The insight about different ads on different sites is a great imperative for creating 2 campaigns, one with search partners, and one without.

We’ve been seeing that although CTR’s are lower in the US, the CPA’s / CPC’s are still better. However, internationally there seem to be alot lower quality partners.

many thanks for all this great content you\’re releasing, it\’s very informative. Keep it up!

On Partner networks: I\’ve noticed over a long time now that the conversion rate and overall quality of Partner traffic is frequently very poor.

Sometimes impressions for a given keyword will be tens or even hundreds of times higher on this network, and it\’s impossible to know why. Needless to say this kills your ctr.

That being said, cpc is usually lower, and conversion costs can be acceptable – only there\’s a lot less of them.

I asked Google for a list of all the Partner sites, and they cannot produce a definitive one, although they point out some of the more well-known. I suspect this is because they don\’t even really know, since new ones probably appear all the time.

I\’ll only use a separate partner campaign these days with an ecommerce offer, where we can track conversions and costs with certainty.

Also, I prefer that to be in combination with Conversion Optimizer, having tested first with Google only, then scaling up a successful offer with acceptable CPA to other traffic sources.

Let us know how you\’ve found CO to perform …

I’m beginning to wonder if it makes sense to ignore separation until a keyword has established itself of being “worthy” to spend extra time on. (ie, 80/20)

Bring on the Pivot Table tutorial.