I am myself 2006 user of adsense. I had several of those meeting with google. In past I tried many such Partner whatever. They just take % of your money and do not give any value addition.

I dont know if they can give u any new knowledge. Considering you have 14 years of adsense experience behind you (most of these so called expert are newbie).

I run on of those Certified Publishing Partners. Let me try to answer the the points above without turning into an advert for GCPP

"Yeah Google, these badges are confusing!"
Unfortunately, lots of people deliberately try to make them confusing. Google currently only offer one certification badge for the publisher side of things, That is Google Certified Publishing Partner. You can check which companies are part of it here: [google.com...]
Companies not on that list love to play fast and loose with phrases like "we're Google certified" which probably means they did something like the easy analytics exam 5 years ago. Make your own call on the value of that and whether you want to work with people who start our by telling half truths (sorry - bit of a bugbear of mine considering how much we invest in staying certified)

"I prefer to earn less now but gain sustainability on the long term"
I know several partners take this approach. It is definitely inline with the way us (OKO) do things. Others are more about short term gain (working more with Arb sites etc) or bringing a one off step change. The certification does not dictate and approach or business model, so it is really important to find a partner that matches your goals.

"Are these partners any worth? Should I bother?"
That depends on what you want to achieve. If the partner is certified then they definitely offer benefits (Google work us hard to check this, both by comparing our publishers peformance with non-represented publishers and by surveying our publishers regularly). However not every partner will benefit every publisher. We turn down the vast majority of publishers we talk to, ensuring that those we sign are those we can definitely make a difference for. I would imagine many other partners do the same.

"I understand they take a cut from my revenue as their pay but I, as a 2006' AdSense user, can't really assess the value in them."
Most work on a revenue share, yes. They should be bringing considerable more value that they are charging. It can be hard to measure this accurately as rates fluctuate so much, but if results are good it doesn't even need to be that accurate (because big gains are obvious). There may also be benefits beyond simple "optimisation". I've had numerous publishers tell me that they would continue using us even if we didn't make them more money (but are thankful that we do). Again, each partner will offer their own benefits. One example that comes to mind is that we're very strong around policy. We provide publishers a lot of additional benefit around resolving/avoid policy issues and increasing account security that some publishers really value.

"I once had a private meeting with an AdSense Expert (from Google) and... goodness gracious me... it was terrible"
This is our experience too! In fact it is a regular frustration of ours when publishers act of this general "best practice" advice and undo site specific work provided by our team. What Google offer through account management and what most certified partners offer is very different. If our business was based on sharing a few best practice documents we would not be in business.

"Can they offer me something that I don't have?"
My advice would be to write down what you would like to achieve and call a few.

I'll answer @yaashul's point too.

"I dont know if they can give u any new knowledge. Considering you have 14 years of adsense experience behind you (most of these so called expert are newbie)."
I've also been using AdSense since it was launched, so definitely not a newbie. I also have a small team who are experts in different areas, each of which has knowledge that I don't. having a team dedicated to it definitely has advantages. Most importantly though, we are not just using AdSense - in fact AdSense is now a very very small part of the revenue that we manage. We mostly work with AdX over AdSense for starters. That includes Open Bidding where possible and ideally header bidding. We bring demand from around 20 sources, including premium campaigns and formats. Some of that is hard to directly access for independent publishers unless they have tens of millions of pageviews each month.

Expertise is a big part of the offering, but that covers a much broader area than just AdSense. It isn't the whole offering though. Each partner has their own mix, but generally the value is a mix of access to demand, technology and that expertise. In our case, we have many publishers who I could consider to be AdSense experts. Some of those are our most loyal customers.

I'm all about transparency. I'd be happy to answer any questions about the Google Certified Publishing Partner program. Any about OKO specifically should probably be private so that it isn't self promotional.

Sorry but I would take a google whatever (certified partner) opinion with a pinch of salt (vested interest for them, they need to do chest thumping for getting new business). In my niche adsense is outperforming adx by 200%. Now I know you would say they your adx provider is not optimising it correctly and all. Sorry for bitter truth.

Expertise is good. But there is a catch. Publisher do not get experts, they get newbies to work with. You do not get experts time on your account much. Most of the time you deal with newbie (lower end employees of these so called expert companies). Experts works on big accounts which earn 1000 of usd per day.

With all due respect Yaashul, it's unfair and disingenuous to take your clearly poor experience with one partner as evidence of problems with dozens of very different companies. Your claim that . "Publishers do not get experts" is simply untrue for most certified partners. If you are working with one of the low-touch, high scale partners it is almost certainly the case, but please do not judge everyone in the same way. It's like be saying that "all restaurants just have minimum wage staff dumping food in a fryer" because I ate at KFC once. This is why I always tell people to talk to a few partners and understand the difference.

