Google Ads Search Campaign: Network (with search partners) Referrers

[skatofiabah]

Hi,

In Google Ads for a Search campaign, there are 3 networks: Google Display Network (GDN), Search Partners, and Google Search. We use CIDs and a processing rule to determine our paid search campaign. It's stored in an eVar and expires on the Visit. Are we able to figure out using referrer, referring domain, or a different field in Adobe whether the Search Campaign was a Network of Google Display Network (GDN), Search Partners, or Google Search?

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

In theory, that might be possible to a degree? However, I don't know what the referrers look like exactly in each scenario...

Google Search should be relatively easy.. it should be things like:

https://www.google.com/
https://www.google.ca/
https://www.google.co.uk/
etc

But would also include app search like:

android-app://com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox/

The Google Display Network would be other Google owned properties like:

https://news.google.com/
https://accounts.google.com/
https://mail.google.com/
https://accounts.google.ca/
etc

But then you have to know other domains owned by Google, like gmail or youtube, etc...

This will be the hard ones to identify, and it may be an ongoing process to try and keep this list up to date....

After that, anything from your Paid campaign can probably be thrown into that last bucket of "Search Partners"... and you would have to keep an eye on this for GDN or Google Search falling through the cracks....

As for an approach to this... you could try creating logic in Launch, to identify the referrer and set a value... but if there are issues, you are stuck with whatever is set...

Or you could create an eVar (set to Visit level attribution or maybe an attribution that matches your campaign tracking), that tracks any "non-internal" referrer on every page load.... Then you could create classifications on this eVar that you can correlate to your campaigns.