Search Partner Placement Reporting: What You Can Audit

Two questions, two reports

A client notices an unfamiliar domain and asks why their ads appeared there. A different client says leads got worse and wonders whether search partners are to blame. These are different questions, and Google gives you a different report for each.

The placement report answers where. It lists the partner sites and how many impressions each one received. The Network segment on a Search campaign answers whether: it splits the campaign's cost, clicks, and conversions between Google search and Search partners. Neither report answers both questions, and the audit goes wrong when a site list is asked to explain a cost per lead.

Write the question at the top of the export before you open either report. A list of domains has a way of turning into an exclusion list simply because it is the data everyone can see.

Open the placement report and keep its limits with it

For Search, Shopping, and App campaigns, the report is in Report editor. Expand the section for when and where ads showed and choose Content suitability, then set the reporting period before you download.

The report has two columns that matter: placement and impressions. A site appears only if it met one of Google's inclusion thresholds in the period, at least 5 impressions, more than 0 clicks, more than 0 video views, or more than 0 conversions. So a site that is missing from the list may still have shown an ad a handful of times. Keep the account, the campaigns covered, the date range, and any filters with the export; a bare list of domains loses the context that makes it reviewable.

Performance Max campaigns have their own placement report, also impressions only, and their own channel performance report for results. The two are covered in the Performance Max Search Partner guide linked at the end.

Check partner performance in the report that has it

For a Search campaign, segment the campaign or ad group table by Network with search partners. The table splits into Google search and Search partners rows, each with impressions, clicks, cost, conversions, and cost per conversion for the period. That is the partner performance figure, and it is the one to put in the client update.

Read it the way you would read any segment. Check which conversion action is being counted, allow for conversion delay on the most recent days, and compare against an earlier period long enough to be meaningful. If partner cost per conversion is far worse than Google search and the conversions that do arrive are of the same quality, that is a case for turning partners off on the campaign. If the volume is small, a few late conversions can move the figure a long way.

The temptation is to go further and split the partner row across the sites in the placement report by impression share, then paste the account's lead-quality rate next to each domain. That produces a tidy spreadsheet and no information. The report contains sites and impressions, and everything else in that sheet would be the analyst's guess with a number attached. When the placement report and a CPA rise land in the same week, you have two observations, not a cause.

If you hold separately collected attribution data, for example landing page parameters that identify partner traffic, say exactly what it links and what it misses. A shared date range is not a join.

Review the sites against a written policy

Sort the placement report by impressions to decide what to look at first. That ranks visible exposure, which is the right order for a suitability review. It says nothing about money, so do not let the ranking turn into a loss estimate.

Open each site that gets a second look and judge it against the advertiser's actual requirements, not familiarity. An unfamiliar publication can be suitable; a well-known site can carry content the advertiser cannot sit next to. Record the URL, what you found, and the policy requirement it conflicts with.

Keep uncertainty visible. A page may have changed since the ad ran, a placement may be gone, a site may mix suitable and unsuitable material. A short note beats a made-up quality score.

Keep the placement, impressions, reporting period, suitability finding, and proposed scope together. Identify who reviewed the concern where that helps the handoff. Any separate performance evidence should retain its own attribution limits; the placement report itself cannot fill site-level cost or lead-quality columns.

Exclude for a written reason, at the right level

Exclude a site because the advertiser has a defensible reason not to appear there. A suitability rule is enforced on sight; it does not need a bad cost per conversion to justify it. The reverse holds too: a site that passes the policy check stays, however unfamiliar it looks.

Placement exclusions for search partner sites are set at account level under Content suitability, in Advanced settings under Excluded placements. Google documents those exclusions as applying to Display, Search partners, and video inventory, and the Search Partner Network announcements confirm that exclusions made in the Content Suitability Center apply to the Search Partner Network. Enter the site, save, and record the change.

If the agency manages the list from a manager account, a placement exclusion list applied to selected client accounts carries the same exclusion to every account that uses the list, and later edits propagate to all of them. Manager accounts can hold up to three such lists; client accounts can hold up to twenty; account-level lists cannot be attached to individual campaigns. A decision for one client should not become policy for all of them by accident.

If the real question is whether search partners belong on the campaign at all, the control is the campaign setting. Under Networks in the campaign settings, the checkbox for including Google search partners turns the whole network on or off for that campaign. That is an all-or-nothing decision per campaign, made from the Network segment figures, not from the site list.

After any change, confirm the exclusion or setting saved at the level you intended, keep a record of the previous state, and watch the next period. If aggregate cost per conversion moves, investigate the movement the same way you would any other; the exclusion is one candidate explanation among several.

Suspected invalid traffic is a separate route. Google's Invalid Activity Credit Report shows credits at campaign and network level and points to the investigation process. It is not a site-level conversion report.