Google Ads Search Partner Network

If you’re new to creating Google search campaigns, it’s easy to assume that your ads will only appear on Google.com. Well, if you’re just accepting the default settings that Google recommends when creating new campaigns, that’s not the case. Your ads can appear on dozens and dozens of other placements besides Google.com. This is what they call Google’s search partner network.

In this video, we’re going to show you what the search partner network is and we’re going to show a few examples of other placements besides Google.com where your ads could appear. Then we will show you how to turn the setting off if you’re not happy with performance. But in order to see if performance is bad, you need to know where to look to assess the performance.

So we’re going to cover that one as well. In the meantime, let’s just jump in!

The first thing I want to cover and I’m going to keep it brief, is to show what kind of ads can appear on the search network. And of course, we’re going to get the most common type of ads with search and that is going to be the response of search ads. I didn’t include expanded text ads.

Yes, we could still run them even though we can edit or create new ones. But if you do have any expanded text ads still running within your account, those are also eligible. But from here on out, we have responsive search ads.

Next will be your dynamic search ads. DSA is already a great way to expand reach and try to find new users. But even if you feel like you’re hitting certain limits or plateauing at all with your DSA campaigns, you can try to expand the reach even further with search partners. If you’re not familiar with DSA campaigns, you can watch an intro video here.

Call-only ads is the third option and these are another search-only type of ad campaign. We also have a video about call-only ads. You can check that out here. Essentially the headline of your ad is going to be the phone number. And since this campaign type is only available on mobile devices, a user can call straight from the ad.

In most cases, the user doesn’t end up on your website. Next will be your shopping ads. We’re going to see a few examples of those coming up really soon. And then, depending on which campaign type you are and which partner network you’re on, certain images and videos can appear alongside your ads on the search network.

So now that we know what types of ads can appear on search partners let’s look at a few examples. I got about three or four of them pulled up. You can now see that I am on YouTube, and by now, you probably know that YouTube is owned by Google and YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google.

YouTube is going to fall under one of two types of categories of search partners, and that’s the Google-owned properties. So if we look in the search bar on YouTube, I typed in custom bobbleheads. And before the actual video results, we see that there are three ads, and these are three text ads. And within these text ads, we also see a few of the assets.

So the contact us today simple order process; those are call-out assets. And then next to each of these three, we see example of image assets. So this is where the image part can play in. These are a lot bigger than how your image assets look on Google Search. It’s the same size as a video title card on YouTube.

So I think some of the first two examples look really well because it’s actually showing me a custom bobblehead. The third option not so much. If those are actual custom bobbleheads, then kudos, that looks great. But my first impression is it looks like it’s just a team picture.

So this is a good example to always understand that if you are running on any search partner sites, understand how every component of your ad could look on more than just Google Search. Let me go up, and we can check out another Google property, and that’s Google Images. I’m going to paste in the same search query here. Now let’s see how this looks!

And boy, oh boy, do we get some weird-looking bobbleheads here. And even though the product is a little weird, we do get a very good example of a partner placement for shopping ads. I’m actually surprised this didn’t show up on YouTube as well because shopping rows like this can also appear on YouTube.

But down below, these are the main Google Image results. But for anyone running shopping campaigns that have opted into search partners, here’s another example of where your ads could appear. Now besides images, there also is a shopping tab. Here, we see more placements there besides just the main shopping one.

This is technically considered part of the Google-owned search partners. But other examples of Google properties are going to be Google Play, Google Maps as well as the Google Maps app. Odds are that’s where you would see some of the call-only campaigns would be on the Google Maps app.

But now let’s look into the other category of search partners, and that could be other search engines. There are hundreds of non-Google websites where they are actually showing Google results, but it looks like they’re running their own search engine. So let me paste in the same search term, and then let’s go fetch.

