Did you know that Ezoic, a Google-certified partner and the world’s largest ad-testing platform, can improve your earnings 50-250% by systematically testing and optimizing your ad placements and layouts?
As you will see, I think Ezoic is one of the few gems out there for website owners (especially since it is free to use), however I nearly abandoned it after a few weeks because I didn’t fully understand how best to utilize it.
If I had given up on Ezoic, I would’ve missed out on so much income (I shudder thinking about that!), improved user metrics and an enormous amount of learning and education. And I don’t want you to make the same mistakes.
My intention with this Ezoic review is to provide you with a clear, easy to understand explanation of what Ezoic is, how it can significantly increase your website earnings (and user experience) and your options for optimally setting it up.
My hope is that you will be able to, in a matter of minutes, make more money, save yourself a lot of time and hassle, improve the user experience on your site and ensure you don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity.
In a nutshell, Ezoic will help you to make as much on money on your website’s advertisements, as well as, figure out how best to improve your site’s user experience. And it does this by testing lots of different website layouts, ad types and ad positions.
And, it is actually free!
How can it possibly be free? Here’s how: when Ezoic shows your website, it includes one small ad at the bottom of the page which brings them a bit of revenue. But I’ve always still made much more even with this ad.
It is a win-win, in that it help you, helps Ezoic and helps yoiur sites visitors.
That’s the short version for those of you who just want to jump in. If that’s you then feel free to sign up for free over at Ezoic right now.
If you would like to know more first, read on.
Wanna know what Ezoic really is? For me this snapshot, sums it up well:
This screenshot is a list of different experiments that are in progress on a newer site of mine that I recently added to Ezoic. It is comparing how Ezoic is doing vs. the original version of my site.
The leftmost column is the name of each experiment (each of which is just a different website design and layout), followed by what type of device, how much money it has made compared to my original design, how the performance (time on site, pages per visit, etc) has done compared to my original site, how accurate (or confident) I can be that this is correct and how many days until I can be 90% that the data is accurate.
Note that two of these tests are very accurate, one is rather accurate and the remaining two are not yet accurate. However, all five experiments have so far yielded increases in revenue and improvements in performance. I have found this to be the case with about two-thirds of the experiments.
As you can see, Ezoic will systematically test different layouts and ad placements on desktop, mobile and tablet devices in order to find the combinations that will make you the most money and will be most appealing to your sites visitors.
Just a side note on user experience...Ezoic tests how long people stay on your site, how many pages they look at per visit and other metrics in order to come up with a “performance” metric. A better user experience not only means that your site’s visitors will enjoy your site more, but also can lead to more social sharing and better ranking in the search engines.
But, you might ask, will this work for my site? My answer is somewhere between almost certainly and yes it will.
For most of us, this is the bottom line and why you are reading this Ezoic review in the first place. And I will answer the above question with two answers:
1) Ezoic is currently testing my 4th site and, so far, I have made more money on every site (and the testing on the 4th one isn’t finished yet). On my first three sites, my revenue has increased by 77%, 128% and 184% (the 4th one is up 68% so far and still has a long way to go).
2) Because Ezoic uses artificial machine learning (it tests a ridiculous number of combinations and intelligently makes decisions about which make the most money) it will almost definitely eventually find combinations that make you more money. The only way it wouldn’t is if you just happened to stumble upon the ultimate perfect combination yourself (and even if you did, you’d probably still make more on Ezoic for reasons which will be explained below.
As mentioned above, this is also very important, though you might not be as concerned about this as making more income. But for the same reasons as above, it most likely will.
It’s all simply a numbers game. After testing hundreds or thousands of layouts, eventually Ezoic should find something better.
Yes, completely.
You can turn Ezoic on and off with a couple clicks. You can decide what percentage of traffic you want to send to Ezoic and what should go to your original site. For example, I could have 50% of my site’s visitors see my original site and the other 50% see Ezoic’s layouts. And I could adjust it as I like.
You can also do the same depending on device. For example, if I notice that Ezoic is making way more money for people who visit on mobile devices but not really doing much for desktop visitors, then I could make it so that 75% (or 80, 90, 100% etc) of visitors see Ezoic’s layouts on mobile, but only 25% see Ezoic’s versions on desktop.
There are many other things we could get into here, but suffice it to say that I have always felt completely in control of my sites while they were implementing Ezoic.
If we looked deeply under the hood, I’m guessing neither you nor I would have any clue. But basically what happens is that Ezoic uses intelligent machines to throw up different combinations of website designs and puts many different sized ads in many different places and tracks how everything does.
The results of the experiments in your reporting section will look something like this:
Each color in the image above represents one layout and what percentage of the time it was displayed for any given day.
Then the statistics simply speak for themselves. If one layout leads to people spending more time on your site, viewing more pages and making you more money, then Ezoic will continue to show that layout combination more often, while at the same time, continuing to test other layouts on a smaller percentage of visitors.
And, over time, things change. User behavior adapts, the advertising industry shifts and Ezoic keeps using the winning layouts, all the while, testing out other combinations here and there.
If you make money using ads on your website, then Ezoic has a ton of benefits. Some are as follows
- In nearly every case, sites using Ezoic make more money
- Odds are your website’s visitors will enjoy your site more (stay longer and view more pages)
- It’s easy to use - set up is straightforward and there’s tons of extra features that can be turned on or off with a click or two. If you can manage your website, you can use Ezoic.
- More ads on the page - because Ezoic is a certified partner of Google’s they are able to put more ads on your site than you can (and increase your Adsense revenue).
- Premium ads & Lots of Networks- Ezoic uses dozens of different ad networks (not just Adsense, Criteo or Media.Net). Because there are more advertisers to choose from, they can choose higher-quality and higher-paying ads that you can (I get higher paying Ezoic Adsense ads vs. just serving ads through my personal Adsense account). Simple supply and demand. Also, if you want, you can turn on anchor and in-line ads.
