Google search and their search partners on adwords

[Ronald Regging]

Hmm..

I'm running an ad campaign and noticed a disproportionate number of my impressions are coming from Google's search partners and only a very small number actually from Google.

Google Search - 1,443 impressions
Google Partners - 36,456 impressions

I'm talking strictly search here, not content.

My ad is eligible and showing an average position of 2.3 for Google search and there isn't much competition.

I'm just wondering why the numbers are so skewed? I would think the vast majority of searches would be coming from Google.com, so why I am getting significantly less impressions? Am I too assume that Google Partners get vastly more searches than Google itself? Maybe they should join up and start their own advertising program and cut out the middle man

 

[SEOFocused]

setup your campaign to run only on google and remove google search partners. you will be burned otherwise. i hear very few people doing well on traffic from google search partners, most just waste their money of such traffic. yes, you will get lot less impressions and clicks, but at least they will be real prospects

 

[nielsencl]

I'm talking strictly search here, not content.

I have seen this on some campaigns, but in general you will see more traffic from Google than the search partners. Since you didn't mention anyting about the quality of the traffic or conversions, I will assume that is not an issue and you are just wondering about traffic volume.

It may be that the keywords you hare targeted are not used much at Google, but are at the search partners like ask and aol. I would NOT exclude them, especially since that is where you are getting traffic from. Just keep an eye on the conversions (you should be tracking them if you are not, it's the only thing you have that really lets you know what is working and what is not working.).

Do you know if you have the extended match enabled?

Also, how may adgroups do you have, with how many keywords and ads in each adgroup? For the best results you should great a number of adgroups with one or more closely related keyword/phrases. You should also check and add negative keywords as needed and create at least 2 and preferably 4-8 ads for each adgroup. Sorry, you may know this but others reading may not.