Does your company run Google Ads Search Campaigns? If you have this one box ticked in your settings, your data may be a bit skewed.
The box we’re talking about is within the Campaign Settings under Networks. Under Search Networks there is an option where you can “Include Google Search Partners.”
When we’re setting up campaigns for clients, it’s pretty standard practice for us to untick this box.
Why do we untick it?
Over many years and many campaigns, any time we have tested having this option active we’ve found it’s pretty useless to be honest.
With the option employed, you will most likely get a ton of impressions. You’ll get a bunch of clicks, but in our experience these clicks lead no where. Little to no conversions.
Additionally, the clicks from this option are usually pretty cheap compared to the clicks from the true SERP. Those dirt cheap clicks, which are usually leading to no profitable actions by the clickers, skew your overall campaign CPC and CTR data.
If you’re currently running a search campaign and this option is live, go to your Campaign View and segment the data by Network to see how it’s performing. We’ll bet your getting a boat load of impressions, few clicks and even fewer conversions if you have everything set up correctly.
We’re not saying this option is useless, because we haven’t run campaigns in every industry vertical. However, we have run a lot of campaigns for many service based industries and the story has been the same each time.
It gets little to nothing in the way of profitable actions.
