Switching to Ezoic Increased My Ad Income by 628%!


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Switching to Ezoic Increased My Ad Income by 628%!

I switched the ads on my website from Google AdSense to Ezoic a few months ago and I have to say that I’m astounded by the results!

Seeing an increase in ad revenue of over 7x what I was making before is pretty crazy.

Let’s start with this though – I’m not a big-time blogger. If you think this site was the catalyst for us to reach early retirement… yeah, not so much. The money we’re talking about is still not something that would have ever let me quit my job before I retired.

Regardless of whether you’re a small fish in the blogger-sea or a publisher bringing in massive traffic, such a crazy increase in your advertising income is a big deal.

The best part, though, is that Ezoic offers several incredible features for free that can streamline your site along with the increase in ad income. I’ve been taking advantage of several of these and really like what I’m seeing.

Let’s talk about the change from Google AdSense to Ezoic and the additional functionality gained. And of course, we’ll discuss the huge boost in advertising income.

Once upon a time, there was Google AdSense…

I don’t hate Google AdSense. It’s not hard to implement (particularly the Auto ads) and can be a great way for any blogger to easily get started. Add a little code to your website, turn it on, and you’re done.

You start slow and make 1 or 2 cents a month. Over time, though, that income slowly starts to grow. You start seeing a dollar or two a day and you feel like you hit the lottery. It’s not a lot of money, but the growth makes you dream what it’ll be like down the line when you’re swimming in cash.

There’s always a lingering feeling though that you could be making more money on ads elsewhere. But if you don’t have huge traffic, you won’t meet the requirements needed to be accepted in many programs.

A while back I had switched to Media.net for a few months and wasn’t impressed. The income I was seeing was the same and sometimes less than AdSense and the support I was getting just wasn’t worthwhile.

So I switched back to AdSense.

Sometimes though Google would randomly decide to shut me down for “invalid traffic concerns.” In a nutshell, they would stop showing ads on my site for 30 days before allowing it to work again.

The problem is there’s not much you can do either. They don’t define what the “invalid traffic concerns” are, there’s no one to talk to about it, and following the suggestions found on the internet is futile.

In other words, you’re at their mercy and that can be a real downer. I had a few months over the years with $0 in ad revenue just because of this issue and that sucks.

Well, hello, Ezoic!!

Eventually, I stumbled across Ezoic. At the time, the requirement was 10,000 pageviews per month, which I’m far beyond so that wasn’t a show-stopper for me. They’ve recently just removed their pageview requirement completely though so now even small publishers can enroll.

I applied to Ezoic, was quickly accepted, and then switched over to them. I decided to take them up on their free name server and CDN integration (Cloudflare) since that makes things work even smoother. “Why”, you might ask?

Because then you’re not required to add code to your site. You change your name servers to them (they walk you through this) and you install a plugin to help with purging the cache for WordPress if that’s what you’re using. Then you use their Ad Tester browser extension to decide possible places for ads… but nothing actually gets added to your site where it sits.

Setting it up this way essentially lets Ezoic sit in between your site and your users like a proxy… and it’s pretty damn cool. When a user goes to a page, the ads are injected by Ezoic on the fly.

So far, so good. It’s a different mindset than Google AdSense but it was something I was willing to try.

Ezoic then uses artificial intelligence (AI) to test different ad placements. You can limit the number of ads shown if that’s a concern but Ezoic does something interesting. Even if you set 20 different placeholders on a page, that doesn’t mean that a reader will see 20 ads.

Ezoic will test different locations, types, and quantities of ads with each user. They say the process can take 12 weeks or longer to determine the right balance for your site… and it will continue testing even after that.

The testing aims to find the locations that will garner you the most money. But another key is that the AI also looks at your bounce rate (how long users stay on your site before bailing). If it determines that people jump ship immediately because of ads under the title, for instance, it’s going to make that something that it rarely does.

So over time, it finds the best places on your site and the right balance of ads to make you money while still trying to give a good experience to your readers. Letting it run over a good amount of time to find this balance is important.

The boost in advertising income from Ezoic

If you’ve made it this far, there’s probably one reason why – you wanna make more money in advertising income! Well, I’ll show you what it did for me. Your mileage may vary but it does seem like my story is far from unusual.

Again, I’m not bringing in a crazy number of readers, but were my numbers using Google AdSense over the last 12 months of use:

MonthEarnings
May 2020$32.86
June 2020$47.45
July 2020$48.90
August 2020$60.38
September 2020$6.20
October 2020$14.83
November 2020$25.85
December 2020$17.49
January 2021$17.81
February 2021$40.49
March 2021$0.85
April 2021$41.16

Not very impressive, right? But still, it’s something.