Well, doesn’t that look familiar? So we see some of the same awkward bobbleheads that we saw on Google Images. Yeah, there they are. I’m going to stop. But underneath that we get full-blown search ads. These are showcasing a lot of callouts. We get full site link extensions here. Down below, there’s one using the price extensions.

I just realized I’m still saying extensions. I got to say they’re called assets now, but if someone prefers to use Dogpile.com for search, it’s pretty much just ad results, and then we’re finally getting down to organic. All right, one more example of a non-Google site.

Jeeves may be gone, but Ask.com is still around. So I’m going to type in the same search query again. Paste that in there. Let’s just hit Enter. No shopping on this one, but look at the first two ads, and you can go back and forth. But I specifically remember some of these ads are the same ones that were showing up on Dogpile.com, especially this one. This is the price asset I called out.

So while Ask.com and Dogpile.com look like they’re running their own search engine, they’re not. They are powered by Google. So now you know how you can expand the reach by using Search Partners and where your ads could appear. Let’s jump into Google Ads, and we’ll show you where you can find the search partner network setting!

Your first interaction with the search network setting will be when creating a new search campaign. So, for now, I’m just going to select an objective and keep moving on. Make sure it’s search, don’t care about any of that. For now, select your bidding. And once you finally get to the campaign settings portion in the campaign creation process, you will see networks.

How I do it? I will always uncheck the display network, and Google is going to get angry at me for that one. But I always leave Google Search Partners on when creating a new campaign. I want to see how my campaigns are going to perform on other placements like YouTube or possibly Ask.com.

You can always go back later on and turn this setting off, and I’ll show you how to do that right now. So let me hop into an already-created campaign. This is just our paid media pros demo account. I’m in the DSA campaign that we use to record the other video. You can see I have the campaign selected, not an ad group.

So once we do that, we can click on Settings, which will get us to the campaign level settings in there, find the Networks row. You can expand it, and for whatever reason, if you’re not happy with the performance, you can uncheck include Google Search Partners.

Eventually, when you have Search networks unchecked, there will be a recommendation showing up in the report. And if you don’t acknowledge the recommendation to turn it back ON, google will lower your optimization score. So even if you want to leave Search Partners off, just view the recommendation; you can ignore it. Then your optimization score will go back up.

Now the question is, how do we research to see how search partner networks are performing for our campaigns? And that is a great question. So in order to do that, I’m going to hop into an actual client account, so we can actually see some metrics to compare how the main search network is doing compared to search partners.

Okay, I am in a client account. If we look at the filters above, I’m only looking at our search campaigns. But if I haven’t mentioned it already, and shame on me for not doing so. Search partners are a campaign-level setting. That is why if you need to go back and turn things OFF, you have to do it at the campaign settings level.

So that is when I first like to look at search partner performance, I do it at the campaign level. So in order to find this information, we would want to go to Segment, and then we see Network with search partners. Remember, I have the search campaign filter on. If you’re looking at all campaigns, you’re going to see Display Network also show up here.

For this video, I wanted to keep it just search. So let me go over and scroll down a little bit. And this is a smaller account. And this is the performance from the past 30 days. We see the top row is Google Search, and the bottom row for each campaign will be the search Partners.

If I highlight the first campaign, we get a great example of why I’d like to test search partners immediately when launching campaigns because many of our clients assume that Google Search is always going to be the better performer. And while for this campaign, Google Search has a little bit lower cost per conversion and a much higher conversion rate, it’s not giving us a lot of volume.

There’s a lot of very specific low-volume keywords within this account and we knew that going in before creating the campaign. So we left search Partners on, and most of our volume is coming from search partner sites. And luckily for us, almost all of our clients use CRMs where we can easily see the quality of conversions coming in this campaign; they’re all pretty good.

Let me highlight the second campaign, which we see is our DSA campaign for this account. Here’s kind of a flip side. Engagement is also really good for DSA. We’re getting more conversion volume, but what we’re finding out from this area is that cost per conversion for partners is higher, and then going back and reviewing the quality, it’s actually not that great.

