Summary: For sites that target user experience over advertising revenue, this feature sucks.
Do Not “ENABLE” Ezoic’s MAXIMIZE YOUR SITE’S REVENUE
Ezoic’s “MAXIMIZE YOUR SITE’S REVENUE” Feature
A little background on my experience with Ezoic: I have been using Ezoic on TrailsNH.com for 18 months. I have written 3 reviews on the experience along the way. You can find those reviews here:
Ezoic’s claim to fame is their use of AI in ad placements. The company tag line says it all “Intelligent Technology For Exceptional Content“
Ezoic uses a lot of technology to help make managing ads placements on your pages easier. However, my experience with their technology is, it sucks if the goal for the site is user experience over advertising revenue.
Ezoic Support is very good. I have used them many times. They were always very responsive. 99% of the time they are very helpful.
Ezoic Monetization is a huge app. It a bit of a pain in the butt to set up because there are so many screen to review, and setting to deal with. One of those settings is your monetization target. You can choose from 1) User Experience, 2) Balanced, 3) Maximum Revenue. TrailsNH’s monetization target was set to “User Experience”, because I think a large portion of the audience hates advertising.
The “MAXIMIZE YOUR SITE’S REVENUE” feature is not recommended for sites that targets user experience over revenue. It’s a max-revenue feature, not max-user experience feature. As such, when enabled, it will turn on every possible advertising revenue enhancing feature Ezoic has. It just turns them on. It does not tell you what it’s about to turned on, it does not ask you if you want it on, it just turns them all on.
When enabled the “MAXIMIZE YOUR SITE’S REVENUE” made TrailsNH look like sh*t, and totally spammy. I was shocked at how bad the site looked. Just like that everything changed with one click. No, “Are you sure?” No, list of what is about to change. Just boom, everything changed. I freaked out. I do not want a spammy looking website. Where’s the “Disable?” Where’s the “Undo?”. There isn’t one.
I began reviewing the monetization settings, trying to roll back the changes, but there are too many. I set up this site 18 months earlier, I can’t remember all those settings. Who could? I’m screwed. I hate the way the site looks, and I can’t remember how I had it. My only option was to disable Ezoic altogether. You will see that in the report below, from February 21 to 24. I removed the Ezoic integration from the site, and went with no revenue.
To cut a long frustrating story short, Ezoic Support helped be remove much of the crap they turned on. I turned Ezoic Integration back on, and reviewed and adjusted the manual ad placements I configured in 2021. The Ezoic Support person helping me later told me “Don’t click enable again” on MAXIMIZE YOUR SITE’S REVENUE.
Personally, I think it’s really really dumb to have any max-revenue feature, on the dashboard of a site configured for max-user experience. Why do that? You are just asking for max-user experience type publishers to hate you. Ezoic cost me a lot of time and money with that stupid feature. Another really dumb thing Ezoic does here is not to have a way to back out of it. Anytime you apply that many change with just one click, there really should be an undo.
Is MAXIMIZE YOUR SITE’S REVENUE “Intelligent Technology For Exceptional Content“? No. Ignoring configuration setting is very poor programming.
In March ’23 TrailsNH dumped Ezoic for Underdog Media. I’ll write a post about UDM soon. Ezoic may be OK for your site if are looking to maximize ad revenue, not the user experience.
