DuckDuckGo and Ecosia Inventory: Buy It or Cut It

You cannot buy DuckDuckGo. Its ad slots are filled from Microsoft Advertising's syndication network, and Ecosia has carried Google-sourced results alongside Bing since 2024, which means the inventory you are asking about already sits inside two accounts you run, hidden behind a network setting most teams have never opened. This engagement answers one question using your own numbers: does partner inventory earn its budget, and at what bid. The levers that actually exist: In Microsoft Advertising the network choice is set per ad group, between owned and operated, search partners only, or both. Partner traffic can then be cut at domain level through website exclusions and read back through the website dimension in reporting. In Google Ads the matching control is the search partner network checkbox, on by default and absent from most reporting views. That is the complete set. There is no DuckDuckGo bid, no DuckDuckGo quality score, no DuckDuckGo audience, and anyone selling you a DuckDuckGo campaign is selling you a renamed ad group. Why the measurement is the hard part: Privacy-first engines strip the referrer. Where auto-tagging is misconfigured, and it usually is in accounts running consent mode, those clicks land in analytics as direct traffic, partner performance reads as zero, and the network gets switched off for a reason that was never true. Before any conclusion I reconcile click identifier presence against session counts, and where the data cannot carry a decision I say so instead of decorating it. How the two weeks run: Days one to three, access and the tagging check. Days four to eight, the split: partner against owned and operated, by campaign, by match type, by device, over a window long enough to matter, usually ninety days or four hundred conversions, whichever is longer. Days nine to twelve, the rebuild or the exclusions. Day thirteen, a call in which I argue the case against my own recommendation and you watch it hold or fail. What comes out: A per-campaign verdict on partner inventory with the impression, cost and conversion split behind each line. Website exclusion lists ready to import. Where the traffic earns its place, a separate partner-only campaign set with its own bids, because one bid rarely fits both networks. Where it does not, the settings that remove it cleanly. In roughly half the accounts I look at, the answer is to leave partners on for the long-tail non-brand set and take them off brand. If that is your answer you have it in week two and we stop there. I would rather close a short engagement than stretch a fortnight's finding across a quarter. Not included: Ongoing Microsoft Advertising management, Google Ads restructuring, consent mode or server-side tagging work. I will name what is broken in your tagging and hand your analytics team the specific fields to fix. I do not deploy it. Who this is not for: Accounts where partner traffic runs under about forty thousand impressions a month. There is nothing there to decide on and I will say that on the call rather than take the fee. Anyone who needs a DuckDuckGo line item for a board slide: the line item can be produced, it simply will not mean what the slide implies, and I am not willing to sign my name under that. And any team whose conversion tracking is currently disputed internally. Settle that argument first, then this work is worth buying.