I’ve been using Ezoic for 5 months now so it’s about time I gave a fair and honest review.
When I first heard about Ezoic, I thought it was too good to be true. I would usually choose Mediavine for a website when it starts to get substantial traffic. However, one of my sites was not eligible for Mediavine as it’s not in a niche they currently support. My AdSense earnings were barely scraping £100 per month and it was time to try something new.
So, I signed up for Ezoic in June 2019. Was it successful? Did I increase my earnings? Is it worth joining Ezoic to monetise your own website’s traffic? Keep reading to find out!
This article is aimed at people who are thinking about joining Ezoic but need more information. If you do sign up using a link in this article, I will earn a small commission. This does not affect your potential earnings with Ezoic in any way.
In this article you will learn:
- What Ezoic is and how it works
- How to integrate your website with Ezoic
- An overview of Ezoic’s basic features
- The pros and cons of using Ezoic to monetise your website
Contents
What is Ezoic?
Ezoic is a certified Google Ads Partner who can help you monetise your website by showing ads. The really interesting part about Ezoic is that they use machine learning to test the best placements for ads on your page according to the user. That means that each user will see a different set of ads in various different locations on your site.
The platform is automated to ensure maximum earning potential for both Ezoic and the publisher (you). Websites using Ezoic generally earn more income than those using AdSense on its own.
How does Ezoic work with existing websites?
In order to start earning money from ads using the platform, you have to integrate your website. After integration, your site’s content will be cached and served using Ezoic’s servers, they will apply automatic ad layouts within your existing content. There are a few different ways of getting started:
Cloudflare
If your website already uses Cloudflare (if it doesn’t, it should) then you can integrate your site very easily. You need to get your website approved by Ezoic then add the Cloudflare app to your Ezoic dashboard to integrate your site.
DNS Servers
Another way to integrate your site is by changing your name servers to Ezoic’s. Don’t worry, this won’t affect your web hosting, it just means your site’s traffic passes through Ezoic’s platform on its way to you.
WordPress Plugin
You can also use a free WordPress Plugin to integrate your site with the Ezoic Platform. The plugin is readily available from the WordPress repository and very easy to setup.
Code Snippet
This is the least preferable of all the integration options. Just like AdSense, this involves pasting a small line of code into your site’s header. This method is only suitable if you’re using a free blending platform like Blogger.
In my opinion, Cloudflare is the best method of integration. If you’re already using Cloudflare as a Content Delivery Network for website performance, all you have to do is connect Cloudflare with Ezoic.
There’s no need to mess around with extra plugins or code if you use Cloudflare!
What are Ezoic’s Minimum Requirements?
If you’re thinking of joining Ezoic, there are a few minimum requirements that you need to meet before you’ll be eligible.
You must have a minimum of 10,000 page views per month.
Don’t worry if you’re not quite there. It’s worth applying and Ezoic will review applications on a side-by-side basis.
You must have an active AdSense account
Ezoic relies on AdSense to serve ads, so your site must be approved for Google AdSense.
No AdSense Policy Violations
Your AdSense account needs to be in good standing with no policy violations.
If you meet these requirements, then you could start earning from your website right away! However, it takes a bit of configuration in order to make the most of it.
Is Ezoic Free?
Yes, it’s free to join Ezoic.
There is a paid option which costs $39 per month.
The difference? If you join for free, you will not earn income from 1 ad on each page. That means if one page has 4 ads, you will earn from 3 of them and Ezoic will earn from the other one.
The cost of paid membership increases if you earn more than $1000 per month in ads. However, you can remain a member for free with Ezoic earning a small amount from your traffic.
Overall, your earning potential will be higher with Ezoic than AdSense, so the cut that Ezoic take is negligible.
How Often do you get Paid?
You get paid via PayPal once per month.
Setting up Ezoic Ads
Once your site has been approved and integrated with Ezoic, it’s time to start placing some ads! If you already have existing ads on your site, then you need to wrap these with Ezoic code.
Don’t worry if that sounds complicated, it isn’t! If you have manually placed ads on your site, then you simply go to the page where you’ve inserted them and paste some Ezoic <div> tags around the ad codes. You only need to do this on one page of your site.
Next, use the Ezoic Ad Tester Plugin in Google Chrome to create the layout of your website with ad placeholders. You have to be signed out of your WordPress dashboard to do this.
