All the major search engines increase the number of searchers they offer an advertiser by allowing their search results to show on 3rd party websites. The traffic for paid ads showing on these 3rd party sites is typically of a lower quality than that generated by the search engines’ own sites. However, that traffic is also usually cheaper, so some types of businesses benefit by having their ads show on search partner sites.
If you allow your ads to show on search partner sites, it’s important to constantly monitor the traffic those sites generate. This fact was underscored one day a few weeks ago when a Path Interactive client suffered an 800% traffic spike on one particular adgroup in a Google campaign, with most of the spike coming from one keyword, with no corresponding increase in conversions.
