The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

When you advertise on Google, you can target many more searchers than those who use Google.com. Over the years Google’s ad serving has grown from search-queried ads on Google.com, to syndicated search results on portals, contextual targeting on thousands of Web sites, and search results on mobile devices.

If your campaign performance on these networks goes unmanaged, efficiency can suffer and opportunities can go unrealized. Many search marketers are familiar with all of these different networks and devices within Google, but few bother to optimize past search and content optimization.

Google Search vs. Google Search Partners
By default, settings in Google AdWords are set to Google Search and Google Search Partners. Google Search Partners are Web sites that show Google search results when searches are performed on their sites. Netscape.com, Earthlink.com, and aol.com, are all examples of larger sites that may syndicate your ads if you are opted in to the Search Partners program. However, there are also many mid-size and smaller sites that syndicate through Google Search Partners – and, as a result, the quality of this traffic could vary.

Ideally, an advertiser would be able to target both Google Search and Google Search Partners independently. However, for search targeting, Google only allows advertisers to opt in to Google Search or Google Search and Google Search Partners. Opting in to both with these settings is fine for most search campaigns. However, over time you may see variance in conversion rates between Google Search and Google Search Partners, at which point you may want to consider changing your approach.

Optimize Your Google Campaigns and Network Settings
One way to optimize your listings is to simply opt out of Google Search Partners, but you would likely leave sales and leads on the table. Another approach is to opt out of Google Search Partners and recreate a nearly identical campaign that is opted in to both networks with lower bid prices based on the historic performance you have seen through Google Search.

For example, let’s say you are selling calculators and your cost per conversion is $.50 on Google but $1.00 with Google Search Partners enabled. Your cost per conversion goal is $0.75. To implement this strategy, you can:

1. Opt out of Google Search Partners in your existing campaign
2. Create a new campaign targeting both search networks with a 25% reduction in bid prices

In theory, your original campaign will serve the vast majority of ads on Google.com, given its higher bid. However, your syndicated search traffic will be in line with a $.75 cost-per-conversion goal, given the 25% reduction in bid prices. Not only would you be reducing costs from the optimized search syndication traffic, this would allow you to increase your bids to drive more traffic with your original campaign.

When you create a new campaign using this strategy, you may want to consider making subtle changes to ad copy in the new ad groups so that the history and Quality Score will be less likely to be distributed among the two sets of keywords, given that one set will have lower bid prices.

To compare the performance of the two networks, you can run a campaign report in Google by including:

“Ad Distribution”
“Ad Distribution: with search partners”
“Conversions (1-per-click)” and / or “Conversions (man-per-click)”

As well as clicks to compare conversion rates. Another way you can assess the difference in performance is to customize your view in the interface dashboard.

Over time, you will see that performance between the two networks is typically comparable and usually will not require separation. However, significant variance may occur; if you surface it with these tips, you can manage your budget and volume more efficiently.

Andrew Bernero, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search-marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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