Buying DuckDuckGo and Ecosia Through Microsoft Search Partners

There is no DuckDuckGo ad account and no Ecosia ad account. Both sell their paid results through Microsoft Advertising's syndicated inventory, which leaves you three controls: a per-campaign switch for search partners, an account-level website exclusion list, and a publisher report that names some domains and buckets the rest. This engagement is the decision that switch deserves. In the accounts we have split this way, syndicated traffic has run between eight and thirty per cent of Microsoft spend, and in roughly half of them it should have been switched off months before we arrived. The measurement problem, which is the entire job: DuckDuckGo's audience blocks third-party script by default and by habit, and Ecosia's is not far behind. The UET tag fires unreliably against exactly the people you paid for, so partner traffic reads worse than it performs, gets bid down, and the channel dies of a measurement artefact rather than a commercial one. The fix is not a better tag. It is auto-tagging on, the msclkid captured at the point of enquiry or order, written to the record in your CRM or order system, and posted back to Microsoft as an offline conversion carrying its own timestamp and value. We build that pipeline with whoever owns your CRM, and no bidding decision gets made until it has run clean for three weeks. Shaping rather than blanket exclusion: Once the publisher split is visible, the exclusion list is written from behaviour instead of instinct. Some partner domains never convert at any bid. Some convert on a lag long enough that a thirty-day window calls them dead. Exclusions apply at account level rather than per campaign, which means one list has to be right for every campaign it touches, and that is a judgement about your whole account rather than a tidy-up. On Ecosia specifically: Ecosia's work with Qwant on a European index changes what its organic results are built from. It does not change the auction you are buying, which is still Microsoft's. Anyone selling you Ecosia inventory as a distinct media buy is selling you a checkbox with better packaging. What you receive: A publisher-level read on twelve months of syndicated spend, the offline conversion pipeline running in production, an exclusion list with the reasoning attached to each entry, and a keep, shape or stop recommendation in writing with the arithmetic behind it. If the answer is stop, that is the deliverable and we will not soften it into a smaller test. What this is not: It is not a DuckDuckGo campaign. We do not build or manage your Microsoft owned-and-operated search account here, we do not touch the Microsoft Audience Network, and we make no brand-safety guarantee about domains Microsoft does not disclose. Where undisclosed placement is unacceptable to your brand, the honest recommendation is partners off, and you will get it. When we will tell you not to bother: When your CRM cannot carry an extra field and nobody will make it. When your average order value sits under about forty euros, where lag and noise consume the margin before the analysis pays for itself. And when Microsoft spend is small enough that the partner slice never reaches a readable sample. Below roughly ten thousand euros a month of Microsoft spend, this engagement will not return its own fee, and we would rather say that in the first call than in the final report.