For all of my Adwords search campaigns, I have disabled content, but enabled Google search partners. I just did a search for the domain and found my ads running on sites like tripadvisor, about, etc. What is everyone's experience with opting in or out of this feature? Has anyone measured the effectiveness of the search network? Am I just pissing away clicks? Some sites get very close to content. Will this show up in Analytics under Google or the actual domain it is coming from? I'm going to do some testing, but I wondered if someone has done this before me.
For many peoples its very uselful traffic, for others its junk. Keep an eye out on your conversion analytics reports and make sure those search partners are converting. If not, start blocking the ones that don't. If its really not converting for your niche, then just turn it off
google doesn't offer very good reporting via the adwords interface. every industry is different so it would be crazy to make a statement such as it works or it doesnt work. also i have found some very dubious partner sites just full of ads, i suppose it is not a million miles away from the content network
Yes google reporting is horrible, which is why you need 3rd party tracking. Every campaign should have 3rd party tracking, if you don't, you simply cant optimize properly
Definitely test with and without Search Partners. I've run a campaign for all of July with Search Partners switched off and it resulted in a huge drop in conversions. I've switched it back on for August and already it's seen a huge jump in conversions. For another campaign it made no difference at all.
adtrackz is fantastic for tracking you're traffic, its abit expensive but it really is a great piece of software...