May 2021 – Side Project Playbook

If the only thing an Ezoic review talks about is making more ad revenue, they're missing most of the value from the Ezoic Platform. The average Ezoic managed website sees a 50% increase in ad revenue. In fact, this may be even larger if you've never tried to optimize your ads (most of our new websites double their revenue). However, these websites also enjoy... A 48% increase in traffic per yearAn average mobile speed score of 92Visibility into which topics earns the mostOpportunities to optimize your content The total package provides you with a way to increase your earnings per hour as a blogger or website publisher, focusing on the right goals. And using the Ezoic platform for the boring stuff. Step 1 - Faster Site, More Traffic Have you heard of Google's Core Web Vitals initiative? They released a series of technical measurements last year which they indicated would be used to help rank websites in the future, starting in the summer of 2021. Slow websites will be ranked lower in Google search and will receive fewer visitors. This poses a problem to many WordPress blogs. The WordPress plugin model makes it easy to customize a website. However, layering multiple WordPress plugin options on top of each other can easily slow down how quickly your site loads. This can create a real challenge for a non-technical website owner (isn't that why we picked WordPress to begin with?). Ezoic's site speed products help you navigate this challenge without getting into the details. The Ezoic Site Speed Accelerate Product helps solve for many common issues. Ezoic LEAP, free to monetization customers, speeds up your website to meet the Core Web Vitals challenge. These capabilities turn a disruptive event (Google changing the rules) into an opportunity (your site has a better chance of ranking up). Without having to spend the next several months learning how to be a web designer and WordPress expert. Step 2 - Understand What Articles Make Money All articles aren't created equal. Certain topics do better than others. Certain writers do better than others. Certain formats do better than others. So what if we targeted "the good stuff" and told our team to spend most of their timing working on that content? This isn't a theoretical question (here's a case study, using Ezoic and SEO analytics to drive a 10 X lift in revenue per article). Sure, you can get some of this from Google analytic tools. But Ezoic's Big Data Analytics Product is built for publishers and addresses the stuff we want to know: Which Writers Are Getting Results?Long Articles or Short Articles?Which Topics Do People Like?Which Topics Drive Ad Earnings There's an 80/20 in your content; most of your earnings come from a handful of articles, topics, and writers. This applies to revenue and page view metrics. Imagine how much faster your ad earnings could grow if you double the time you invest in those topics... Step 3 - A/B Test Page Titles My favorite new feature. The truth of the matter is that far more people will see your page title in Google's Search Results than will ever read your content. So why not test that? With Ezoic's Title tester, you can. Simply load up an alternative page title and their system will run each title for a couple of days and assess results. The right title tag can have a huge impact on your traffic... and the title tag tester allows you to be continuously optimizing this for your articles... Step 4 - Simplify Privacy Compliance Privacy is a hot issue these days, especially with the passage of Europe's GDPR requirements and similar legislation in the US. Many of these laws include penalties at the website owner level for failing to appropriately manage user data. Complying with these standards, which are often not well defined, is a legal and technical mess. Made more complicated by a bunch of software vendors running around asking you to pay for their particular privacy solution "to avoid trouble". It's got all the charm of a Mafia shakedown. With Ezoic, this is handled. They address privacy issues through their platform. Without requiring technical changes by a website owner. For free. All part of their website monetization offering. Step 5 - Optimize Ad Density for User Experience Given this article is about comparing Ezoic vs Adsense Earnings, there is one key difference that we should mention on the ad network front. Yes, you're going to make more money. But more importantly, the optimization process should enable you to deliver a better user experience. The typical ad network thinks about how an ad placement performs. That's the genius of Google AdSense Ads - an automated way of letting a computer manage ad optimization at the ad placement level. Define an ad unit for a given ad space on the page, cycle through display ads and watch the ad performance. In fact, Google's Adsense auto ads fully automate this process. It's a great way to monetize your ad inventory without much human intervention. The downside of this process? Too many ads on a page. The Google ad manager lets ad network buyers slug it out over who gets the ad position, with losing bidders getting other ad space on the page via other ad exchange bids. So the page is loaded up with adsense ad slots. Good news for adsense ad income, bad news for users, which increases your bounce rate and will ultimately hurt your search engine rankings. By the way, get too many clicks on an overloaded page of ads and your AdSense account may be at risk as well. Ezoic's ad tester works more strategically, looking at the total ad revenue from a session. Their ad optimization works at the visitor level and page level, testing sets of ad placeholders to optimize first how a page looks and then tailoring that based on visitor tolerance for ads. This helps keep visitors who are likely to stay on your website engaged and looking at additional pages. Oh - and that ad placement policy compliance thing?? Also handled, automatically, by the Ezoic platform. You can even add Adsense Ads back to the page via their mediation app. Or bring higher end networks into the mix using Ezoic premium. Without losing control of your user experience. Recap - The Five Ways to Create A Competitive Advantage Ezoic is more than just an AdSense alternative; the Ezoic ad platform has many other ways to help new bloggers succeed. This includes: Solving Site Speed IssuesFinding High Ad Revenue ContentPage Title TestingEasier Privacy ComplianceReduce Impact of Ads On User Experience And yes... you can also use the Ezoic ad tester to generate more revenue from your existing ads. 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 FAQ - Ezoic vs. AdSense Does Ezoic Pay More Than AdSense? Generally speaking, yes. Ezoic reports a 50% increase in ad revenue for their average website (dashboard on home page). Given that most small AdSense websites aren't well optimized and rarely have access to higher level display advertising networks with premium ad demand, I suspect there is considerable potential to exceed that 50% number. Most of our smaller websites have at least doubled their revenue when we promoted them to Ezoic. How Much Does Ezoic Cost? Their base plan has a choice of being either a small monthly fee or allowing them to run a small ad at the bottom of the page. The earnings from the ad would go to Ezoic. Ezoic Premium has a larger monthly fee which is offset by higher advertising revenue due to premium ads. Compare Mediavine vs. Ezoic Mediavine is a slightly more selective ad network, requiring 50,000 monthly sessions for approval. They're looking for long form blog content within a lifestyle niche, which restricts many publishers from approval. Why my AdSense rpm is low? The correct answer to a question like this is always "it depends" but here are some leading culprits. Many of these would be addressed by shifting to another ad network (Ezoic vs. AdSense): Low Overall Traffic - can't get a critical mass of ad buyersPoor Ad Placement / Ad FormatGoogle Ad Penalties / Policy ViolationsContent Not Attractive to Advertisers (not immediately addressable by Ezoic, although you could certain drill down to find out what topics are working and refocus your publishing efforts on that material)No Access to High End Ad Networks

Month: May 2021

Ezoic vs. AdSense: Five Huge Competitive Advantages For New Bloggers