Ezoic Review: How I Increased Blog Earnings By 508% (And You Can Too)!

If there is one area of blog monetisation that is the easiest, it is definitely display advertising.

Income doesn’t get more passive than this – build up your blog, build up your traffic, slap some ads on and BAM, passive income!

Of course, this is dramatically underemphasising the amount of effort involved in building up a blog and traffic, but once you have made a good start on this, display advertising is the simplest way to start earning some money from your blog.

Ezoic is one of the companies out there that can help you do this and optimise your ad revenue so you earn as much as possible while you put in minimum effort.

I first heard about Ezoic in 2019. I noticed them being mentioned more and more in the DNW Facebook group.

After reading all the questions and favourable reports, I wanted to try it for myself. Not just to see if I could make more money, but so I could write this Ezoic blog review and let you know what I found.

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Is Ezoic worth your time? Will Ezoic work on your site? Should you sign up?

I will help you work this out below. I’ll describe what (and who Ezoic) is, show you the results I got when I switched over and talk about all the good and the bad of using Ezoic in my Ezoic case studies.

Ready to start?

Want to sign up to Ezoic right now? Click here to get started.

I first published this article in August 2019 after my first full month using Ezoic. I updated this article in January 2020 to show how Ezoic was performing after it had time to test my ad set up and optimise my ad earnings. Note that I am an affiliate of Ezoic.

It is now November 2022. I still use Ezoic – across six sites now – and am happy with them and their new free speed tools which have helped me pass core web vitals and avoid any negative aspects of the Google Page Experience Update. I have added a new section to this article, including a video, of the Ezoic Leap speed tool.

What is Ezoic?

In really simple terms, Ezoic is a platform. They do many different things but the primary thing that bloggers will care about is that they can run advertising on your site, will optimise placement and everything ad related to maximise advertising earnings for your blog.

Ezoic is an AdSense certified partner and basically, if you sign up, they will handle everything ad-related for you so you can sit back and know your ads are constantly being tested and optimised to increase your earnings.

Ezoic also does more. The founder, Dwayne Lafleur, realised that ad earnings are directly related to visitor experience. So, in addition to Ezoic helping you with advertising layout and optimisation, it also has functionality to help increase the user experience on your blog including things like improving site speed and SEO.

Ezoic is a widely used platform and a legitimate company. You don’t have to worry that they will disappear with your hard earned advertising revenue. They have been around for years, and many big companies use their services.

How I am using Ezoic

I only started using Ezoic in June 2019 for my site in my case study. This is a blog about Malaysian travel (you can see it here – ads and all!) and it has a sizeable Malaysian and Asian audience. At the time I signed up, I had just hit 20,000 page views on the 7 month old site.

Before I signed up to Ezoic, I had been using Google AdSense on the site for a couple of months. I had some manually placed ads where I had experimented with placement and auto ads running.

At the time I started using Ezoic and first wrote this review, I was also using Mediavine on another site (I have since switched that to Ezoic where it earns more money) and have previously used Monumetric so my experiences and expectations have been shaped by my experiences on these networks and AdSense.

I don’t have ads allowed on all pages. I have turned them off on my home page and other key pages. I am also conservative when it comes to how many ads I allow as I want to minimise impact on affiliate earnings.

In Ezoic, you can choose whether their tool puts more weighting on user experience or ad revenue. I always have it towards the user experience end.

See below for my experiences using the Leap speed tool added to this review in 2021.

My Ezoic earnings (Ezoic vs AdSense)

Before I get into the nitty gritty of my Ezoic review, I think it’s important to start with my earnings – as if it doesn’t perform better than competitors income wise then the pros and cons of using Ezoic don’t matter.

Below, I share my earnings from my last full month on AdSense (May 2019) and my first full month on Ezoic (July 2019). I also show my earning from Ezoic five months later in December 2019.

When looking at this, it’s important to remember two things:

1. Ezoic is constantly testing my site and optimising my ads. They say this takes a few months to really optimise your revenue. So, this is part of the reason why you can see a big difference from July to December.
2. July is a lower than usual month when it comes to advertising revenue because it’s a time (along with January) where companies are re-evaluating their ad spend.  This is across the industry (Mediavine gives the same warnings) and not Ezoic specific. So, again, this affects my figures in July. Still, it easily beats AdSense.