In our case we have a small team who we invest a huge amount of time in to ensure that they have a high level of subject level expertise. Importantly we retain staff so that expertise is not lost. 50% of our team have been working with me for over a decade each. We have no interns / minimum wagers. We don't outsource or offshore. Our newest team member is celebrating their 1 year anniversary today and she isn't even providing account management or support. We also have a very flat structure so our publishers can deal directly with us "old timers" too. Experts work on every account. We simply don't take on hundreds of small accounts like some others do. We decline about 80% of the publishers who contact us.

We're not unique in that. It's even more true for other partners. There are some GCPP that are literally a couple of ex-Googlers with no additional staff. We're all different. I'd really appreciate you considering that before slating dozens of companies that you have not even had contact with. There are some very good partners out there.

You've clearly had a bad experience. From you post there is a major red flag that you didn't get

"In my niche adsense is outperforming adx by 200%. "
There are slight differences between adsense and adx that can play out differently by niche, but never anything like that amount. A 200% difference can only be caused by their either being an issue with the adx implementation or their being an inflated CTR (adsense will generally outperform short term in very high CTR positions, but it then usually results in massive clawbacks or policy issues). Either way this is something I would expect a partner to properly address.

AdSense v AdX performance shouldn't be that direct an issue anyway though (other than as an indicator of their being a problem). GCPP should be offering more than just "swap your adsense for adx" (if that is the solution you were given I completely understand your cynicism about the program).

AdX will usually outperform AdSense, but not by much and not always. Factor in a partner taking rev share and a bit of performance overhead from GAM and the gains will only ever be minimal at best if you are just swapping out adsense units for GAM with AdX. Partners should be offering more than that though. The only time I would offer AdX as a standalone solution is if the publisher was running their own header bidding and needed AdX as part of that. AdX seems to response better to auction pressure so will bring greater gains in this set-up. If a smaller publisher was simply looking for an "adsense alternative" then the least I would expect to provide is AdX with Open Bidding. That would allow additional demand from Premium Partners like Rubicon and Index Exchange to push the price up and bring a clear performance benefit.

I'm sorry that you have clearly had a bad experience with one partner. That doesn't mean that the same holds true for others either in terms of service or performance. I'd be interested to know which partners this was an how long ago it was, just for my own personal curiosity (I'm going to look a right berk now if it is us, but I'm pretty sure it isn't!). I recommend a few other GCPP companies to publishers who are not a good match for us, so I like to get a feel for publisher experience with others. Maybe privately though if you wanted to share that.

matbennett, As I earlier said I have almost 14 years of experience in web business and adsense. I have in past worked with 4 such certified partners (who are listed on Google page itself). First 2 month most of them work very beautifully and all of them usually change the person who deals with you.

In country like South East Asia/Middle East/APAC internet on mobile is pretty slow. Rubicon/Index exchange with header bidding almost kills the business. There is no active view ratio. Ads never load on time on mobile devices. (its my experience, now before you jump on the conclusion that my site is slow; it is the fastest on my niche, 2.3 seconds avg load time according to google analytics).

About Adsense beating adx. I tried A/b testing using javascript rand function given on adsense support page. 50/50 and adsense always beats adx 200% again on my website.

Header Bidding is definitely a challenge if your users have limited broadband speed. The usual solution to that is to user server side bidding. In our case that is Open Bidding. However that comes with its own challenges if your audience is largely outside of Tier 1-2 countries as the partner selection is limited and very focused in a few key Geos. End of the day, the partner should have known these things before signing you. I'm genuinely really surprised, but still maintain that it is not the case for all partners.

What you say about adx/adsense on your site still seems very strange to me though. In the thousands of domains I have used ADX on I have never seen that behaviour.

It's fine if working with partners doesn't work for you. However I'd please still ask that you don't make sweeping statements and state falsehoods about us all.

Is a report of one person's EXPERIENCE a falsehood?

(note: been there, done that, didn't find anything untruthful)

The way I see it these "partners" are ad mongers and not really a partner at all. Not the kind you see on a contract where stated aims and projections are codified.

Tangor, few thing about how they are ad mongers, when they signup adx with a website, they never add google analytics(of that website) with there adx account for more transparency.
They will never setup PMP and preferred deal using ADx but use DFP so that they can have sweet share of that deals because they know in and out of cpm of that particular website.

I dunno, I guess the only way is for OP to try one out.

I'm in a partnership with one right now and I can leave them whenever I want. My rep is super understanding and detailed, and it feels good to diversify from Adsense for sure; I've also gained a rep that has a direct pulse on the online ad industry and responds to my concerns within the hour, even on Saturdays - things that Adsense does not provide to you at all and never will. Ads are header bidder type and lazy loading is an option. Reporting is pretty good, though not as deep as Adsense (no one really is).

I wont say that I'm making tons more revenue with them, they are about even with what Adsense is giving out right now, but the current COVID market is dictating a lot of things in the ad business right now. For some, staying strictly with Adsense might be a safe bet, for others, branching out might make sense.