Search partners on Search campaigns: turn them off or judge them by conversions?

Search partners come up in almost every account review, and I still don't see a clean consensus. The argument for switching them off is that the clicks come from sites you don't control and the placement reporting is thin. The argument for keeping them on is that they can add volume without you adding keywords.

For a lead gen account on a tight budget, I'd start with them off. A few weak partner clicks can eat money that Smart Bidding would otherwise spend on your core terms. Say a dental clinic spends $300 a day: if the partner segment shows real cost and almost no calls or form fills, that settles it. But I wouldn't decide from clicks alone. Check conversions and cost per conversion by network before changing anything.

Splitting by network helps, but the conversion definition matters more. Form fills and calls are cheap to trigger, and partner traffic often looks fine on them while producing few booked patients. If the form is the only goal, the partner segment can win on a metric that doesn't reflect real revenue, and Smart Bidding will keep feeding it budget. A simple test is two campaigns, partners on and partners off, compared on cost per booked appointment over a few weeks. Does your clinic track bookings back to the ad, or only form fills?

Offline conversion import is what makes this test work. If the clinic's booking system can store the gclid, you can upload booked appointments back to Google Ads and let Smart Bidding optimise toward those instead of form fills. Without that, the partners-on arm can look fine in the dashboard while the bookings tell a different story.

The catch is volume. A clinic with 15 bookings a month won't separate two arms in a few weeks, so you'll probably need a longer window or a bigger signal, like consultations, before the comparison means anything.

Agreed on volume. With 15 bookings a month, I'd split the test by time rather than by campaign. Run a month with the partners on, then a month with them off, and compare cost per booking on the same search terms. A campaign split can't isolate a handful of bookings, but a before-and-after on the same keywords at least gives you a direction.