Week-5 With EZOIC

EZOIC Ads went live on my hiking website TrailsNH.com about 5 weeks ago. This post covers what I learned over the last 4 weeks. See Week-1 With EZOIC for what I learned prior to this.

Is EZOIC A Scam?

EZOIC is not a scam. I have received my first revenue check from EZOIC. It’s just a small check from running ads as a test on one page.

What is EZOIC’s Average RPM?

Average RPM varies based on a website’s topic. The topic for TrailsNH is “hiking” which I guess has a low RPM. Revenue over the last 4 weeks on this site from varied from $6.5 ePMV ($4.6 RPM) to $7.7 ePMV ($5.3 RPM). See RPM vs ePMV below for an explanation on the difference. Over time I hope RPM will increase. RPM usually varies quarter to quarter. Q4 is generally the highest as online shopping goes into high demand. Fingers crossed.

RPM vs. ePMV

EZOIC tracks revenue on their reports as ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) instead of RPM (Revenue Per Thousand Pageviews). ePMV is revenue by user sessions, and PRM is revenue by pageviews. ePMV is always higher than RPM because there are many pageviews in one user session. To determine the RPM pull the revenue and pageviews from your EZOIC reports and calculate: (( revenue / pageviews ) * 1000)

EZOIC Alternatives:

Mediavine and AdThrive are the two most popular alternatives to EZOIC. But TrailsNH does not meet the traffic requirements to signup with them.

What is EZOIC’s Minimum Traffic Requirement?

EZOIC removed their minimum traffic requirement in 2021. Any website can sign up with EZOIC.

What is EZOIC’s Sign-up Like?

EZOIC’s Sign-up is a pain in the ass. I signed up on May 30th 2021 and did not get ads up and running till August 5th. That huge delay was partly my fault. I messed up the accounts needed to access Googles advertising tools. Pro-Tip: Googles advertising tools, ad exchange, ad manager, etc…, all need to be under one account!! Their sign-up process could be made to help avoid this screw-up. You can read a little more about my screw-up here.

Part of the delay was because my EZOIC Specialist (Laura) seems to be just going through the motions and not understanding what I wanted.

Should You Integrate Using EZOIC’s Name Servers?

Maybe, maybe not. I changed TrailsNH to use their Name Servers. That caused a few small technical glitches, but EZOIC’s Support Team quickly fixed that.

I do not use many of EZOIC’s features. I do not use the CDN, caching, AI Ad placement, or other tools. I’m only using EZOIC to serve ads, and the ad placements are manually inserted into my templates. I assume I do not need to use their Name Servers for this setup. Integrating via javascript should work. I may test that after Q4.

EZOIC Integration Increased Bot Traffic

TrailsNH is hosted on SiteGround, and SiteGround blocks traffic from hackers with a custom AI-based defense system. To use EZOIC you have to disable SiteGround hacker defenses. Since then traffic from bots has gone way up on this site. I’m logging the bot hits and blocking what I can. But down the road something has got to change.

EZOIC Advertiser Blocker Does Not Work

The EZOIC Dashboard has an Advertiser Blocker App, but it’s 1/2 baked. You can use it to block ads inbound from Google Ad Exchange, just enter a list of domains you want to block. Cool right? But Advertiser Blocking is only partly implemented. It does not block ads that EZOIC pulls in via Header Bidding or other ad networks.

Nothing pisses me off more than seeing my competition’s ads on my website.

EZOIC Support has some options to blocking ads based on the ad URL, that are not available to you and me in the dashboard. But you can’t block those proactively. And there is no guarantee that blocking will work.

I reported the Advertiser Blocker App as broken to the EZOIC Support Team. If it’s not fixed by the time TrailsNH hit 50K Monthly Sessions I’m outta here.

To be continued …