As a veteran affiliate and digital marketer, I always get asked whether or not people should run display ads on their site.
The answer is yes! You can generate a significant amount of revenue with little impact on your affiliate earnings.
Usually, the next question is, which ad platform is the best to use?
Ezoic.com is one of the most interesting options with its use of artificial intelligence for optimizing ad placements.
But we know what you’re thinking…
Does their artificial intelligence actually work?
Is it the best display ad option for blogging?
That’s what I’ll cover in this Ezoic review, coming from someone that’s actually used them.
First, let’s dive into the pros and cons of Ezoic.
Table of Contents
Pros of Ezoic
- Can be the highest-earning ad solution
- Super easy installation and setup
- Amazing team
- AI placement optimization
- Endless features
- Google Certified Publishing Partner
Cons of Ezoic
- Main integration routes DNS through THEIR servers
- Can lower site speed
- Can hurt user experience
- Takes time to ramp up
Ezoic Features
Ezoic’s Artificial Intelligence
Ezoic’s pride and joy is its proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithm. By using AI, they can test and optimizes millions of combinations of ad placeholders, settling on the most profitable ones.
Ezoic Ad Tester
Ezoic’s Ad Tester allows you to test, style, and preview different ad layouts on your website. It has a super intuitive interface so pretty much anyone can set up ads on their site.
After a bit of setting configuration, Ezoic will mix and match thousands of ad types and sizes, in order to find the combinations that result in the most revenue.
This video gives a complete walkthrough of the tool from Ezoic’s own Piper.
Ezoic Premium
Ezoic Premium is a new and exciting service that provides publishers with more control over their content, monetization options, API access, reporting updates for the dashboard to track progress.
For a monthly fee, you can gain access to some of the largest ad partners out there. We think that everyone should test Ezoic Premium to see if there’s net revenue increase. Even though it costs money, most people tell me the extra cost is more than made up for by the premium ad partners.
Ezoic Analytics
Another cool feature of Ezoic is its sleek big data analytics and reporting studio.
I actually really like the look and feel of their analytics panel, and use it over Google Analytics on my sites that use Ezoic.
We’ll cover some of the most important places to visit here:
The first report they give you is the real-time panel. In here, they give you some cool metrics like whos on your site now, where they came and were referred from, how much their expected to make on their visit, and more.
Next is the revenue section, which details everything there is to know about how Ezoic is succeeding in monetizing your site via its ads.
The traffic overview does exactly what it would seem like, and give analytics surrounding your traffic, comparison views, users over time, and more.
Lastly, their site speed tab is super awesome and useful for viewing and diagnosing page speed issues, on a page-by-page level. Site speed can be a major SEO and user experience factor, so you’ll want to pay a lot of attention to this one.
We could cover Ezoic’s analytics forever, but these are the most important ones.
As you become more and more comfortable inside of Ezoic’s analytics, you can view all the different metrics, tests, experiments, and more their analytics platform has to offer.
Ezoic Leap
Ezoic Leap is Ezoic’s newest offering, and is dedicated to optimizing Core Web Vitals for website owners. It’s a completely free service that resolves core vital scores on struggling websites. On top of that, Ezoic uses this technology to help ensure the ads they are serving to their users don’t conflict with Google’s Vital scores.
What’s great about the service, is it often eliminates a lot of the other paid plugins and tools publishers typically use when trying to resolve these sorts of issues on their sites.
Ezoic Leap is also the fastest way for a site to display it’s ads, completely cutting out a step. The diagram below explains it better than we ever could!
Ezoic Case Study: My Experience Using Ezoic
For this part, we’ll look into my experience running Ezoic on my scuba diving and travel blog ScubaOtter.com for one month.
We’ll look into ad placements, revenue, Ezoic effect on page speed, and more.
Ezoic Earnings
We know the first question on your mind…
How much did you make!?
Below, is a screenshot of the site’s earnings:
As you can see, through the entire month of March, I received an average income of $11.29 of 955 page views a day. This comes out to an earnings per 1000 visitors (EPMV) of $11.82.
Like all ad platforms, Ezoic’s ad revenue and EPMV completely depend on the niche.
Ezoic Effect on Session Duration
This depends on a case-by-case basis, but let’s take a look at how running Ezoic on the website in the case study affected session durations. While this may not be the best way to conduct a test, it should provide good information.
In the month of December (orange line), my site ran no advertisements. In March 2021, my site ran Ezoic for an entire month. And what we saw was that the session duration was actually higher, with ads on the site.
I’m not sure exactly what causes such a higher session duration. It could have been some site upgrade I did during this time, but also the extra scrolling and page length/content ads create could have lead to this increase.
So overall, no, ads did not decrease session duration in my experience, but actually increased it.
How to Setup Ezoic
After you’re approved to join Ezoic, you’ll want to log in to your Ezoic account and head to your Ezoic dashboard.
