Adwords Quality Score Part Three

Monitor Googles Search Partners

 

So we all know that CTR (Click Through Rate) has a direct impact on quality score, therefor it is always a good idea to keep you CTR as high as possible. One overlooked area which is often a guilty party in low CTR is search partners located in the Google Search Network.

Who are Google’s Search Partners?

No-one really has the full list of Google’s search partners but we know that companies such as Amazon, Ebay, NY Times and AOL are part of this network. Google displays your ads in the search results on these partner sites and in most cases the position that your ad appears is different to that of Google.

This can sometimes result in your Ads not being easily visible and can lead to lower CTR.

How can I check my Search Partner statistics?

You can check to see if the CTR’s of Google’s search partners are performing well by looking under the segment option under campaign. You will see an option in the drop down for Top vs Side.

Once this section is located you can view the search partner stats. Sometimes you may get CTR’s of more than 1% in the search partners network, if this is the case then leave your campaign alone as it is likely not driving your CTR down. If your CTR is lower than 1% in this section then you have one of two choices:

  • Increase your bid so that your keywords in the selected campaign allow your ads to show more on the top than the side
  • Remove the option for your ads to show in the partner network.

How to Remove Search Partners?

If you are not getting very good results in the search partner network then it is a good idea to turn off this option. To do this you will need to go to your settings tab and locate the Network and Devices section. In this section you will need to make sure that the search partners option is deselected. Click save and you are all done.

Be sure to check back in a couple days to see if this new change has indeed increased your CTR . As I mentioned before, sometimes the Google search partners perform well so you will need to use your own discretion.

Tagged as: adwords tutorial, CTR, Google Adwords, pay per click, quality score

About

Owner of Casson Media and popular SEO blog SEO Cowboy. Bryan Casson is an expert in search engine optimization and location based SEO (Google Places) and has extensive knowledge in Google Adwords management.

Bryan Casson has written 12 SEO articles for Casson Media.

  • http://twitter.com/creationnation creationnation

    I’ve been having issues with a particular ad groups performance lately. Great CTR, bad conversions. This had been driving me crazy and I finally dug enough in Analytics to discover the culprit.

    Google for some reason considers Parked pages as part of their search partner network (vs. content). I had a few terrible parked pages that were sending traffic, but none was converting. So, this is something you need to monitor as well. I found the sites in: Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns > Source/Medium column.

    • Anonymous

      Very good point and thank you for bringing it up. Parked pages with Ads are indeed considered as part or the search network.

  • http://stealherstyle.net/ Linda

    While disabling search partners can be good for other reasons (ie. if the traffic converts poorly), I don’t believe that it will have any impact on your quality score.

    The Google help docs explain the CTR factor as: “The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain; note that CTR on non-Google sites (such as AOL.com) only ever impacts Quality Score on our search partners – not on Google”
    from http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10215

    • Anonymous

      Yes I agree with this, however, over all quality score influences CTR, and search partners are counted in the Average CTR for your campaign, therefor it only makes sense to get rid of it to increase your over all CTR (and in turn raise your quality score).

  • James Senick

    It’s interesting that the Google Help Doc Linda quotes above no longer distinguishes between the Google.com domain and search partners. I wonder if we’ll soon be able to have search partner only campaigns.

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