So while we’re waiting on new assets for different ad platforms, we don’t want to turn this off right now because we have to spend the budget, but eventually, we’ll probably be scaling back on this. And the easiest way for me to do it is to just go back into the campaign settings for this DSA campaign and turn it off. And in the next one, I’m not going to run through all of these.

We see another example of much higher clickthrough rate on search partners but no conversions. So within the past 30 days, we spent $150 but haven’t seen any conversions. Lifetime value for this product is extremely high. So I do have the right to keep going. Another couple hundred dollars to still hit between the target CPA goal. Before I want to consider turning off this particular network, I will admit this account is different from other ones we see in many of our other accounts.

When search partners is working, cost per conversions a lot of times can be much more affordable. But we’ve also seen where the search partner clickthrough rate can be really, really low. No matter what the difference between your partners and search click the rates are, you should always remember that your clickthrough rate for search partner sites do not affect your quality score.

I’m going to say that again, click the rate for search partner sites do not affect your quality score. So if you are seeing really good conversions from search partners but you have a boss or client who just freaks out about quality score for no reason, let them know that we’re focusing on getting great conversions here. And that’s just one of the many reasons.

By segmenting your information and looking at it from different points of view can help tell the whole picture. And that’s why there’s been certain times where I had to warn my clients. Like this third example I’m highlighting again, there’s been times where I’ve had to pause search Partners because it’s not converting, and we’re wasting spend that could be better used elsewhere.

But I have to tell my client to be ready for the click the rate for this campaign to really go down. So when you’re looking at our week-over-week or month-over-month reports, you don’t freak out and say, oh my God, what happened? Our ad engagement is really poor. It’s like, no, we just turned off a whole network.

So understand all those changes, so you don’t go in and start messing with ad copy that actually is working. You just turned off a different setting. And in case you ask, I’m going to go to the ad group level, go back to segment, and review the search partners.

And dropping down a little bit, you can see, yes, you can still look at search partner performance at the ad group level and even deeper if you want to because maybe search partners is working really well in one or a few ad groups in a campaign. However, as I’ve already talked about, search partners in Google are a campaign-level setting.

So if you turn search partners off within the campaign, you might be turning it off for certain ad groups where search partners is performing well. That’s when you’re going to have to start deciding. Do I need to break out any ad groups into their own campaigns? Or potentially, search partners in the one or a few ad groups really won’t make a huge impact, and it’s okay to turn it off in the entire campaign.

But also consider the flip side. There have been many times we’ve turned off search partners, waited several months, and then needed opportunities to expand reach again, either as budgets grown or just overall account performance has gotten better. But we’re kind of limited in our reach. And in some of those cases, when we brought back Search partners, it actually worked the second time around.

So we completely understand the reasoning to need to turn it off. I’m probably going to turn it off in a few campaigns in this account in a month or two, but I’m not going to forget about it and I’m not going to leave it off forever. At some point, I am going to come back and test it again to see if it will convert a second time around after I’ve made other optimization decisions within the campaign. And that’s all we have for you right now for Search Partners.

It’s a very simple setting at the campaign level that you can decide to opt-in or opt-out. Use the network segmentation, at least from the campaign level; while I check in on the segmentation reports about once a month, I still like to look at longer data sets than just the past month. Sometimes a month will be good, sometimes a month won’t. So look at longer averages to see if it’s worth leaving on or not.

And if you are that person who always turned off search Partners and never gave it a shot, hopefully, this video changed your mind. And if you do change your mind, understand the impact it can have on your metrics. You can always go up, create a note within Google Ads, annotate it within analytics, so if clickthrough rate dramatically increases or decreases, or you see noticeable changes in your cost per conversions, you can go back and check and see what search partners the reason why those changes occurred.

If you have any other questions on how search partners work and how they can affect your Google Search Ads, please let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez