Are 'Search Partners' starting to suck? / Excluding search partners

I answered my initial question, but the larger one remains...

[toomer]

So last month, I saw some really really bad targeting coming from a few of Google's search partners - to the point which roughly 85% of the traffic that I *paid* for from them was way off target, and a complete waste of money. Without reading too much in AdWords initially, I added these sites to my excluded sites list for my campaign, but am still seeing the traffic come through. Turns out, excluded sites doesn't apply to 'search partners' - only the content network.

So, my options are to turn off the search partners entirely - from which I get a good amount of valuable traffic - or continue to deal with this junk? And by junk ... let me give you a quick look at a few of the referrer query strings that have come through recently:

searchover.asp?q=st+patricks+day+recipe
searchkan.asp?q=arbys+nutrition+guide
searcheh.asp?q=goldendoodle+puppies

I run a small consumer electronics review site - and can guarantee you that none of those keywords appear anywhere on my site! Each one of those queries landed on a page that simply lists a number of digital camera models that I have reviews for. Yet users are feeding queries to this 'junk' partner (MFA, in the search partner space perhaps?) and that 'partner' is feeding my ad to them as a response.

And those were the clean queries that were family-friendly enough to share on the forum. There's a whole bunch of porn queries coming through too ...

I really, really don't want to pay this 'partner' for any of their traffic at all ... as it's obviously crap. But I guess I would have to throw out the baby with the bathwater and deactivate the entire search partner network since there's no way to selectively block a partner? Is this correct?

... sigh ... so frustrating ...

[kdobson99]

What has happened is very simple. They are allowing their search partners to syndicate ads to arbi sites. Check your favorite arbi site that is one of the bigger ones. The ads are provided by infospace.

What infospace does, as a search partner is aggregate PAID ads from adword and YSM, and then allow their sub-publishers to publish them on their arbi sites through an xml feed.

Thus, where if I am going to use adsense as a publisher, I have to follow a whole bunch of google rules about how to display etc.. and google picks which ads appear on my page. If I use infospace for the same page, I can display them essentially however I want by using an xml feed of the ads. Plus, I can decide which search term I wish to apply to a given page. Thus my page about "donate a widget" might serve up ads from adsense that are cheap ads.... but through the search partner, I can get ads to display on that page where the advertiser is buying the search term "buy widget" which will obviously pay more per click.

Google has decided to use the back door to keep revenue from arbi sites. They impose a bunch of rules to prevent arbi with adsense publishers... but allow their "search partners" to violate every imaginable rule and syndicate the same ads. Kind of don't ask, don't tell if you ask me.

[chief72]

Yeah this is a big issue. If G is going to continue to degrade the search network like this they should at least allow us the use of site exclusion. That is if they are to have any credibility on this issue at all.

[kdobson99]

If they are going to allow search partners to syndicate the ads on the search network (rather than content network... thus more $$$ per click)to third parties without the rules that are placed on adsense publishers... I wish they would do it themselves.

Why does Google pretend they are protecting advertisers so much by imposing a bunch of rules and structure to adsense publishers for the content network... then allow search partners to have free reign to distribute and syndicate feeds of the search network at higher cpc... with virtually no regulation?

Every Arbi site worth its weight is displaying search network ads, without being search network partners themselves. Just wish they would open it up to all of us... or stop pretending they are protecting advertisers from arbi and MFA sites when they aren't... and know it.

Plus, site exclusion doesn't really help much since the ads are being syndicated through a feed... I don't think excluding the actual search partner would help much. I think you would have to find and exclude all of the second and third tier "partner of a partner of a partner" sites. Good Luck.

[Israel]

I don't think excluding the actual search partner would help much.

Pardon me, but I haven't been around much lately. Besides the bnmq and I think the search.in and domainsponsor, are there other sites we can exclude from the Search Partner Network?

Did the policy change by chance so that now we can exclude search partners?

Thanks,

Israel

[kdobson99]

Not that I am aware of. You can choose not to run your ads in the Search Network in the Campaign settings, but then I think you lose the decent partners like AOL. You can also exclude individual sites... but that appears to be only for the content network.

So, the short answer is "no". Which kind of stinks, because the good MFA sites are now "Made For Search Partner Results" pages. No doubt google knows this... and wants this continued source of high cpc crappy traffic coming from fake search engines.

Actually, in perhaps some small defense of google, I have noticed that many of these syndicated ads by infospace and others over the past few weeks have been coming less from google and more from yahoo. Don't know if this is simply due to bid prices or by some action on the part of google. Hopefully the later.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

I'll certainly pass your feedback from this thread along to the right folks.

AWA

[Zamboni]

You can tell your quality control has gone to hell when you're paying for clicks coming from domains that are a jumble of random letters .com. This is both a Google and Yahoo problem that a fix is way past due.

It's unfortunate that the good search partners are lumped in with the really bad and possibly criminal search partners.

[edited by: Zamboni at 3:46 pm (utc) on Feb. 13, 2007]

[kdobson99]

AWA... the simple solution is to not allow further syndication by search partners. Google loses all control over the end publisher. Every site that does not on its own merit meet the qualifications to be a search partner should be relegated to content partner status and be forced to live by adsense rules.

Allowing search partners to syndicate high paying ads simply erodes the value, and most certainly the trust advertisers place in search partners.

I know for a fact that if I can generate a couple hundred thousand impressions per month, I can get search partner listings and the resulting higher ppc than the content network... without having to even talk to or be approved by google. I've been tempted... and probably will dive in b/c I'm missing out on a ton of revenue by not just bidding on cheap arbi terms and sending that traffic to my own fake search engine.