Ezoic Ad Revenue Index – Display Ad Market Trends

One of my favorite features about Ezoic is completely free. They publish a public index of the average ad rates across the websites they manage.

The Ad Revenue Index is compiled by taking a daily sample across all of the publishers on Ezoic’s ad optimization platform. These are reduced down to a single number between 0 and 100 which represents the overall pricing level for the display advertising market.

The Ad Index generally behaves about as you would expect. Black Friday tend to have a major peak each year. December is strong. January basically falls out of bed.

The Ezoic ad index is extremely useful for two things:

  • Assessing longer term trends in the display advertising market
  • Assessing how well your website is keeping pace with the market

Troubleshooting Website Performance

A variety of things can affect how much your website earns for a given month. You’ve probably got a solid handle on traffic activity through watching Google Analytics. However, you can also get hit with ad program penalties (such as the two-click penalty for invalid clicks on mobile traffic). You may also be dealing with a short term drop in ad revenue for unrelated demand factors. This is particularly true if your revenue source is heavily influenced by direct buys from larger brands.

I regularly use the Ezoic Ad Index as my first source for checking daily ad results against broader market trends. While the Ezoic optimization platform does a great job of keeping us on track, the Ad Index serves as trusted third party view of performance.

They’ve got data running back through late 2015, so you can get a good view of the longer term trends in the display advertising market. The market has been trending upwards over the past couple of years – particular in the “off-season”. This is likely a function of the increased use of re-targeting and personalized data to improve the effectiveness of display advertising.