Ezoic – 6 Month Review (March 2022)

My hiking website TrailsNH started running Ezioc Ads in August 2021. This is my 6-Month Review of the Ezoic Ad Network as a Publisher. To get caught up, check out my earlier Ezoic Reviews: Week-1 with Ezoic and Week-5 with Ezoic.

Ezoic offers many services for Publishers beyond running ads. I do not need or use those other services, like CDN, caching, etc…. I only use the Monetization Tools, so my Review is specific to using Ezoic as an Ad Network.

Ezoic ranks Publishers into Levels. Levels are awarded based on the sites web traffic, visits, earnings and growth. TrailsNH is ranked as Level 2 and will likely never reach Level 3. At the current RPM, page visits would have to grow 1800% to reach Level 3. I will move on to another Ad Network before then.

Advertisement Quality:

Ad quality from Ezoic in my market (hiking) is very poor. Way too often I see spammy type Ads with no brand name, no product name, or any photograph. Pretty much just a “Click Here” button. This type of Ad is not allowed on many Ad Networks, but there are too many Ads to check, so no one is checking.

I have tried tweaking the Ezoic Monetization settings to increase Ad quality. One of the things I tried was limiting the number of ads per page to 3 on Desktop and 1 on Mobile. I had hoped this would filter out the cheapest ads. That did not work.

ePMV vs. Page RPM:

ePMV is revenue generated across user sessions, for the users entire visit. Ezoic tracks ePMV as a measure of user satisfaction. The longer a visit, the more satisfied your users are with your website.

Page RPM is revenue generated by each page. RPM is an industry standard measure of how much a page is worth.

Page RPM will be less than ePMV, when readers look at more than one page per visit. The longer the user session are, the greater the gap between Page RPM and ePMV will be. Here is a comparison of my hiking websites ePMV vs. Page RPM

Note: I made this graph. Ezoic does not use dashed lines in comparison reports. See Ezoic Reports Need Work below for more detail on that.

How Important is ePMV?

It makes sense to me to measure revenue across user sessions. I want my users to value the site and one measure of that is long sessions. But if it’s so important to Ezoic, how come ePMV is not one of the canned reports? Total Revenue is a canned report, Traffic volume is, and Yeald (number of ads per page), and many others. But ePMV? Nope, it’s not listed. I have to make your own custom report.

ePMV might just be marketing hype for Ezoiz. Something they jammed in at the end, to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Ad Networks out there.

Ezoic Reports Need Work:

Visually, Ezoic Reports are not well designed. The poor design makes them hard to read. It looks to me like they just used the out of the box settings for the graphing library.

Take comparison-graphs for example. When you have one data series that you compare over time. Say, ePMV this month over last month for example. A good designer would keep the same color, and change the line pattern. Solid for now, dashed or dotted for the past. Google Analytics does it this way, and so do many others reporting tools. But in Ezoic, the older series just grabs a random color. This makes it impossible to compare different series without memorizing the legend. Visually, it’s a chaotic mess:

For a company that claims to understand the value of user experience, Ezoic totally missing the mark here. This one they just phoned in.

AI-Based Ad Placement Needs Work:

AI-Based Ad Placement may work for you if: 1) your template is not multi-row, multi-column, like Bootstrap and 2) your priority is to maximize ad revenue, over quality and reputation.

I use a template based on Twitter Bootstrap v4. The AI Based Ad Placement did not understand Bootstrap. It was not aware of Rows and Cols and inserted ad placements in places that did not make sense visually. Also, AI Based Ad Placement looked like sh*t in my opinion. Even thought I told the Ezoic Onboarding Specialist page quality and reputation was my Priority, not Ad Revenue, AI Based Ad Placement was really in your face. My site looked super spammy. Like a garbage click-bait site. I was shocked.

I removed all AI-Based Ad Placements immediately. My site looked far too bad to keep it that way. I had to manually create and inserted ad placements where they made sense visually in the template. Manually creating and inserting ad placements takes a few hours, but the page looks a thousand times better.

Ezoic FAQs:

Based on my first 6 months using Ezoic, here are my short answers to frequently asked questions:

• what is ezoic: I use Ezoic is an Advertising Platform for Publishers. In additional to Monetization, Ezoic also offer some infrastructure services like CDN, chaching, and more.
• what is epmv? ePMV stands for Advertising “Earnings Per Thousand Visitors”. It’s based on the user sessions, not page performance.
• ezoic average rpm: Average Page RPM on my hiking website last week was $2.93 for desktop users, and $2.11 for mobile users.
• how much does ezoic cost? Nothing. Ezoic takes a cut off the top of your ad revenue. Same as AdSence.
• what is ezoic ads? Ezoic Ads are ad delivered by the Ezoic Advertising platform. They could originate from Google AdSense, or many other ad sources.
• is ezoic company legit? Yes. I have been paid every month, for the last 5 months.
• how much does ezoic pay? Ezoic pays based on ad impressions and clicks on your website. My hiking website earns roughly $3 per thousand desktop users, or $2 per thousand mobile users.
• is ezoic an ad exchange: Yes, and more
• what is your current impression of ezoic? Ads from Ezoic are often very low quality and look bad. Ezoic AI-Based Ad Placement is very spammy and look terrible.
• how much does ezoic pay for 1000 views: On my hiking website Ezoic pays roughly $3 Desktop RPM, and $2 Mobile RPM.

6-Month Summary:

In general, I am dissatisfied with Ezoic. RPM is lower than I expected and the Ad quality is not good. Probably worse than AdSence, and I ditched AdSence because Ad Quality sucked. I’m still building towards 50K monthly user sessions so I can move up to Mediavine. That’s probably a year out.