Google Search Ad Networks: Should You Leave Google Search Partners and the Display Network Enabled?

When setting up a new Google Search Ad Campaign, you may notice there are a couple boxes that are checked by default:

Obviously, Google Ads wants you to just leave these be but is it really in the best interest of your campaign?

Hovering your cursor over the question mark will give you more info but not much.

Search Network / Google Search Partners

For the first one “Include Google search partners” it says:

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It doesn’t give you a breakdown of who these search partners are. All you really need to know is that it’s showing on third party search engines, not Google.com. This does include Youtube.com however.

Leaving it checked can increase your click and conversion volume than if you were just relying on Google.com traffic. In fact, you can see how many clicks come from these search partners by clicking on the “segment” button in Google Ads:

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Here’s a campaign that’s about 4 months old and you can see how many clicks and conversions have come from the Search partners vs Google.com:

Search partners are generating a much lower cost per click and cost per conversion but that’s only telling part of the story. 

If it’s an ecommerce campaign and you’re already tracking sales conversions than great but if it’s a lead gen campaign it’s hard to speak about the quality of these conversions unless you have offline conversion tracking implemented.

The Display Network

For this second one I usually always just disable or uncheck this one since I typically only want to show ads on search engines when it comes to a standard Google Search Ad Campaign. If I want to run ads on the display network, I’ll just set up a Display Ad Campaign.