It’s also important to recognise that this site has a BIG Asian audience. So the RPM I get for this site isn’t comparable to my site with a majority Australian audience or one with an American audience.

All audiences are different, and RPM (how much a site earn 1000 page views) is only useful for comparing results on the same website.

So if you want to know how much ezoic pay for 1000 views, comparing my values for RPM below with your own site won’t show you anything useful. Although if your RPM is less with a more “western” audience then I would be concerned.

It is useful for comparing my blog earnings in May versus July versus December though in my own Ezoic income report. If I just compared income, this would not take into account the fact that my page views grew in this time.

AdSense Revenue – May 2019

In May, I earned AUD$59.18 on AdSense. This is equal to USD$41.16. The RPM was AUD$2.85 which is USD$1.98.

(RPM is displayed in AdSense or is calculated by: RPM = earnings for month/page views x 1000)

Total Earnings = US$41.16

RPM  = US$1.98

Ezoic Revenue – July 2019

I made US$89 from Ezoic in July.

Ezoic uses their own value, EPMV, instead of RPM. This is earning per visitor, rather than page views. I calculated the RPM below so I could make a fair comparison.

However, first I need to mention that I have it currently split testing so some ads still show up from AdSense. In July, I still made USD$26 from AdSense in addition to the USD$89 from Ezoic.

My page views for July were 26,371.

Total Earnings = $115

RPM  = $(Ezoic Earnings + AdSense Earnings) / Page Views * 1000 = $4.36

Results?

My site had a RPM from advertising of US$1.98 in May and $4.36 in July.

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This means that my earnings increased by 220%!

These results are not in isolation either. I did a lot of googling before I signed up for Ezoic after being stung by an advertising platform in the past. I actually didn’t find a single person who had had their earnings go down. I expect mine to go up when I remove the AdSense split test too.

Ezoic Revenue – December 2019

So five months later, now my site has had some time to settle in, how is it going?

Very well!

I made US$318 from Ezoic in December as well as US$6 from AdSense.

My traffic has also grown with 32,158 page views so let’s work out the RPM!

Total Earnings = US$324

RPM  = $(Ezoic Earnings + AdSense Earnings) / Page Views * 1000 = $10.07

Results?

From a RPM from advertising of $1.98 in May, the site is up to $10.07 in December!

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This means that my earnings increased by 508%!

Even since July, my earnings have increased by 231%! So if you try out Ezoic, make sure you give it a few months to see what potential your site has.

I am crazy happy with these results for a site that has 65% of its traffic come from Asia, mostly Malaysia.

How about in 2022?

My Ezoic earnings have only got better and my RPM is now over $12, despite the fact that this site has a majority Asian audience.

I’ve also started to experiment with video ads which is pushing this even higher. I look forward to sharing what it gets to after I have a full month of video ads working properly on this site.

You can see all my Ezoic income reports in my case study here.

Results on other blogs

I also asked DNW community members who are using Ezoic about their experiences. Here are their results.

Jennifer Melroy from National Park Obsessed says…

“I have been using Ezoic since March. With AdSense, I was making about $1 per 1,000 views. With Ezoic, I am averaging about $11 per 1,000 views. The set-up wasn’t the smoothest. I downloaded their plugin and then got stuck on the next steps. But I submitted a ticket and a day later, one of their nice support team contacted me. We set up a screen share and he walked/did the rest of the set-up for me.”

Marco Ferrarese from Penang Insider says….

“Setting up Ezoic via the WordPress plugin was super easy. My rep did all the rest via the backend and I was up and running in a day (provided you are Google AdSense compliant). I have a Malaysia based site, and was rejected by Mediavine because of my Asian traffic. Well, with Ezoic I went from $30 on AdSense to $150 a month in two months. I’m happy with the results thus far.”

