glad you guys like it.

[blank]

Wow, did not know of this... Definitely I will be implementing this... Thanks a lot

[stephen186]

Excellent tip. I am going to implement it right now.........thanks for sharing.

[SashaMike]

I must say a brilliant discovery. It seems logically possible to get your competitor stumbling in the dark. But would have to personally verify with dummy/test run.

Nevertheless, it looks good.

But what if your competitor uses third party tools like spyfu.com to find them.

Regards

[OrlandoSEO]

Use it all the time. Unfortunately for most small business users they are competing locally so make sure you really have their exact i.p.

Also, this reminded me of another issue people have. People love to put their hard earned keyword research on display in the keywords meta tag. This tag really does not do anything anymore except show your competition what you are going for. Put the generic ones in their but leave out the long tail keywords that you had to spend a lot of time discovering were profitable.

[shehreen786]

Very useful information, Thanks For Sharing it with us ,