In order to integrate with Ezoic, you’ll first want to pick an integration method.
The main options are Cloudflare, WordPress Plugin, and a Cloud option.
Ezoic is a certified CloudFlare partner, so their integration is pretty seamless. If the platform detects you’re a Cloudflare user, they’ll suggest it automatically.
The Cloud or NameServer option is another popular option, which claims to have better site speed and earnings potential through Ezoics CDN.
To set up this, you’ll have to point your domain name servers to the ones Ezoic provides. WPBeginner has a great guide on how to change a website’s nameservers, in case you need help!
If you’re on WordPress, the official plugin is an option, but can be slower than the CloudFlare integration.
Once integrated, you’ll want to reach out to one of their dedicated account managers. I’ve had nothing but great experiences with their account managers. They have outstanding communication and will even set up your ads for you.
These managers have tons of experience with ad locations and will get you a great starting point. From there, Ezoics artificial intelligence will take over and find the best setups.
Next, we’ll cover some of the features of the Ezoic platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Eligible to Try Ezoic?
Ezoic has a couple of requirements to join its platform. They are:
- Adhere to Google’s Ad Policy
- Contain original content
- Easily verifiable traffic
- A Google Adsense account in good standing
Does Ezoic Have an Affiliate Program?
Yep, Ezoic has a lucrative affiliate program that pays a 3% lifetime commission. In the example above, my site earned $~400/m on 30,000 sessions. This would come to $12/m for the referer. But if you were to recruit a site say 10x the size, getting 300,000 sessions a month (not unrealistic), that would be over $120 in your pocket each month.
You can join the program here!
What is the minimum session count for joining Ezoic?
Ezoic used to require website owners to have around 10,000 sessions a month in order to join. This is no longer. Compared to other options like NeworMedia, Adthrive, and Mediavine, this is a very low threshold.
How many Ad Placements does Ezoic do?
This depends on several factors, like the length of the page, niche, and website layout, so it’s hard to say. But what we have noticed is that Ezoic adds WAY more placements than other networks. So a longer piece of content will naturally earn a lot more using Ezoic, than some other options.
What CMS does Ezoic Support?
Ezoic supports pretty much every CMS, WordPress, Shopify, Magento, and more! Ezoic works via a connection to nameserver and DNS records, so as long as these are available, you’re good to go.
Does Ezoic Integrate with Cloudflare?
Absolutely, Ezoic integrates directly with Cloudflare. This is their fastest and recommended integration method. I did encounter some frustrating caching issues when routing it this way, so it’s something to keep an eye on.
Does Ezoic Integrate With Afflytics?
At the moment, Ezoic does not have APIs, so it can’t integrate with Afflytics. We’ve contacted them about creating APIs for Afflytics to tap into, but they haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Do you want Ezoic to integrate with Afflytics?
Let us know in the comments.
How Can I Increase my Ezoic Earnings?
The main ways to increase your Ezoic earnings are:
- Increase traffic (More info content vs affiliate)
- Gain more valuable traffic (USA, UK, Europe)
- Change audience/niche
What Payment Methods Does Ezoic Support?
Ezoic uses the following payment methods to pay its users:
- Paypal
- Payoneer
- Bank Transfer
- Check
Does Ezoic Out-Perform Adsense Ads?
In ours and the experience of our network, Ezoic will far outperform Adsense revenue. You’ll have to test for yourself to make sure, but we haven’t located a niche where this doesn’t hold up.
Ezoic Payout Examples
Ezoic makes a small buck from one of the ads shown on your website to keep their platform profitable but other than that the money is all yours and it generates a lot more than Adsense auto ads or manually placing ads like the old times.
Ezoic pays via PayPal, Payoneer, or checks and even bank transfers if you’re in the US. Their minimum payment limit is $20, which makes monetizing with Adsense or other platforms more affordable for people who are already starting as you don’t need to wait until you reach your first $100 (or equivalent in different countries) to get paid by Google.
All payments are monthly NET 30, which means you receive the payment for your April Earnings at the end of May. This is the standard and Google does the same when paying you directly.
Here’s a copy of one of the payments I’ve received lately:
Who Should Use Ezoic?
There are a few types of people that will really benefit from Ezoic.
If your site is over the 10k session threshold, but under say the 10k-50k range, Ezoic is pretty much your best bet in terms of pure revenue. Google Ads and Adsense will only get you so far.
Also, if revenue is your main and only concern, Ezoic should by far earn the most amount of money for you.
But this extra monetization comes at the cost, of extra ad placements, page speed, and DNS complications.
At the end of the day, it’s really up to you, but Ezoic is a fantastic ad platform and a service I’m super happy with and personally recommend.
You can sign up for Ezoic here, or if you’d like to sign up as an Ezoic affiliate here.
