Google Search Partners: When to Use and When to Avoid

All right. Should you have Search Partner Network enabled on your search campaigns? Well, that depends. So first let's start with what the definition of search partners are. So we know Search Network is the actual google.com search engine that you type your, you know, search question in, right? That's going to include the Google Search Network. That's going to include images, that's going to include maps, that's going to include shopping. Right. These are, this is all owned by Google. So this would, you know, this would what you think of as Google, right. And where you'll, you would see ads from on search or at least search ads or shopping that would be on Google. Right? That's the search network. Search Partner network is non Google owned. So this is non Google Websites. Okay. And, and it says, it says listings to hundreds of non Google websites. I would imagine there's like thousands of, if not, you know, tens of thousands of non Google websites it's showing on. It also can be park domains, it can be YouTube and it can be other Google sites. Now you're reading this, this is like their whole definition and you're like wait, that's it, right? It's super, super vague. So let's go into a few of the things I don't like about the Search Partner Network and then I'll get into when and when not to use it in your campaigns. Number one, I do not like a, this, this definition of what it is, right? It's like, oh, it's just a bunch of non Google websites you can show on. You get absolutely zero clarity when you have Search Partner Network turned on you. You have no idea where your clicks are coming from. Right. So the partner network can include all these other websites like ask.com and dog. Dogpile.com can even include marketplaces I believe, like walmart.com however, you have no clarity or reporting on the clicks you're getting from Search Partner Network. And I'll show you what it actually looks like in a real account and I'll show you how to enable and disable as well. But I don't like that. And so you lose all of this clarity to it. Right. The other thing I don't like, it's prone to increase a lot of what I would consider bot and spam traffic. So campaigns that have easy conversions and that's what the campaign's been sort of built around. Easy conversion could be a 30 second phone call, it could be a very simple form to fill out like what's your name and email and there's no recapture or Anything. It's just a very generic form fill. Those would be what I consider like weak, easy conversions. Right. When you have that Search Partners is very prone to inflate your conversion data. It's like, wow, look at our performance here. But the reality is it's a lot of junky and downright probably fraudulent traffic that you're getting in regards to the quality of that traffic from the Search Partner network. Now I did a video recently on how to stop spam and bot traffic. One of the recommendations I actually make there is if you're experiencing this and you'll know if you are right and you'll, you'll see it in the like, let's say you're running like lead generation and you have like a week form field to fill out. You'll. You will see these spammy leads come through. Right? One of my recommendations in that video is turn Search Partners off. If you have it enabled, that video will be in the description below. If you want to go check out further on that if you're just interested. Now, Search Partners isn't always bad, right? And so you. It will depend on the scenario of your campaign, which I will get into the other issue I have with it. And this is a actual screenshot I did on LinkedIn. I hate LinkedIn, so sometimes if I find interesting things there though I will just sort of take a quick screenshot of it. This is Mike Rhodes. If you don't know Mike Rhodes, he's like an OG in the Google Ads world. He actually reposted a guy named Mike Ryan. Now Mike Ryan, I don't really know him personally, but I have seen his stuff before so I have respect for his thoughts. He posted this and I actually didn't know this. I've been doing this for over 10 years. I didn't even know this, but he said we had a client with a maximum bid of $2, but their average cost per click was way higher. Segment segmented by network. Google search network was 170. Search partner network was $4. That's because the Search Partner Network is completely independent bidding arm that doesn't respect your settings like Max cpc. In fact, it optimizes towards cost per conversion, which implies that Search Partner Network version of Smart bidding doesn't support Max conversion value bid strategy at all, let alone target roas bidding. Okay, that's. You can pause and read this entire thing if you'd like. So this will obviously be popped up. But Search Partner Network doesn't even respect the actual bidding sort of rules and definitions Google gives You that only applies to Google owned properties and the search network itself. I had no idea about that until I saw that on LinkedIn. So even though I do, I, even though I hate LinkedIn, I still check it, you know, maybe once a week and then I'll scroll the feed and I find interesting and good stuff like that. So I'm glad I did find that and I wanted to bring that to your attention as well. Cause that was new to me as well and it, it made me look at Search Partner Network and even worse of a light than how I looked at it before. Okay, so I just dogged on Search Partner Network. Why would you even use it? Right here is when you don't use it, here's when you use it, you don't use it. And I talk about this in all of my trainings. You do not start with Search Partner Network turned on. If you're building a brand new search campaign, start with Search Network only get that campaign dialed in on high quality conversion data. So if you're E Commerce, that's going to be purchases and if you're lead generation, more than likely it's going to be sales qualified leads or actual closed deals if you have the volume to do that. Now I'm not going to go into all the details of that. I've got plenty of videos on this YouTube channel for you to go watch some of those trainings. I have a community called PPC Copilot or actually Mentor train and have all my course material in there and people ask me questions in a weekly Q and A. So if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole of all of all of my trainings and my thinking thinking on all of this, go check that out or go check out my other videos on this YouTube channel. Plenty of content for you to learn. So if you have campaigns that are new or even if they're not new, but you don't have them dialed in yet, do not have Search Partner Network turned on, you'll prevent all of this crap then that you would have to deal with. Now let's say you have a campaign, you have it dialed in. You're you, you're using smart bidding like T ROAS or TCPA and you have high quality conversion data that you've trained those campaigns on, then Search Partner Network is fine to test. Why? Because the algorithm has been trained on high quality conversion data. So now I'm happy to flick Search Partner on knowing that that campaign and Google knows that I need a if I'm E Commerce, actual purchase traffic and if I'm lead generation, actual SQLs or closed lead traffic. Right. So I can't just open the floodgates of Search Partner Network to low quality traffic because it will not convert. Because I've now trained my campaigns and they're dialed in on the search network on high quality conversion data. So that is when I am absolutely. Okay, testing Search Partner Network. Now let me hop into an account and I'll just show you what, where you find Search Partner Network data, how to look at it, how to enable it, or how to disable it. Okay, I'm inside an actual account. Now. Most of the names of the campaigns and stuff are going to be blurred out. But here is a campaign search campaign. You'll see Google Search Network and then you're also going to see Search Partners here. Now how did I even get here? I use this segment setting here and then you go to network with search partners. This is going to show you then if you have Search partners turned on or not, you'll notice this is a search campaign as well. Again, naming names will probably be blurred out. You'll know Search Partner Network does not show. That's because it is turned off. Right? So this campaign, it's turned on. This campaign, it's turned off and you can easily see it from this view, at least through the time frames that you're looking at right now. How do you turn this on or off? You just go into the campaign settings. And by the way, if you're building a brand new campaign, Google is going to want to force you into it. Don't do it. You can turn it off through that setup. I have videos on how to set search part or how to set search campaigns up on this YouTube channel. So go check those out. But here in the campaign settings, just under networks and then here we've got the search network, right? Ads can appear near Google search results and on other Google sites. So this right here include Google Search Partners. This is this little box that you check blue or not. This is how you turn it on or off. So, so all you have to simply do is turn this off and then you would hit save. Now in this account, on, on this campaign, I'm actually okay having search partners turned on here for this search campaign. The others, it's turned off because we've tested. So again, test when you turn it on. Actually test and make sure. Does this make sense? So you're going to want to give it like you know, probably 30 days of a time frame when you turn it on and make sure the performance there is good. Again, only do that if you have high quality conversion data in an already high performing dialed in search campaign.