Cathy Winton from mummytravels – “I found adsense very non intuitive. I made more from Ezoic in one week than AdSense in the past year not least because I had someone to help me set up and do all the work. It couldn’t have been easier… I really regret not knowing about Ezoic sooner. I could have had their ads on for much longer and been getting the revenue as I was getting nowhere with Adsense. I did have a great ad manager there which helped. If it helps to know, I used the plugin rather than changing name servers which also seemed very straightforward.”

Ezoic Review: The best parts of Ezoic

I have had nothing but a brilliant experience with Ezoic and they are definitely my favourite ad network that I have dealt with. Here are some areas which I think particularly deserve praise.

Crazy good onboarding

The first thing I noticed about Ezoic was that they contacted me straight after signing up to walk me through the process of getting started with Ezoic. Better yet was that they did the vast majority of the set up themselves. It is so much easier than other ad networks including AdSense.

I was running within a couple of days after submitting the sign up form which is just amazing.

Note that you may take longer to get set up if you don’t already have an adsense account.

Great service team

Anytime I have a query, problem or question, I am responded to as soon as they come online (initially this was someone in Ireland, now my support person is in San Diego which works much better for my timezone). They are always friendly, professional and there is no mucking around.

The only exception to this was when my assigned team member went on holidays – but I got an immediate autoresponse to my email about this and I forwarded it on to their general support email and I was, again, replied to as soon as they came online.

I have honestly not dealt with any service (whether for advertising or anything I use in my blogging business) where the response is so fast and helpful.

You can still place ads in exact locations

Something I love about Ezoic compared to my experiences with Mediavine and Monumetric is that they allow me to place ads in exact positions. This means I can keep having ads in the spots that I found during my AdSense testing that are particularly lucrative.

If you don’t have exact spots already, this is fine too. The Ezoic ad tester will work it all out for you (and it’s what I use for all my ad placement bar two).

They pay at the end of the following month

Ezoic pays you at the end of the following month. So I was paid for my June earnings at the end of July. This is just a few days after AdSense pays me and over a month before Mediavine does.

I’m not seeing the same July lull as on Mediavine

While Ezoic, Mediavine and others all talk about big drops in income in July, I have not seen any drop. Of course, this could be because I only recently signed up and their algorithms and testing should see my income go up at this early stage.

However, I only joined up to Mediavine for my other site in May so you could say the same thing about that. But there is a very big difference between June and July with my July earnings being much lower for that site.

There isn’t a crazy amount of ads

I was surprised how few Ezoic ads I actually saw on my site when I first switched over. This definitely has increased now and varies, but, in general, it’s less than I have seen with other networks.

It is definitely less ads than what were being shown with AdSense so it’s an even bigger win that it’s making so much more money.

This is because the Ezoic system measures bounce rate, session duration and other things on a per user basis to work out what is the best balance of ads where to ensure maximum earnings while balancing user experience. Basically, it learns where to show what ads on your blog so you will make money while minimising any effect on user experience.

I’m definitely a fan compared to every other platform I have used where ads are absolutely everywhere. I like this smart approach.

You can add many other ad networks

Ezoic starts by using and optimising Google AdSense ads (which is why you do need approval from AdSense). However, it’s possible to add many different advertising networks so that you can have more advertisers competing for spaces on your blog and thus increase your earnings.

At this point, I have only used AdSense. So any ad space on my blog competes between AdSense and Ezoic which leads to bigger earnings.

I look forward to looking into this further with other ad networks. It’s a big plus you don’t have to sign an exclusivity contract.

It’s more than just ads

There are numerous tools to improve user experience on your blog so Ezoic offers much more than just ads. You have full control over which tools you use and which you skip as well.

No contract

This final point is what took me from thinking about signing up with Ezoic to actually doing it. I love there is no lock in contract!

This means if you aren’t happy, you can leave anytime you want. Services like Monumentric and Mediavine make you give notice which makes it harder to try it out for a couple of months and then leave.

When I had a very negative experience with Monumetric in the past and wanted to leave immediately, they were able to keep all my pending ad earnings if they wanted… This was a few months worth of revenue because of how slow they were to pay.

They also let you combine their ad service with others and don’t demand exclusivity.

So I love there is no lock in contract.