Now, let’s take a look at what my first few months at Ezoic looked like (including a partial first month):

MonthEarnings
May 2021$73.78
June 2021$216.63
July 2021$236.68

Yeah, much better, right?!

I’m showing a rolling 30-day average lately that’s been floating around $215. That seems to be where things have settled. Considering it’s been taking at least a couple of months to even make $100 with Google AdSense, I’m thrilled with this.

To put this into perspective, from May 2020 through April 2021, my average monthly earnings with Google AdSense was $29.52. Compare that to my $215 monthly average I’m now pulling in at Ezoiz and that’s an increase of over 628%! I’m earning 7 times more per month with Ezoic than I was with AdSense!

Look, I’m not going to be buying a Lamborghini anytime soon with this kind of money regardless. However, it’s definitely making my beer fund look a little more attractive!

Another interesting tidbit is that you can link a Google AdSense account if you have one (among other ad networks). Then you can enable a feature called “mediation.” What that means is that when someone goes to a page of yours, a bid is put out. If Ezoic’s network is higher, Ezoic gets the ad. If AdSense is higher, Ezoic gives AdSense the spot and that revenue shows up in your Google account.

This all happens on the fly in an instant (technology’s amazing, isn’t it?!). I’ve rarely had Google beat out Ezoic but I do see a few cents show up in my AdSense account here and there. Oh, and this is still done without you needing AdSense code on your site – Ezoic handles it all.

Some cool stuff, don’t you think?

The extra features I’m loving

First off, know that this functionality is optional. I decided to try out several Ezoic features and I’m loving them. However, they aren’t something you need to participate in to use their ad network.

I’m aware that they provide these features to make you “sticky.” If you’re not familiar, the idea is to be able to bring you into their ecosystem with enough value that it makes it a little harder to leave.

That’s not a bad thing if you’re getting something worth your while. Everything I’ve found so far is that this is a company looking for a solid two-way relationship. They know that the better you do, the better they do and I see that in what they offer and the direction they’re going.

The biggest feature that I’m excited about is something called Leap, which they’ve recently released. The aim is to help make your website better and faster. If you aren’t aware, Google is now pushing for publishers to focus on Core Web Vitals. You can bet your bottom dollar that those who do well with this will eventually be pushed higher in the Google search rankings than those who don’t.

Ezoic’s unique setup as a proxy enables them to do some magic to help streamline your site to help increase your Core Web Vitals scores. That’s what Leap is here to do.

For instance, it can make some decisions on the fly depending on who is requesting a page. Suppose your page images are in JPG or PNG formats. If your browser supports a higher-compressed smaller image known as WebP, it can serve up the image in that format instead. That’s a big deal because it can speed up loading pages quite a bit.

It also evaluates what’s slowing down or causing problems on your site. If you have plugins that are slowing your site down (we all have some of those!), it’ll tell you what they are and provides you with actual solutions. It’ll even provide you with information on alternative plugins that don’t cause the same problems. I’m still tweaking my site with this info, but I’m loving it!

One of the biggest culprits of slowdowns on sites is something called jQuery. With a couple of clicks, I was now able to offload jQuery to run on the CDN instead of my web server. Incredible!

The best part is that you can test all the settings without affecting your live site. Once you’re satisfied, you can then activate the site with the improvements. You can even go back to previous revisions if needed. And again, this doesn’t do anything to your actual site. This all happens on the CDN through Ezoic.

I could go on and on, but needless to say, I’ve been impressed so far. There are a ton of other features as well and almost everything is relatively easy to implement with just a click or two.

And, if you’re wondering, the support I’ve been getting from Ezoic has been outstanding. You have a regular account manager, but they also have a ticketing system for support. I’ve opened several tickets and the responses have usually come within hours with solid answers.

Is Ezoic right for you?

If you’ve been considering starting a blog, I walk you through that on my Create Your Own Blog page. Then it’s up to you to decide if monetization is something you want to do. If so, you might want to consider Ezoic.

Ezoic could be just what you’re looking for to increase your ad revenue significantly for small to medium-traffic sites. The other features that can help speed up and improve your site are truly icing on the cake. I wish I had jumped on this earlier.

For larger-traffic sites, Ezoic might still be a good fit but other ad networks should be investigated as well (i.e. Mediavine and AdThrive). But even with those other ad networks, the incredible features that Ezoic offers for your site can still make it a strong contender.

I make more money on affiliate marketing than I do on advertising income. That’s where I share referral links for products or services I enjoy and trust so recommend to you guys (thanks for your support!).

But that’s no reason not to focus on the ad revenue as well. It’s fun to try to make a little money on this site and Ezoic has made the advertising stream a little more impressive now.

If you’re interested in seeing what Ezoic can do for you, please consider using my referral link here to sign up.

