January 2020 – Side Project Playbook

How much are you leaving on the table by selling your Google AdSense inventory through the ad exchange? You're getting $1 CPM (if you're lucky) for ads on your website... what will a big brand buyer pay for display advertising space? How about up to $50 CPM? Wouldn't you like a piece of that action? With Ezoic Premium, you've got a way to tap into this market to increase your ad earnings. How Ezoic Premium Works Hopefully you're familiar with our regular Ezoic Review, created for the website owner who is looking for an alternative to Google Adsense. The cliff-notes version: the Ezoic platform is an automated ad tester that increases how much you make (by an average of 50%) through optimizing ad placements, ad units, and ad network partners. It runs different ad variations to figure out how to earn you more money while delivering a better user experience (many sites see increases in traffic). So: up to 50% more money, better user experience, totally automated. Ezoic Premium covers the stuff which can't be automated - specifically, going out and selling large ad placement deals to big brands that are willing to pay for access to premium inventory. These deals pay much better than ad network demand sold through Google Ad Exchange. Setting up these direct sales relationships isn't cheap (which is why many competitors won't do this), so Ezoic's premium plan shares this cost with the website owner. You pay for additional sales and marketing effort - and get a slice of the sales from the higher paying inventory. Show Me The Money! We've averaged 50% - 70% returns on our investment over the past year (at different levels of ad revenue due to the pandemic). Here's a screenshot of the results. In the past 30 days, we've paid $2200 for the Ezoic premium plan and generated $3451 in ad revenue from the deal (on top of our regular earnings), which is a 56% return on our investment. Last month, we generated $3641 in ad revenue from the same premium program fee, for a 65% return on our investment. Currently Monthly Results for $2200 Fee From a cash perspective, this is outstanding. We pay a fixed premium plan amount for direct sales each month and recover that investment (plus 50% to 70% profit) in our next ad earnings check. (That's the math part of this Ezoic Premium Review, complete with screenshot. Your specifics will vary based on timing and ad rate trends.) Fund It With The Free Trial Period Ezoic actually gives you (most) of the capital that you're going to need to support this program, via a free trial period of about two weeks. Sign up, collect the extra revenue from Ezoic Premium, use that to fund the next month's premium fee. As of last year, their reps were indicating they had never had a customer lose money on the Premium program. So it's a quick, easy win. Why Does A Premium Ad Pay More? If you step back for a moment, the higher ezoic earnings from Ezoic Premium actually make sense from an economics perspective. Two things are going on here. First, we're cutting out a bunch of middlemen. The truth is, a lot of the money used to buy that $1 CPM ad never made it to site owners. First the brand spoke with their ad agency (who took a big cut), who contracted with an ad platforms (another fat cut) who called Google Ad Exchange (there's a reason they're a super-profitable company) and finally Google AdSense skims a third off the top. Add a few "targeting" and "optimization" vendors into the mix (at huge markups) and you'll find the brand probably paid $5 to $25 for those ad slots. Seriously, I had massive sticker shock at my day job when I discovered how much big companies will pay for digital advertising. After a decade on the publisher side (in a non-digital business), fighting and scrapping to get $1 - $2 CPM's on small websites, I figured they were buying for no more than two or three times that amount. Imagine my surprise when I learned the typical buyer was spending at least 10 X what I earned. Second - by dealing directly with Ezoic, brands have better opportunities to put their message on the right websites. These ads perform better (and have lower risk of showing up next to bad content), so they are worth more to a buyer. And all of this yields more ad income for you. You Still Get the Benefit of Ad Tester For those who haven't used Ezoic before, I'll recap our experience with the Ezoic ad tester (Ezoic Review). Ezoic's core product combines an ad tester with access to high paying ad network partners. They run continuous statistical testing to optimize the ad placement and user experience. As a result, Ezoic ads tend to earn better and have less impact on user experience than AdSense ads. The typical Ezoic client sees a 50% boost in ad revenue (from higher Ezoic ad rates) along with traffic growth due to better user experience. If you haven't optimized your display ads before, the initial bump can be higher than this. The Ezoic platform was built by a group of website investors who wanted a quick way to boost AdSense revenue from the sites they bought. The Ezoic platform is designed to quickly align a website with best practices for display ads if the website already had an AdSense account. The ad testing product takes a set of ad placeholder ideas and tests combinations of ad units, ad variations, and ad position. In addition to the Google Ad networks, they tap into a broader set of Ezoic ad partner firms who help bid up the ad rate. This includes both premium ad partner networks (high ad rate) and flexible ad network buyers (who help monetize your less desirable spots). Best of all, all of this occurs automatically - the system (guided by an Ezoic account manager) handles the details of optimizing the website. The offering was intended as a quick (and highly profitable) upgrade on AdSense Ads for a newly purchased website. By increasing the AdSense earning potential, it raised the value of the site. There are some minimum Ezoic requirements (for example, there is an Ezoic traffic requirement of at least 10,000 monthly users for the optimization tool to work effectively). This system plays well with affiliate marketing, especially for top of funnel traffic. Use links and deals to harvest high intent buyers and show ads to get some additional revenue from the rest of your traffic. In summation, Ezoic is an advertising optimization platform that offers better ad placements and access to premium ad networks. Their premium plan allows you to tap into direct sold advertising deals. In general, their program pays better than AdSense and delivers a better user experience. Plus New Services (often for free) Ezoic's focus has broadened in recent years to include tools to improve user experience, privacy, and content quality (in addition to ad earnings). As a premium user, you get early (often free) access to these tools. Talk with your Ezoic rep for details. But as part of this Ezoic premium review, I'll call out a couple of the key services which we use on a regular basis. Site speed improvements has been a key area they have focused on. In addition to their Site Speed Accelerator analytics, they launched a service called Ezoic LEAP which streamlines your website's code to serve content faster. This is expected to help with future Google search engine algorithm updates, which will penalize websites with poor user experience. Another high value service: the headline tester. This is a simple way to increase traffic to your website by A/B testing alternative title tags for your content. A better title can help you attract more attention on Google (higher click-through rates) and potentially improve rankings as well. Ezoic also has a solid set of tools for managing privacy and GDPR compliance. Given the pace at which this space is evolving, this simplifies a complicated topic for websites with international audiences. Like our Ezoic Premium Review? Want to know more? Check out our regular Ezoic Review, read about how we used Ezoic to help turn around a broken website acquisition, or click here to get a free trial? Recommended Reading (From the Ezoic Blog): How I Made A Fast WordPress Site With Ads Using Ezoic LeapHow to find high-value pages using Big Data AnalyticsHow to Use Smaller Topics to Write Longer Articles

Month: January 2020

Ezoic Premium Review: How To Get Paid Like an Ad Agency (50%+ ROI)

Article Forge Review 2.0: Using AI for Low Cost Content (Updated 9/26/20)