Can You Make More Money than AdSense with Ezoic?

I had been using AdSense to earn money from my blog for pretty much 10+ years overall and didn’t really put much effort into looking at other ad platforms I was content and pretty much figure that Google the giant that it is must be better at automating ad placement and revenue generation than most other companies.

Turns out I was very wrong and leaving money on the table, how much? If I had used Ezoic the last few years I would have more than $10,000 extra dollars in my pocket from passive ads, that is literally not an exaggeration of how much money I left on the table by just sticking with Google AdSense for my blog and not testing Ezoic sooner.

Ezoic claims to do an average of 2-3x as much revenue as native AdSense and so far nearly 2 months in they are able to back that up with earnings deposits and analytics to prove it isn’t just hype. Now here is what I have learned, if you run an informational, news or general blog then you are in an ideal position to maximize your earnings with Ezoic, in networking with blogging peers it seems that if you run a very tight niche site, it may not be as beneficial especially if you are in a very tight focused niche but it still may be worth testing.

How does Ezoic Work

Ezoic is a bit more intrusive to setup than just simply enabling some Javascript on your site for Google to insert ads, it actually requires you repoint your site DNS over to Ezoic themselves and use them as a CDN (Don’t worry they use Cloudflare so the same protections you get from Cloudflare extend with Ezoic). They will support all your custom DNS records if you have them and you have to point your NameServers over to Ezoic and do all appropriate routing which is not hard to do if you purchased your domain name from NameCheap or Route53, you just update the configuration to point to Ezoic NameServers.

You can turn on Ezoic for Desktop Browsers, Mobile and Tablets independently

And you get to control the initial placement and optimization of where ads display down to the individual page if you prefer with their Chrome extension.

Ezoic works by taking advantage of placement and learning patterns creating heatmaps and knowing which ads placed where generate the most engagement. This learning pattern means that the Ezoic platform takes a week or two to get off the ground running as it builds a profile and learns those patterns.

So using historical analytics, I can show you that in July 2020 my site which was averaging about 37k PageViews the past several months was only making around $40 – $100 in AdSense per 37k – 45k pageviews. The days fluctuated anywhere from .32 to $3 in earnings on a single day.

AdSense Earnings July 2020

In August I had about 42k pageviews and earnings went up a little bit to around $68 in ADSense earnings for the month.

AdSense Earnings August 2020

September turned out to be a little better even, as we had some anomaly days of $8 – $13 earnings on a single day.

AdSense Earnings September 2020

But on October 19^th 2020 I decided it was time to take the risk and cut my site over to Ezoic and see if it really could live up to the claim that it would out earn AdSense by 2-2.5x my current AdSense revenue. Note I was bouncing between $40 and $100 for about a year so I had a good amount of solid analytics to compare Ezoic to.

I activate Ezoic on October 19^th 2020 and within the first 12 days, it already made more than the entire month of July 2020 which was a good sign.

Ezoic Earnings the first 12 days.

You can see that the first week or so was the learning period and then it started to ramp up. At no point did any day go into the .50 or lower like there was with many AdSense days.

It continued to RAMP up and kept climbing each week in November 2020, by the time I had November 1^st through November 30^th you could see that 54,913 pageviews which is only 17% more pageviews than in September 2020 ended up with $395.06 ad earnings and an ePMV of $9.78. This is over 300% increase in revenue with only a 17% increase in pageviews.

Ezoic Earnings November 2020

Ezoic first full month after the learning showed a 300% increase in revenue compared to using vanilla AdSense auto-ads.

Realizing there is some overlap here as the month of December isn’t finished, I can report that with Ezoic my site for the first time hit over $400 in AdSense in a 30 day span with less than 55k PageViews. That is the remarkable part, we are talking about a $10.72 ePMV in 12 years of running AdSense, when my site was getting 200k Pageviews per month back in 2012 I was only averaging about $300 in AdSense.

Ezoic Earnings Last 30 Days (11/21 – 12/12)

This is also with me using the “balanced” ad plan, and having to disable some ads on my SpintoWin page where the ads were interfering with the Spin Game, which is my highest trafficked page getting almost 10k views by itself per month. That is why there was a dip in the last 12 days of December, as we determined the Ezoic banner was slicing in some of my game and breaking code, so I had to remove 1 banner segment and it caused a slight drop off, but even with this drop the average earnings are 3-4x better than my earnings were on AdSense auto-ads.

You could select Revenue focused and let the program up the ads to try to maximize revenue, but I did not want to test this yet as a risk to my end user experience visiting my site. You can also minimize the ads with User Experience Focused if you find that the ads are too intrusive, which I found them to be no more intrusive than the Google AdSense auto-ads at balanced honestly.

Ezoic What About Site Performance?

Because Ezoic uses Cloudflare and CDN it generally shouldn’t cause any negative site performance compared to your existing site as the content is cached. There could be some slight extra latency as the DNS has to redirect to possibly another site before coming back to your site on new requests, but this generally could be minimized by leveraging proper caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and optimizing your site. Even more you could leverage the Site Speed Accelerator function from Ezoic but this wasn’t tested for this review and will come later.

Ezoic Security and Privacy

Ezoic requires to run over an SSL certificate as most sites do now, and even has integrations for showing a privacy policy as well as hosting a consent management option for you for opting in if you aren’t using a WordPress plugin or other method to have people opt in to cookies and ads for GDPR and CCPA compliance as well.

Ezoic AD Location Design and Testing

With layout testing, split testing, AMP testing and so much more at your fingertips you really have so much more power and control over how you want your ad placements to look, render and split test away to optimize what fits best for you and your site.

Again the Ezoic Ad Test Extension for Chrome is a MUST and recommended plugin to let you not only test, configure but choose if you want to disable ad blocks on specific pages and posts for your site.

So far, I am only about 60 days into using Ezoic which completely replaced my Google AdSense auto-ads on my blog and I am very impressed with the conversions so far. Had I done this back in 2018, I might have earned as much as an extra $10,000 in ad revenue from my 1 blog.

Sign up for Ezoic and test it with your site today, but one thing to note is that your site must generate 10,000 or more pageviews per month to be eligible to sign up for Ezoic. So that is the only caveat to determine if you are eligible to sign up and should investigate if you can make more money than AdSense on your site by switching to Ezoic or not.

I can tell you that if I had more blogs with 10k impressions per month or news sites, unless they were specific niche affiliate sites targeting product sales, Ezoic so far appears to be an excellent option for news and review sites where you generally publish information and are not specifically targeting niche affiliate product sales.