Excluding Iran from Adwords Campaigns

Question

We have a couple of adwords campaigns going, and having analysed some of the stats for the last 9 months, it appears that 2/3rds of our click-throughs are coming from Iran. We deal with a number of countries around the world, and we are always looking to expand, but we aren't going to be hitting Iran in a hurry.

My first question is how to exclude Iran from our campaign.

There is a means within adwords of selecting countries to include, and by not including Iran you would think that would be the solution. However, the idea falls down because when adwords are talking about excluding countries, they are really talking about not rendering ads on particular google sites. Given that there is no Iranian Google site, that most of the traffic is coming through Google.com and Google.co.uk, this idea isn't going to work.

The second question, why are we getting so much traffic from Iran? Is it part of some sort of scam? It appears that the vast majority of visits from Iran are from adwords click-throughs.

Answer 1

The link below has a few ways it can be done

How do I change my campaign location targetting?

The actual process varies depending on whether you are using basic or advanced targeting and you have the option of importing a CSV file containing the countries you want to target.

For basic targeting the process is to:

1. Select the Campaigns tab.
2. Select the campaign(s) you want to change.
3. Edit the Location Targetting.
4. Select which countries or regions/cities within a single country that you wish to target.
5. Save.