I'm a little confused...so questions:

Previously, you had AdSense tags directly coded onto your pages. Then you implemented DFP with AdSense fall back. With that said, did you introduce other networks into the mix when you went to DFP? Did you not have them before?

I'm sure you realize, but you do have to take a holistic look at things. If in the original scenario, AdSense was earning you $100 but in the second scenario, it dropped to $80 but you are also getting $30 from your other networks, you are up by $10...

Thanks for your reply thats correct yes, the HTML for the pages had the Adsense tags directly in them.

I didn't have any networks added to DFP. I sometime have direct advertisers, but haven't had much success with networks (any recommendations?) being able to compete with AS (which is a shame!).

Outside of that experiment I did try Criteo competing with AS fallback on DFP, falling back to another DFP slot (which showed Adsense fallback again), but earnings still didn't compete with exclusive Adsense.

Does it just perform worse because it doesn't get as much info to compete with on DFP vs Adsense. I would have hoped it would be much closer run thing tbh.

Okay, my hunch is that the problem is just with your setup.

Theoretically if you aren't running any networks, and you are just backfilling with adsense. They should perform very close to each other given enough time / traffic.

If they are NOT performing the same, and your setup is not messed up, then I would be very curious about this. Because that would mean somehow running through DFP changes the advertiser setup directly through adsense. Or maybe it adds some variable to your publisher tags.

Most likely however, you've got some share of voice going to criteo or some other network you setup, that is actually taking traffic from what would normally go to adsense.

The only other thing I can think of, is that your DFP setup is actaully setup with AD X and you don't know it, and you just dont have it setup well. So in that case you arent comparing apples to apples.

My first suggestion is to really read through the DFP help files to understand this, or shortcut it and hire a consultant to help make sure the very basic setup is atleast done right.

It doesn't make much sense to use DFP if you have no third party networks or direct ad deals...it only makes sense if you have something to compete with AdSense. Also, it sounds like you have entered your AdSense code as a line item, that's another thing you don't want to do. Instead you want to enter competing networks as Orders, ads as line items and then enable automatic competition with AdSense by going to "Inventory" and then "Network Settings" (if you want to enable AdSense competition to all ad units) or click each individual ad unit if you only want some competing with AdSense.

Other than that, I can't really explain the difference in earnings if you're not running only AdSense, unless you have some exclusions in targeting that are causing some inventory to not be filled.

DFP has been a huge success for me personally so I fully endorse it.

It is not uncommon for google adsense to outperform serving ads through dfp. There was a good case study written about it too: [webgilde.com...]

Interesting article thanks.

I realise there's not much point in DFP only serving Adsense but I wanted to get a baseline before making things more complex.

Adsense is served as the dynamic fallback not as a competing line item btw and it is linked to Adsense not Ad Exchange (although I would very much like to get access to AdX!)

I will have to find a reasonable competing network and try another test to see how that compares. Are you using price priority in DFP to compete with the fallback Adsense ads?