The reporting is unreal

I can see exactly how much each post is making and how much per 1000 users. It’s awesome. It makes it really easy to see which topics earn the most ad revenue and what you can do to improve. It’s the best reporting system of any of my monetisation partners.

There’s no minimum sessions required to join

Anyone with a quality blog can join. You don’t need to hit a certain number of sessions. However, if you have under 10,000 sessions per month with the first site you join with, you’ll need to complete some training material and a test.

There is some great free training available

Once you hit 10,000 sessions per month on your sites with Ezoic, you can join free “level-up” training. This is great for helping you learn how to get more traffic and make more money with some great success stories coming from past students. There is helpful information about how to increase Ezoic earnings, but a lot of the content is generally applicable.

You also get to hear from me as I recently created a webinar for this program specifically about how to update your content to get more traffic and make more money 🙂

There are many free business grants available

Ezoic recently created a whole system of business grants that you can apply for to get money to help you grow your blog. It’s quite amazing how much money they are giving to publishers to grow their business.

I highly recommend that if you sign up to Ezoic, you look into how you can get a grant. This is a great way to be able to afford more tools, content and other items to help you grow your blog.

Ezoic helped my sites pass Google Core Web Vitals

While Ezoic used to have a reputation for slowing down sites, this changed in 2021 with the introduction of their speed tool, Leap. I actually have added more sites to my Ezoic account and started putting ads on my sites earlier (when I used to wait to hit the 10k-20k page view mark first), simply to get access to these tools so I can pass core web vitals.

There is more about this below. It’s a HUGE PRO for joining Ezoic.

Ezoic Review: The worst parts of Ezoic

As stated above, I have been very happy with Ezoic and I honestly don’t have any real complaints. I have a minor one below, but first I want to say that if you have any problems with Ezoic, please just reach out to their support!

Whenever I see a question or complaint about Ezoic in my Facebook groups, it usually turns out that for some reason the person is posting on Facebook instead of emailing their support… Their support is responsive and can help you out far faster and better 🙂

Note: When I originally created this review, I had two points here – that you need 10,000 sessions a month on your blog to start using this service and that it slowed down my site. Neither are an issue anymore. There is no longer a session requirement to sign up and the new speed tools are very helpful.

Everything is a little more complicated than other ad services I have used

When I used other ad services, I pretty much never needed to talk to their support once the ads were set up. However, Ezoic offers a lot more power and customisation than those services and with that, things get a little more complicated.

I find I need to deal with their support more often whenever I want to try something new as I can’t always solve it myself straight away.

Ezoic Leap: New site speed tool

Added June 2021

To answer Google’s increased importance placed on site speed and how pages load with the Page Experience update, Ezoic created a whole new suite of speed tools included for free for all members. These tools help improve your speed directly with great caching and optimisation settings for this and also help you analyse and fix any issues with your site which are impacting your speed.

The easiest way for me to explain this is to show you – in the following video, I walk you through my Ezoic leap review with how this is set up for my Malaysia site.

It’s helped me have effective caching for my sites which solves many of the speed problems and then pinpoints where my remaining problems are with some suggestions to fix them.

My Malaysia site now passes core web vitals.

The version in this video is only the beta version, and this tool promises to get even better with time.

Ezoic Humix: New video tool

Added: November 2022

Ezoic has recently added a suite of video tools which are honestly amazing.

Not only can you upload videos (or get them from your YouTube channel) and start having ads on them on your site, you can also allow these videos to be shared across other Ezoic sites.

The upside of this is that if your video plays on another site with an ad, then you get part of the ad revenue without really doing anything.

If you don’t have any of your own videos, you can also choose to display other sites’ relevant videos. You have to split the revenue with the owner of the video in this case so it’s not as lucrative, but it’s worth it while you make your own videos.

It’s also easy to make your own videos with their Flickify tool. It helps you turn your blog posts into videos. I have been using it so I have videos to show on my sites, and it works very well.

I highly recommend you start using Humix on your sites as soon as you sign up for Ezoic.

Ezoic Page Booster And Other NicheIQ SEO Tools

Added: May 2023

Ezoic has recently added a suite of SEO tools that can help you with tasks like finding new topics to write about on your site and checking your on-site SEO health.

