What are Google’s Search Partners?
If you’re unfamiliar, when creating a new search campaign (or at any stage of an existing search campaign), Google allows you to opt in or out of the Google Search Partners Network, which are an additional collection of search engines that your text ads are eligible to appear on. To name a few, these have included AOL, Ask, Lycos, NYtimes, and washingtonpost.
Google have now announced that YouTube, who are already a Google partner, will be incorporated into its Search Partner Network too.
What does this mean for advertisers whose search campaigns are opted-into this feature?
You guessed it. Your text ads will now be eligible to show on YouTube’s search results page if users enter keywords relevant to your campaign. However, this new feature is currently only available on mobile devices, so fear not for changes to your desktop campaigns… yet.
Is this a good or bad change?
According to Google, early tests have shown similar performance results for text ads on YouTube and Google Search when comparing on a cost-per-conversion basis.
If you are opted-into these additional search engines but are are unsure how their results compare to Google’s SERP, Google Ads does allow you to view a performance breakdown of your ads shown on search partner network, which can be found using ‘segment’, then clicking ‘Network (with search partners)’. However, frustratingly, the option to breakdown each search partner website individually doesn’t seem to be something we can do yet.
Google Ads is constantly evolving and updating so hopefully this does become available to us in the near future. What could also be very useful to some advertisers, if this does become available, would be to have the option to implement bid adjustments to certain search partner websites which are performing well/under-performing, much like you have the freedom to do with devices.