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Disable Search Partner Sites
Disable Search Partner Sites

Search Partners: what they are, why disable them and how this improvement task will help you decide.

Shaquira Jeyasingh avatar
Written by Shaquira Jeyasingh
Updated over a week ago

Note: This GIF shows an earlier version of the app in action. New GIFs coming soon! 

Why Disable Search Partner Sites?

In AdWords, search partners are enabled by default for Search Network and Shopping campaigns. When enabled, your ads will be displayed on other Google properties or partners (e.g. Google Maps, YouTube, Ask.com and over 100 others).

With search partners, you have no control over placements and no bid adjustment options. All keyword and product group bids must be the same as the bids within the main campaign.

Apart from those two factors, there's no real problem with having search partners enabled. The truth is, search partner sites are still somewhat of a mystery. Some advertisers see a better return on their partner spend than on Google spend, but others see significantly worse partner site ad performance. 

The only way to know whether you should have search partner sites enabled is to look at the data. Opteo will do that for you and provide you with a comparison of both networks' performance (CPA).

You'll want to disable search partner sites if their CPA is significantly higher than Google's.

What Does This Improvement Do?

If you see this improvement, it means that we've found that at least one of your search campaigns is currently running on search partners sites and the CPA is a lot higher than Google's.

To help you decide whether to push or dismiss this improvement, we show you the difference in performance between the search partner CPA and the Google search CPA, as well as how much was spent on both.

By completing this improvement, all of your budget will be spent on Google and not on any search partner sites.

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