Introduction
Usually, the first thing that website publishers do when they start getting traffic is that they try to monetize by signing up with an advertising platform. The first choice of any website owner is Google Adsense but it is a tough nut to crack if your website does not generate enough page views per month. Of course, there are many other advertisement platforms for smaller publishers but one Ad network that is growing in popularity for both small and big publishers is the machine learning powered Ezoic Ad platform.
In this Ezoic review, we will explain to you what is Ezoic actually, how it works, and most importantly how much Ezoic pays to the publishers.
What is Ezoic
Ezoic is an award-winning platform for website publishers to optimize ad placements, website layout, and increase user experience with the help of machine learning. This helps publishers to increase their website traffic and revenue manifold times.
Ezoic is also Google Certified Publishing Partner since 2014 which means they help publishers to increase their Adsense earning and also safeguard from Adsense policy violence with their artificial intelligence.
Ezoic Services and Applications
Ezoic offers a suite of applications that are covered under the following services. In this article, however, we will only review Ezoic’s monetization feature because this is what you would be looking for.
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Ezoic Earning Review- How much revenue can I make?
Before we go into any other aspects of the Ezoic review, it would be a good start to motivate you with how much revenue you can make with Ezoic.
To begin with, we had monetized our website with Adsense and switched to Ezoic at the start of Dec’20 and our personal experience had been great from the very start. After one month we have seen an increase of approx 2 times in the ad revenue. This is great for growing sites like us who see 20K-30K page views per month, in spite of the dip in traffic during the holiday season.
This is our experience of one month and we are looking forward to the coming months the machine learning model behind our ad placements gets trained and optimized further. Now, what about other websites that are using Ezoic for over a year.
In 2019, Ezoic had released a case study data of websites whose revenue increased many times after just one year of using Ezoic. For all these websites, the percentage of monthly traffic increase was not directly correlated with their monthly revenue. The monthly revenue increased drastically compared to their monthly traffic.
In one year, the average traffic increase for these websites was only 182% whereas the average monthly ad revenue with Ezoic increased to a whopping 541%.
In fact, a couple of websites on the list had a decrease in monthly traffic yet their monthly revenue increased 200%. This is where Ezoic machine learning optimization played an important part in increasing ad revenue.

So what is that thing which Ezoic’s machine learning platform can do better compared to other traditional means of web publisher ads. To understand this, we first need to understand the issues with the current way of how publishers place ads on their sites.
Issues with Traditional Ad Placements
Traditionally, when the publishers sign up with the ad networks they manually create placeholders for ad units on their website. The placeholders are for the fixed-size ad units which are filled by the ad network when users visit the site.
Now the issue with this traditional way is that ad placement setup is left to the due diligence of the web publisher. They choose ad location and ad unit sizes based on what they feel will be good. But often they put too many ads on the website in an attempt to maximize the earnings or they choose bad ad locations or sizes. This, however, results in a poor user experience that can lead to more bounce rate, reduced Google ranking, and even penalty from ad networks like Adsense.
On the flip side, a naive publisher may place lesser ads or choose the ad sizes or location which does not have a high CTR for the type of traffic they get. This results in less earning for publishers and even advertisers do not get better conversions.
Of course, there are many publishers who are doing just fine with their earning but can there be more scope for improvements? There are some advanced site owners who keep an eye on their site analysis and manually do experiments or A/B testing with ad placements.
But a person can do just limited experimentation with ad placements manually. There are so many other variables like the user’s country, device, browser, time of the day, etc. that can affect the performance of ads. And all such dynamic variables cannot be taken into considerations when placing ads manually on the site. Even traditional ad networks treat such a variety of traffic similar when filling up the ads.
How does Ezoic work with Machine Learning
This is where the artificial intelligence of Ezoic has become a game-changer for the publishers. To be precise Ezoic uses neural network models to perform rigorous A/B testing of ad placements with thousands and thousands of combinations of variable factors. They have listed some of the variables on their site which are used for A/B testing.