There’s really no reason not to try it. It’s free to join and there are no contracts. If you don’t like it, you can bail and go back to whatever you were doing previously. That’s what I prepared for initially. I just disabled Google AdSense temporarily so I could turn it back on if I didn’t like Ezoic. As you can tell from this post though, reverting to AdSense wasn’t needed!

I can’t promise you the world, but if you’re looking to make some more ad income on your site, Ezoic might be a worthwhile alternative to try!

Plan well, take action, and live your best life!

Thanks for reading!!

— Jim

You know you wanna share this!!

16 thoughts on “Switching to Ezoic Increased My Ad Income by 628%!”

  1. Congrats on the increased income Jim — and I can understand why. There’s like 7 times as many ads on your site right now. 😉

    I tried out Ezoic for a few weeks back in June, unfortunately the account manager royally screwed up my ad settings and caused some weird conflicts with my webhost. Unfortunately iIt wasn’t going to work for me, but I’m glad its working for you.

    Cheers!

    1. Haha, yeah, I know you weren’t a big fan of the ad network. Sorry it didn’t work out for you but I do like that you came on here to give a different perspective, Mr. Tako. The nice thing is it’s not difficult to switch back if it doesn’t work out.

      Cheers!

  2. That’s great news! $200/month doesn’t sound like much to a working person, but it’s a big help in retirement. Hopefully, you can keep increasing it. Great job with affiliate income too. I think it’s pretty hard for affiliate income to be higher than ad network income.

    1. Slowly, but surely, Joe! I’m hoping to get my numbers to grow over time but it’s nice that this is just supplemental income. There’s not big pressure on making that happen in order to feed my family. Maybe one day I’ll be rocking the big numbers you’ve got! 🙂

  3. Congratulations!! $200 per month in passive income from a blog is… something that I can only dream of, haha.

    I got accepted to Ezoic for about a month now and every weekend, I tell myself I would finish their courses and tests in order to finally place ads on my website but I never got around to it.

    I need a good motivating kick, Jim!

    1. It’s worth the time to get it rolling, David. If you get it going and still don’t feel something’s right, you can open an optimization review ticket with them and they’ll see if there’s something you could be doing better.

      You got this! Good luck!

  4. Congrats on increasing your revenue by 7 times. That’s fantastic! Never used Ezoic so it’s nice to hear that you’re having a good experience with them. I’m quite happy with Mediavine right now. 🙂

    1. Mediavine’s the big leagues – congrats on that, Bob! I didn’t have the traffic to move to them and, if I remember right, they actually raised the requirement a while ago. The upshot is that Ezoic’s other “magic” tools have really impressed me so far.

    1. All good, Yogesh, and no this is not a promotional post. I always try to be as honest as I can in what I see, good or bad. The results I’ve had with Ezoic have been incredible. And since the short time since I’ve posted this, I’ve not entered their Premium program and have been seeing even better ad income coming in. My site is faster and I haven’t had any PayPal charges (maybe this is because I have a U.S. account?).

      Anyway, to each their own. I’m sorry it didn’t work well for you but it’s great to have choices out there regardless. I hope you found an ad network that works better for you.

      Cheers!

  5. Congratulations on the additional revenue! It can be scary to pull the trigger – we moved from Ezoic to AdThrive two years ago and were so nervous about putting 80% of our revenue at risk (and during the lucrative Q4). But that change helped increase our site’s revenue by 300% YOY – whew! Back then, Ezoic didn’t have all the bells and whistles it does now, but I miss their analytics dashboard. It’s really comprehensive and provides a veritable analytics rabbit hole!

    1. Wow, that’s a fantastic revenue leap – nice job, Sarah! I’ve heard great things about AdThrive but I’m not there yet on the pageviews requirement. I just signed up for Ezoic’s premium service a little while after writing this post and that’s given me another really nice boost in revenue. With everything Ezoic’s provided, I imagine I’ll be in a similar position to you in being a little nervous if I’d ever move to another network once I’m meeting the requirements of some of the big guys out there.

      Congrats on your 300% jump – that’s awesome!!

  6. Wow! That’s an awesome income! I am new to Ezoic and this post motivates me that I am on the right track. I hope to see positive changes on my earnings through Ezoic; Adsense earned me peanuts! Thanks

  7. Hi Jim! Thank you for sharing a nice story about ads. I still struggle to get more traffic to my blog. Not bad but until now I use Adsense on my website the CPC is too low about $0.03.

    1. This might be worth trying out, Matt. It’s probably not going to make you rich until your traffic grows but Ezoic does give a much better return than AdSense for sure. The bonus is that it still competes in real-time on bids with Google, so if Adsense would give you better $$ for that particular ad on a view with a user, it automatically gives the space to Google and you’ll get credit in your AdSense account… pretty cool! 🙂

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