A few months back we wrote an article Search Partners Impressions Up? Lets play spot the natural ad where we were discussing how we had seen an increase in the number of impressions on the Google Search Partner network for paid search ads.
We have been talking with Google in regards to this matter and it turns out that there are actually two auctions that are going on in the SERPs for Search Partners. So the ads at the top and on the right hand side are part of one auction, but then there is a second auction for ads that appear at the bottom of the page…
This means that an advertiser can have their ads shown twice on a page, once at the top or on the right hand side and then again down the bottom of the page. We have been doing some testing ourselves on this setting up ads in certain locations on long tail keywords that only we would search for and we have found that in AdWords only one impression is being recorded despite the fact that ads are actually showing up twice on within the SERP.
This raised a couple of questions for us…
1. How do you know actually how many impressions your ads are getting if the ads in the bottom auction are not actually recording impressions?
2. When you click on ad in the bottom then the click and impression is recorded. But does that mean that an advertiser receives a 100% CTR on these ads if the impression is only being recorded when a user clicks on an ad at the bottom?
3. Google tells us that Search Partners has no effect on Quality Score of an advertisers ads, which is fine. But advertisers judge the performance of their PPC campaigns based on impressions, clicks and CTR…so by Google not actively recording these impressions is this giving advertisers inaccurate data in terms of how their ads are actually performing?
We’ve been trying to get further information from Google on this matter, but they seem unclear (or are unwilling to tell us) what effect these second auctions within Search Partners has on Google AdWords statistics.
We’ll keep researching further and will let our readers know should be discover more. If anyone has any further information on this matter please get in touch with us through blackhat@blackhatppc.co.uk.
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If there is an increase of Impressions in Search Partner Network, Double Auction would not explain it when Impressions there are not count.
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