My account manager at Ezoic set up the ad placeholders for me, which I was very grateful for! It’s a good thing that this was all setup for me because…
Ezoic’s platform is not very user-friendly for a beginner. At least, I found it difficult to get used to and I’ve been in the online marketing game for quite some time.
More on that later…
Ezoic’s Onboarding Process
I have to say, the onboarding process with Ezoic is next-level good. The account manager is extremely helpful when getting things set up for you, there’s no question too big or small for them and they will sort out any issues you have.
Tweaking Ezoic’s Settings
After the ad placeholders are all setup and in place, you can get back to writing new content, sit back and wait a few days for Ezoic’s earnings reports to update.
I, however, was keen to change a few settings first. The website that joined the Ezoic platform is quite affiliate-heavy, that means I do not want ads to appear on review posts or posts with a sales funnel attached to them. So, I used the ‘Excluded Pages’ app within Ezoic’s dashboard to exclude all of these pages.
I also wasn’t very keep with one above-the-fold ad placement that Ezoic’s staff put in place for me, so I removed it using the ‘Block Ad Placement’ app which is also available in the Ezoic dashboard.
Here are some of the other plugins or ‘apps’ you can use:
These can all be enabled and disabled as required. So, if your website already has a Cookie Consent feature and a Privacy Policy, then you don’t need to enable these. But, if you need to, then you simply need to enable the required apps.
Website Performance with Ezoic
Ok, let’s be honest. Any type of ads make the page speed slower. The website I’m using with Ezoic wasn’t lightning fast to begin with, mostly due to other ads on the site.
Still, the page load time increased by at least 4 seconds.
Did this impact traffic? Not really. I’ve since optimised the speed on the site integrated with Ezoic, making better use of caching with Cloudflare and it’s made a huge improvement to the site’s speed.
What about rankings, did they change? Again, nothing dramatic here. Everything pretty much stayed the same… remember, Google doesn’t hate ads, it’s how they make their money!
I’m the kind of person who obsessively checks Google Analytics and other metrics, sometimes several times per day. I was watching my stats very carefully. Nothing exciting happened, nor did anything worrying. Everything was ticking over as it usually does.
Readers didn’t seem to care about the extra ads or page load speed, my assumption is that people are used to it. Most desktop browsers will use some sort of Ad-blocker, which is absolutely fine.
Appearance of Ezoic Ads
This is where I did run into an issue. About a month after joining Ezoic, I decided to really have a click around the site. Needless to say I was not impressed with what I found.
This site is supposed to be a fairly passive site, meaning I don’t often inspect it or its content. I’m glad I did!
Most of the in-content ads were displayed very badly, I looked at the source code and could see that Ezoic’s software had inserted ads into a container that was not wide enough for them. Also, the way the ad had so many !important inline styles, it was overlapping with my content and there was no way to change it.
After a lot of back-and-forth between myself, my account manager and my Theme developers (Elegant Themes), this was finally sorted (sort of).
I’ve observed a lot of other sites on the Ezoic platform without this problem and I have since joined Ezoic with another site which didn’t have this problem. My account manager didn’t know how to resolve this, so it seems as if it was a problem that was specific to me, my niche site and its setup. It doesn’t seem like a widespread problem, excessive Googling didn’t find an answer across many marketing and developer forums. So, this is nothing for you to worry about, but it’s worth mentioning!
Now for the important part…
Earnings – Is Ezoic worth it?
Yes. If you want to earn extra money from your blog and it meets the minimum requirements – go for it!
Compared to AdSense, my earnings increased dramatically after joining Ezoic. I personally don’t believe in sharing income reports or the like. However, I want to share as much information as possible to help you decide whether this platform is right for you and your site.
This site, with 35,000 page views per month was earning around £40-80 per month with Google AdSense alone.
I joined on the 19th June, so there were only 11 days remaining in that month. Still, in the month of June, the site earned double what it did in May with AdSense. Good Start.
Here’s my current earnings – November 2019
Here’s a more detailed look at the recent earnings for my passive site with approximately 1000 visitors per day…
Overall, Ezoic is certainly worth trying for a few months if you’re frustrated with the [lack of] AdSense earnings you’re getting from Google. If you’re unhappy with it after a while, you can simply switch it off without messing with the backend of your website.
I’m very happy with the performance of my two different sites running on the Ezoic platform and I’m planning to add a third site soon.
