As part of our series to help new publishers get started on Ezoic, I want to spend a little time talking about their main performance metric: EPMV.
EPMV is defined as Earnings Per Thousand Viewers. It is a session level view of display ad performance.
EMPV vs. RPM – Why Session Level?
If you’ve spent any time tweaking your display advertising program, you’re going to be familiar with looking at RPM – Revenue per Thousand Views. AdSense shares this at both a unit and page level. Other ad networks tend to default to a unit level view of their advertising program.
While I was resistant to this concept at first, it actually makes a lot of sense. You acquire traffic – at the session level. The ad optimization process needs to reflect this. Ads affect user experience, so you need to balance your earnings per page against how many pages you anticipate showing that particular visitor.
Ezoic doesn’t use a one-size fits all approach to optimization; their ad display layouts will vary by traffic type to optimize earnings. Certain visitors are expected to stay longer and usually require a gentler ad layout. Others are “just there for the click” and can be monetized more aggressively.
Ads Cannibalize Each Other
Another factor – the ads on a given page tend to cannibalize each other. Perhaps we have two very “strong” placeholders, in terms of their ability to command attention from a website visitor. We may have a couple of other “weak” placeholders on the page as well, rounding out our total picture.
The ideal optimization is rarely to run both “strong” placeholders. They will cut into each other’s performance, splitting the same basic audience and user engagement. Triggering both of the strong ads may in fact diminish user experience. User attention is a finite resource. It is often better to run a strong placeholder with a couple of “weaker” placeholders that can capture different points in the user’s interaction with the page.
This is why Ezoic tends to test at the page level, looking at combinations of ads for a specific type of visitor.