Quick Answer: If your Google Ads leads are low quality, one of the most common causes is running on Search Partners and Display Network. Google turns both on by default in every search campaign. About 90% of quality leads come from Google Search itself. Turning off these optional networks is one of the fastest, lowest-risk fixes you can make.
The Default Settings Nobody Talks About
When you set up a search campaign in Google Ads, two boxes are checked automatically:
- Include Google search partners
- Include Google Display Network
Search Partners means your ads can appear on YouTube search, Google Maps, and third-party search engines that have a partnership agreement with Google. Display Network means your search campaign ads can show up on websites across the internet, completely outside of search.
Most advertisers never touch these settings. They're buried inside campaign settings, not visible in the main dashboard. And because Google checks them by default, they run silently in the background from day one.
The result: your "search campaign" is actually running across three different networks at once, and your reporting bundles all of it together under one set of numbers.
Why This Creates a Lead Quality Problem
The people who search on Google.com and click your ad are in a fundamentally different mindset than someone who sees your ad on a partner site or a display placement. Google Search intent is active. Someone typed a query, hit enter, and picked your result. That's a buyer signal.
Partner placements are passive. The person wasn't necessarily looking for you. They were browsing something else and your ad showed up. The conversion rates are lower, the lead quality is weaker, and the signals you send back to Google from those form fills are noisier.
When your smart bidding algorithm sees a conversion, it doesn't know whether that lead turned into a paying client. It just knows someone filled out a form. If a large portion of your form fills are coming from Search Partners or Display, where intent is weaker, you're training Google to find more people like those, not more buyers.
The algorithm gets more efficient at producing the wrong thing.
How to Check If This Is Happening in Your Account
You don't have to guess. Google lets you segment your campaign data by network.
Step 1: Pull the Network Segment Report
In your Google Ads campaign view, click the Segment button (it's above the data table), then select Network (with search partners). This breaks your existing data into three rows per campaign: Google Search, Search Partners, and Google Display Network.
Look at each row and compare:
- Cost per conversion
- Conversion rate
- Total conversions
If Search Partners or Display have a significantly higher cost per lead, a lower conversion rate, or almost no conversions at all despite meaningful spend, you have your answer.
Step 2: Check the Settings
Go into the campaign settings and scroll to the Networks section. You'll see the two checkboxes. Note whether both are checked.
Step 3: Make the Call
If the data shows Search Partners underperforming Google Search by a significant margin, uncheck "Include Google search partners." Same logic for Display: if it's running and converting poorly, uncheck "Include Google Display Network."
This is a campaign-level setting, so you'll need to do this for each search campaign individually.
What to Expect After Turning Them Off
Your overall click volume will drop. That's expected and not a problem. You're not losing buyers. You're losing the clicks that were never buyers in the first place.
Give it two to three weeks before comparing CPL. In most lead gen accounts, cost per lead either stays flat or improves, and more importantly, the quality of leads improves. Your sales team starts recognizing the names in the pipeline. Calls get answered. Jobs get quoted.
The metric that matters isn't CPL. It's the percentage of leads your sales team would actually want to talk to.
If You Still Want to Test Search Partners
Some industries do see decent performance from Search Partners, particularly those with very specific, transactional keywords where partner search engines attract real buyers. If you want to test it, the right way is to create a separate campaign targeting only Search Partners and measure it against your Google Search campaign in isolation.
That way you're comparing apples to apples instead of having partner performance drag down (or inflate) your main campaign numbers.
The Bigger Issue: What Google Is Optimizing For
Fixing the network settings is a quick win, but it doesn't solve the deeper problem. Google's smart bidding is optimizing for whatever you've told it is a conversion. If your primary conversion action is a form submission (any form submission, from any network, from any visitor), the algorithm is going to get very good at finding people who fill out forms.
Not people who become paying clients. People who fill out forms.
Turning off Search Partners gets rid of a lot of noise. But the signal you're sending back to Google still determines what kinds of leads show up next month. If you want to take that further and make Google optimize for the leads that actually close, that's what The Unequal Lead covers. It's a free guide that walks through how to separate qualified leads from form fills in your conversion tracking, so Google's algorithm is chasing the right outcome from the start. Grab it free at freak.marketing/the-unequal-lead.