Ad Networks Essentials: Search Partners mechanics, history and more explained

Advertisers may feel like they know the ad platforms they use daily inside out, however, in order to fully understand how these networks work it is important to understand the publisher side as well and how these networks are utilized on that end.

Names and functionality tends to change on both sides, so the overview provided below is to be understand as both – a snapshot as of now  and a bit of ad network history, as some of their former names are provided as well.

When working with professionals who are in this business for a while, you may come across these legacy terms in their language and even in the systems they use, so it’s important to be aware of what these mean.

Google, Bing and Yahoo Ad Networks: Advertiser to Publisher Mapping

(as of )

Legacy term explanation:

Overture:

the former name of the Yahoo ads feed. It had their own platform and did not prominently mention it was the  own branding.

Yahoo & Yahoo Search Ads:

Yahoo offered their own search ad network to advertisers back in the day, similar to Google and MIcrosoft today, these were all migrated to Microsoft Bing (with the exception of Yahoo Japan). While users are still able to visit yahoo domains (yahoo.com or yahoo.de) and run search queries on them, both, the organic and paid results returned are being served by bing.com and are identical to running the query on bing from with in the same geolocation.

Panama Accounts:

When Yahoo migrated their ad network from Yahoo to Bing, they did this market by market over a duration of several months. They called the accounts still being on the yahoo legacy-platform “Panama Accounts”. I believe Australia was the last one to be migrated, many months after the process had been started.

Yahoo Japan has been a completely independent entity long before that, so it never was part of this migration process.

Google Content Network:

Legacy name of what’s now the Display Network. The legacy name still exists on the publisher side, where the feed can be referred to as Adsense for Content.

Where do Search Partners ads appear and what is triggering them?

They can appear anywhere where search-ads ad feeds are embedded, in particular:

Search engines that do not have their own ad network, such as yahoo.com, duckduckgo.com or startpage.com

Content Websites embedding keyword based search feeds

Important:

While “Search Partners” traffic is always keyword-based, it is not always search-based as the name would suggest. The keywords triggering these ads can be hardcoded on published pages without any search at all (or ignoring the search query if there was an actual on-site search took place).