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Initially, when you sign up with Ezoic, you have to create around 15 placeholders for Ad tester units. Creating 15 or more tester ad placeholders does not mean Ezoic will show all 15 ads, it will never compromise with UX.
Ezoic’s machine learning will train on thousands of possible combinations based on these variables. The below table will give you an idea about the mindblowing number of combinations that can be tested with the assumption each placeholder can serve three ad sizes. Indeed it is humanly impossible to test so many combinations manually. This is the beauty of Ezoic’s A.I. as it will test and learn over a period of time what ad placements give the best revenue for specific types of traffic.
It is not only the publishers who benefit from Ezoic’s artificial intelligence, but all stakeholders also benefit from this –
- Better ad placements ensure maximized revenue for website publishers.
- Better ad placements also result in more conversions for advertisers.
- Better ad placements also mean an improved website experience where users are not bombarded with ads.
What are the minimum requirements to use Ezoic?
You may think that a next-generation ad platform like Ezoic will have stringent minimum requirements then you cannot be more wrong here. You only need to have monthly traffic of 10,000 sessions and that too because they need at least this much traffic for training the machine learning model efficiently for proper results. It is actually great to see that an ad platform like Ezoic is open for small web publishers.
Besides this, since Ezoic uses ad inventory of Google Ads Exchange, you also need to be compliant with Google Ads policies to be eligible for Ezoic monetization. As a matter of fact, before you can start showing ads, you also need to get your site approved with Google Ads Exchange through the Ezoic platform.
Please do note that there is no Ezoic requirement for your site to be Google Adsense approved.
Ezoic Pricing and Revenue Share
Technically speaking, Ezoic Monetization is not free but you don’t necessarily have to pay anything due to their revenue sharing pricing model. They have the following pricing plan –
- Free Plan – Ezoic places an ad at the bottom of the webpage and keeps the money from it.
- Subscription Plan – Ezoic keeps flat 10% ad revenue of your website each month.
Ezoic Setup
Ezoic might sound like a sophisticated A.I. platform, but you don’t need to be very technical to set up Ezoic Ads start your earning. At a high level, you only need to carry out the following steps –
- Sign Up with Ezoic
- Integrate your website with Ezoic by doing DNS repointing
- Enable Monetization option
- Apply and get approval from Google Ads Exchange
- Create 15-20 Ad Tester placeholders preferably with their Chrome extension
- Setup Ads.txt
- Configure Ezoic’s Privacy Policy and Consent Management Apps
- Setup sellor.json
- Turn on the Ad Tester
The steps may look overwhelming but they are quite easy and you are also assigned an account manager who will guide you through in case of any issues or if you are stuck. In our case, the account manager himself setup the Ad Tester placeholders for us!
Ezoic Mediation App
Now, this is the fun part of Ezoic that you can continue to use your existing ad network like Google Adsense and other ad partners along with Ezoic Ads. It is possible through Ezoic’s Mediation App which enables the ads from Ezoic and the other partner to compete with each other in the bidding process. Whichever ad bids highest wins the space on your website. This means you always get the best possible earning. Does it not sound fun?
Ezoic Payment
- Ezoic pays on 30 days net basis, which means any earnings done for the month of January will be credited to the publisher after 30 days in February end.
- The payments are done between the 27th-31st of each month.
- The minimum payout is $20 which is a great thing for smaller publishers.
- The payment options are Paypal, Payoneer, or check.
Conclusion
We hope this comprehensive Ezoic review gave you valuable insights into what is Ezoic and how you leverage Ezoic’s machine learning to increase your ad revenue. If you are a smaller website owner who has just crossed 10,000 monthly traffic then Adsense will give you only peanuts. So it will be wise to join Ezoic to maximize your ads earning even if you the small traffic or take your earnings to the next level with your high traffic.