I particularly like using the quick and easy Page Booster tool which shows you which posts are losing and gaining traffic and what keywords are causing these losses/gains. It’s really handy to help me work out which articles I need to update ASAP!

I wrote a whole video review on Page Booster which you can find here. Take a look!

How (and when) to get started with Ezoic

Getting approved

First of all, there are some requirements you need to meet to join up to Ezoic:

• Your site has to be in compliance with Google policies which are things like not automatically generating user content, not having shallow or copied content and other things that should not be a problem as a blogger. You can read them here.
• Your site has to be approved by Google AdSense. You can apply for AdSense while you are applying for Ezoic.

Note that there is no longer any minimum session count required to sign up. You can join no matter how many page views your sites get.

If you meet the requirements, click here to sign up now.

Pricing (it’s free!)

There can be some confusion around Ezoic pricing due to there being a free and paid plan.

I personally use the free plan and have not paid a cent to Ezoic. They have never asked me for money either.

The difference between the free and Ezoic premium plan is that in free plans, they place a small ad of their own at the bottom of pages where you have ads enabled. They keep the revenue from this ad.

Ezoic is very big on transparency, so you’ll always know how they are making money from you.

Getting started

Once you are approved (which was FAST!), you have to do an inital installation. This is simply installing the Ezoic WordPress plugin if you are on WordPress, changing your name servers or connecting via your Cloudflare account if you already have Cloudflare set up for your site.

Initially, I installed the plugin which was quick, easy and very painless. I want to highlight that if you use this, you don’t change the name servers. So if the idea of changing your name servers makes you nervous, there is no need.

However, if you want to use all their tools and want a speedy site using their new speed tools, you’ll want to integrate via cloudflare or name servers. All easy to do and I switched to this after a few months with Ezoic.

I highly recommend this option so you can use their caching and Leap speed tool which can make a dramatic difference to your site speed.

You also need to apply for Google Ad Exchange and link your AdSense account if you aren’t already approved with this.

Once you are at this point, you are ready to turn your ads on!

Depending on your traffic, your Ezoic support person can help you with all of this. I didn’t do any of the ad switching on myself. They can add Ezoic Ad Tester to your site and get your ads up and running.

This is very intuitive and I found it easy to edit to what I wanted once it was there (like I didn’t want ads in my header and I could easily turn it off).

You can now also use the Ezoic plugin to set up the ads for you which is crazy quick and easy.

Note that for bloggers with low levels of traffic, you do need to set Ezoic up for yourself. Of course, you can ask questions and get help if you need it.

It’s even easier if you want to add additional sites later. I have simply added them to my account myself, connected the site and then support has done everything else.

How long did it take?

I was up and running within a day or two – much different to the many weeks it took for Mediavine in April/May to set up my other site and I already had an account with them. I did already have a Google Ad Exchange account which speeds things up.

My support person also helped me add “wrappers” to the ads I had manually set up on my site so they could work through Ezoic on top of all their automated ad testing.

Any time I have had a question or query since signing up, I email and get a response once they are online. If you have any problems, just email straight away. They will help.

Final Words

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Conclusion: Ezoic is awesome! Quick and easy to get started and to use with fabulous support. With barely any effort, I have increased my ad revenue by 508%!

What is not to love?!

Ezoic has been a great addition to my blogging income streams and I am so glad I signed up and gave it a go. I look forward to seeing what it earns in future months especially now I finally have a site with an American based audience to add – I can’t wait to see the higher RPMs!

It really is an easy way to get started with advertising. The support I have received has been great.

Add in the site speed tools that took me from having no idea how to improve my site speed to getting lots of greens in Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals and I’m very happy.

I highly recommend that you sign up now and give it a go.

Worst case is that it doesn’t increase your earnings. In which case, just leave!

But most probably you will also find them an integral part of your monetisation going forward.

Click here to sign up now.

You can also find more posts on making money from blogging here. Ezoic doesn’t just do ads. You can read about their amazing page speed tool here. You can also learn more by listening to my interview with Ezoic CMO, Tyler Bishop, here.