- Science and math are your friend - sorry to say it, but computers can do something better than you or I, and one of those things is to display tons of different layout combinations, keep track of every statistic and tell us which layout works the best. It’s just a numbers game.
- Peace of Mind - With Ezoic you will never be in violation of any advertiser’s (such as Adsense) terms of service. Ezoic ensures that you won’t.
- It saves you time - you don’t have to test out a bunch of different ad sizes, colors or website themes yourself, because Ezoic does this all for you.
- It’s FREE - As mentioned above, Ezoic will show a small ad of their own at the bottom of your site. But if you don’t want that ad there (I personally don’t mind since I’m still making more) then you can pay a monthly fee that is a small percentage of the income you make (Ezoic pricing for this depends on your site’s traffic).
- There is no contract - you can quit or turn it off temporarily at any time with literally one click
- It’s buddies with Google - Ezoic is a Google certified publishing partner, which basically means they have a more intimate connection with Google than you or I do.
- Customer Service is Outstanding - My customer service rep is incredible (thanks Gavin!). Because I am somewhat obsessive about knowing everything, I have asked him literally hundreds of questions over the past couple years and he has patiently and thoroughly answered them all. (I’ve only had Gavin, but I’m sure they’re all great)
- Your site will always me mobile friendly and up with the current best practices
- Super awesome reporting - the user dashboard is full of excellent information and statistics that help you to know way more than you could ever need to know about your site and it’s visitors.
- You can use any CMS - Ezoic can be used on any website
- EPMV - Ezoic measures revenue using EPMV (earning per thousand visitors) which is a much more accurate metric than RPM, CPM and eCPM (which can lead you to make decisions to the detriment of your website and its income)
- Secure Payment - They pay through Payoneer, which is a safe and free way to receive money transfers, both domestic and international.
- They have an AMP converter! - How cool is this? With a couple clicks you can turn on their AMP converter and it will serve an AMP version to mobile visitors.
- You can turn your site into an iOS app - This requires a fee, but is completely optional. For $4.95 a month Ezoic will create an iOS app version of your site, get it on the app store and monetize it. Definitely a better and cheaper alternative than to hire a developer. I’ve done this for two sites and had good success with it.
- Ezoic Blog & Weekly Newsletter- I am very picky about subscribing to an email services. In fact, there are only two that I subscribe to, and one of them is Ezoic’s newsletter. It has helped me improve my sites in so many ways.
- They gave me an incredible seo trick - so, without going into details that would require a whole other article, one o the services they provide is to give you a list of keywords that you are ranking on the second page for and teach you what you can do to increase the chances that those words will get moved up to the first page. This has increased my overall traffic by at least 50%, possibly more.
- A Whole Bunch of Other Cool Things - Ezoic has it’s own collection of apps that allows you to do all sorts of neat stuff like integrate with Cloudflare (giving you a free CDN), exclude certain pages from testing, block out certain types of ads, add SSL, create cache rules for individual pages, and a whole lot more.
Whew! That’s a bunch of benefits and now I’m all riled up after writing all of that. But, seriously, Ezoic is a win-win. Ready to get going? Get started with Ezoic.
You can set up Ezoic in 2 different ways: through the Ad Tester or the Layout Tester.
The differences are simple, but significant.
The Ad Tester
If you use this, then Ezoic will only test ads on your site, not different layouts/formats/themes. Setup with this is more complicated, in that you take some code and put it where you have all of your ads currently. Then Ezoic will change nothing about the way your site looks and works, but will test out all sorts of different ads within the space you designated (where you already have ads).
This is what I started out with on my first 3 sites that I used Ezoic on and, in all 3 cases, it made me a little more money, but not that much. It had a minimal effect on user experience.
Eventually, I switched them all over to the Layout Tester (the 4th site I skipped the Ad Tester all together and went straight to the Layout Tester).
The Layout Tester
This is where Ezoic really shines. This is where you have to let go of the steering wheel a bit and trust the automated, intelligent machine testing to do its work.
The Layout tester will test not only different types of ads, but also different layouts/themes/designs for your website.
A word of caution: be patient! It took a few days (and for one site a few weeks) before the Layout Tester found better combinations. I nearly gave up and quit Ezoic, but luckily I grit my teeth and kept going. And I am so glad I did because now I make more than double the income without doing any work myself!
If you just scrolled through all of this, then the gist of what I said is this: Ezoic almost certainly will make you money and help improve your site’s user experience (and therefore seo).
I highly recommend you give Ezoic a try, because you really don’t have anything to lose.
In order to get started you simply sign up for free at Ezoic.
Setting up Ezoic depends on whether you choose to start with the Ad Tester or the Layout Tester. In any case, your Ezoic rep will give you details about how to do this and it shouldn’t be too confusing, especially if you use the Layout Tester. If needed, they will guide you through the process, though if you’ve been running your own website for sometime it should be rather easy.
Most people will probably want to get their feet wet with Ezoic by using the Ad Tester which will simply change the ads themselves, not the look and feel of your website. However, this doesn’t seem to work nearly as well as the Layout Tester, which will use data to figure out what layout and ad combinations will bring you the most money and best user experience.
If you do start out with the Ad Tester, remember that the Layout Tester should really be the next step.
If you start out with the Layout Tester, it may be kind of a roller coaster at first. But if you grit your teeth and trust in the mathematical data you will be handsomely rewarded.
And remember, you can simply turn off Ezoic any time with the click of a button. This is the future of web advertising, because it works and is truly a win-win.
I’m sure you’ll love Ezoic as much as I do after you give it some time to work its magic.