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.
