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Bing Ads – “Syndicated Partners” is 99% fraud and should be disabled? Let’s get this banned!
I’ve just discovered we’ve spent in Jan & Feb 2021 a colossal sum of money which is narrowed down to just 1 single keyword search term that has been generated via the hidden setting of enabled “Syndicated Partners”.
I am now labelling this setting as a **total fraud ring** that I will be advocating gets **banned** due to the manipulation I’m seeing. This is not being talked about online enough and is not fair for advertisers. If this is happening to just me, to what scale in the hundreds of millions is this bleeding companies budgets unfairly for both bing ads benefit and these fraudulent “search partners”?
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£20,027.55 spend
42,700 clicks
1 keyword on “search term” report also “Exact (close variant)”
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90% activity driven (data from “Website URL publisher” report)
[http://www.search.expertschoice.com/](http://www.search.expertschoice.com/) – NOW OFFLINE
[http://www.search.localbuyer.com/](http://www.search.localbuyer.com/) – NOW OFFLINE
[http://www.search.shopperwire.com/](http://www.search.shopperwire.com/) – NOW OFFLINE
[https://www.store.com/](https://www.store.com/) – FRAUD – STILL ONLINE
[https://www.top10answers.com/](https://www.top10answers.com/) – FRAUD – STILL ONLINE
[https://search.answergal.com/](https://search.answergal.com/) – FRAUD – STILL ONLINE
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The setting to turn off “distributed ads” is a
– enabled by default
– hidden setting under “advanced settings”
– can only be edited at “group ad” level – which can mean hundreds of places to edit.
Why is BING allowing this to happen and why is it hidden?
I guarantee there will be no reimbursement from Bing because that’s also how they operate under the DIY model, so it’s always your responsibility.
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8 Replies
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Whoa, easy there. Definitely sorry that you lost so much money but I have excellent performance on the Syndicated Network so don’t go and get it banned please, lol. To be honest, when I started using Bing a couple years ago the Publisher report was one of the first places I went to start optimizing and noticed the Syndicated Network data. Not sure how you missed this.
And I simply don’t agree with your argument that it’s a “hidden” setting as there are numerous blogs and articles explaining how Bing’s Syndicated Network is much like Google’s Search Partners. I assumed it was quite well known.
I do agree, however, that there are new rogue (spam) sites that pop up and are offline at an alarming rate. I’m positive that this is click arbitrage and you have a ton of bad actors looking to game the system since Bing is far more lax than Google about site approval. But some of the sites you’ve even listed I have good performance on so I think this is simply a matter of you opting out of the Syndicated Network to help your account.
Again, to be honest, there’s a lot of money to be made on the Syndicated Network if you use it right. Call me crazy, but I actually prefer Bing over Google because of this single issue. With Google, you can only target the Search Network OR the Search Network and Search Partners together. With Bing, you can target the Search Network SEPERATELY from the Syndicated Network. So I’ve got Bing specific campaigns (and Yahoo & AOL of course) and I’ve got Syndicated Network campaigns. And while my Bing campaigns perform better than my Google campaigns, my Syndicated campaigns have the best performance by and large. I chock this up to being able to optimize it much like a Google Display campaign. I regularly go into the Publisher’s report and exclude any sites that have too high a CPA. Over time, my costs just keep getting lower and lower.
My guess is Bing “allows” this to happen for 2 reasons… 1) It expands their revenue source. I wouldn’t even be surprised is they generate more revenue from the Syndicated Network then their Search Network. 2) It works for some advertisers – me included.
Edit: Oh, 1 thing I forgot to mention. I will also agree that this setting seems quite a bit more “hidden” with the new dashboard rollout. Under the old interface, it was super easy to navigate to the Publisher’s report on a per ad group level. Now with the new interface, it is far more difficult as you have to create a custom report. You can’t even select a campaign or ad group, you just have to “filter” all the data according to campaign or ad group names.
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I share your frustration about the “exact (close variant)” keyword match which simply doesn’t make sense to me, but the rest is good learning for you.
You should monitor spend on a weekly basis at least. Google is much worse as it offers much less transparency than Bing does; at least Bing allows you to exclude specific partners.
Syndicated Search Partners have good potential to generate extra conversions at a very cheap price. ~10% of our Bing sales come from Syndicated Search Partners at a CPA 25% lower than the regular Search channel.
It doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for some.
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This is such a great lesson you’ve learned my friend:
>I’ve **just discovered** we’ve spent in **Jan & Feb 2021** a colossal sum of money which is narrowed down to just 1 single keyword search term
Today is March 8th, lol and you didn’t check your search terms nor placements for almost an entire quarter, and Bing is the problem and not your lack of optimizing for two months? Sorry to be harsh, but it sounds like you didn’t keep both hands on a wheel amigo… Bing ain’t set it and forget it, you need to more actively optimize. You’ve had the ability to literally disable syndicated traffic, and block whole URL placements, this entire time but didn’t do it, either because you didn’t know to look, or were too lazy or uninformed to check your reporting. This is a good lesson you’ve learned on optimization best practices, tuition was expensive but I’m guessing you’ll never forget what you’ve learned. I’m sorry your returns didn’t match your spend, that sucks, but respectfully this is clearly not Bing’s fault.
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My campaigns actually perform better on the network than the O&O properties so it’s really dependent on what you’re running on.
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SP is fine.
You need to monitor your performance more. You can ban these sites yourself.
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Search Partners are absolute trash and the volume of some long tail keywords I’ve served on just scream fraud. I’m talking 12 unique ones in a row with incredibly high volume. The match typing is straight up horrible. Not surprising for Bing tho sadly.
You might be able to get a make good on it though, depending on how bad the terms are and how bad the site is.
My recommendation, if you want to keep them live, is to break them out by partner network campaign vs O&O campaign. You can do this quickly in the editor. We only keep them live for important campaigns.. mainly because DDG is on there now.
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You know, I’ve heard this about every single traffic source known to mankind.
Paid advertising accounts have to be actively managed so that problems like these can be mitigated.
I check my accounts about 5 times a day.
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Yeah, it’s not fraud it’s ad arbitrage. I bet that keyword is a long weird one too.
That being said arbitrage is not always bad, and the syndicated network is not always bad. In fact, there are some sites that do awesome on the syndicated network.
What you should do is MAKE SURE YOU HAVE CONVERSIONS SET UP and run a publisher report every week or more if you are spending a lot. There you can see which publishers cost per conversion is too high and set them to a negative site list.
Don’t do this by cpc, as you would be amazed how often a high cpc and a low cpa correlate.
You also need to do similar things with your keywords. Run regular keyword reports, negative out the bad ones, break out the good ones, etc.
I run a ton of bong and honestly favor it over google for many markets. I’ve also done a lot of arbitrage so know that side. There are a ton of reasons why bing has a bunch of arb, but honestly google is actually picking it up more. They are just hiding it better. Don’t kill an entire section of advertising from your mix just because you had a bad experience.
Then again, what were your conversions on that keyword? Are you sure it was wasted money?
Lastly, if you want to block a publisher, especially am arb publisher, make sure you block the whole domain, not just the subdomains. But be careful and make sure you see data from multiple subdomains and they all suck. Sometimes search.domain.com can suck but research.domaim.com can really convert. There is a whole slew of reasons for this, including those two can be run by totally different teams.
If you want help with this feel free to dm me
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