A few weeks ago, I was contacted about a new platform called Ezoic. Usually when I get people contact me about new products and platforms, I just wash it aside since they are mostly automated messages to me from something such as a robot. However, this one was different. It sounded like a person had wrote it and included my name and my website’s name (AskWillOnline.com) in the email. For this reason, I decided to give Ezoic a go. I know exactly what you are thinking, though, ‘what is Ezoic?’ Well, hopefully I will be able to give a fairly informative review of Ezoic in this article.
To sum up Ezoic, they are a website improvement platform that has the aim of making your website earn more money through advertising. This sounds like a brilliant idea considering many bloggers spend lots of time concentrating on their content but very little on the ad spaces, sizes, colours and locations on their website.
What Ezoic do is try out different advertising locations, sizes and more dependent on the type of traffic that is coming to your website. For example, if you entered from Google, you may see 3 adverts whereas direct traffic may only see 1 or 2 adverts in different locations to the previous time they saw them. All in all, it sounds a great way to increase the click through rate of a website.
However, with any new problem, I wanted to get a review of Ezoic from someone else. The problem is that there is not one website that has reviewed them yet. That’s strange? I guess they must be very new … or a scam.
My doubts were dismayed when I found out that Ezoic is an Adsense partner: although the only websites to share this news are small discrete websites and Ezoic themselves. That is strange still since being an Adsense partner is definitely a big thing to hype about!
Nevertheless, I decided to sign up for Ezoic. At first, they wanted me to install some coding onto my website so they can monitor the traffic and stats of my website. This seemed all normal as it something Google Analytics does.
I have to say from this dashboard it looks all legit. However, the problem I found with Ezoic is that for them to really work their wonders, they require you to point your website’s servers to Ezoic’s servers, so that they can manipulate with the website to try out different layouts etc. I can come up with a few reasons why bloggers may not want to do this, though:
- Changing servers for a website is a delicate process that could mess up the whole website – its dangerous to give some random platform access to your servers.
- It takes time to change the servers
- They don’t seem completely legit for the simple reason that they are not widely known by Adsense publishers.
All in all, Ezoic sounds like a great great idea. However, I think they need to seriously work on building their brand confidence before they can really kick off and start getting Adsense publishers to start using them because at the moment it just seems an unnecessary risk.
If you are interested in signing up with Ezoic, you can do so by clicking here.
Raffaele
November 26, 2014 at 8:44 am
Hi… any news about EZOIC? Do you know some known websites using this “tool”?
Eya
December 2, 2014 at 4:26 pm
Thanks for this review. Exactly what I need right now cos not ready to mess up my hard work.
John Cole
December 9, 2014 at 8:12 pm
I’m the CCO here at Ezoic in California.
We’ve invited Will to get the software live on his site and to give it a try.
Useful links:
1. Google lists Ezoic as a Certified Partner on their site here:
http://www.google.com/adsense/start/partners/partners.html?#partner-ezoic
2. “Changing servers for a website is a delicate process that could mess up the whole website…”
Cloudflare has millions of websites that access it’s technology using name server integration – so it’s a well documented / safe method. The beauty of using this integration is that your site’s code is untouched, if you want to switch it all off, you can do so using the system or just switch your name servers back and your site goes back to how it was before.
If there are any ad-funded sites out there that want to contact us about using the platform – we’d be delighted to help. The results are phenomenal and it’s easy to get started.
Please email contact [at] ezoic .com or feel free to create an account at Ezoic.com
LLL
May 18, 2015 at 3:25 pm
What I need to know is:
How can I stop Ezoic of managing my Adsense account?
I allowed Ezoic to do so by filling a form but I do not know to reverse this process.
John Cole
August 11, 2015 at 8:13 pm
Ezoic is a ‘Google AdSense Certified Partner’. This means you can choose (if you like) to allow read-only access to your account by our system. There is no rev share (so this doesn’t cost you anything), but if you do want to ‘unhook’ this account, you can do so quite easily. It’s very simple. Just log into your Adsense account.
Click on
> The ‘cog’ symbol (in the top right)
>Settings
>Access and Authorization
>Third Party Access
Hope that helps!
Barbie
May 27, 2016 at 5:25 pm
These pieces really set a standard in the inrutsdy.
Shane
April 27, 2015 at 2:18 pm
Hey Will – Thanks for the info here. I just checked them out and it appears they have a new way of integrating, with a code snippet instead of pointing your DNS (I agree, can be scary!)
Also wanted to point out that they require at least 10,000 visitors per month. If you have less than that you can try a plugin like AmpedSense if you’re running on WordPress
Frankie
May 27, 2016 at 6:41 pm
Deep thinking – adds a new dinmiseon to it all.
LLL
May 18, 2015 at 3:22 pm
We have tested EZOIC but we are not satisfied mainly because the lay-outs tested by EZOIC made our website very little user friendly and TOO SLOW. It takes several minutes before a webpage could be loaded (we changed DNS).
We have decided to stop using EZOIC.
John Cole
August 6, 2015 at 1:02 pm
@ Shane- you’re right – but it’s actually much better / faster to use name server integration vs the JS snippet (NS are faster – more on this point below!). Ezoic is a certified partner both with Google AdSense and with Cloudflare.
@LLL – we’re sorry that you decided to stop testing your website. Testing what the users respond to best is the best way to boost usability and ad income long term. I understand that testing isn’t for everyone – and that’s fine – but I should mention a couple of things to balance out what you said:
* User Experience can be measured directly. By comparing the time on site, page views per visit and bounce rate of the Ezoic test layouts vs the Original (the control). If you didn’t like the layouts – you could have identified those particular themes you personally didn’t want to test – and dropped them from the testing process.
* Data – We think it’s best to go on the data. To really know if ‘one thing beats another’ then you need to reach a point of statistical significance, otherwise you’re making assumptions based on thin information. Testing isn’t like switching out ad tags – it’s not instant – it’s a process. If you pull the plug before there’s enough data, you cannot read anything into the results (‘good’ or ‘bad’). We’re at the mercy of the math I’m afraid.
* Speed – sites that use Ezoic are not slow – they are very fast (the system uses AWS + has 4 data centers around the world, using Cloudfront / Cloudflare CDN’s extensively, including lazy loading for fast mobile loading etc – all the good stuff!). So if someone tries to test random pages (i.e. non-cached pages) and does so just after changing name servers – while the name servers are still propagating – then it’ll appear slow to (just) that person.
One thing I’d like to suggest when testing is to be patient, go on the data & don’t make assumptions based on our own opinions! It’s most helpful to look at the bigger picture and see what MOST of your users respond to best (bounce rates especially).
We’d love to show you the excellent results that come from testing ad positions and page layouts.
Come back and have a chat at any time or email me directly on the email below.
All the best,
John Cole
CCO
Ezoic
John { at } ezoic {.} com
Manuel
August 21, 2015 at 8:42 am
Any updates on how this is working out?
Will Green
August 23, 2015 at 6:15 am
There is an update article here:
http://ppc.org/an-update-to-ezoic-adsense-partner/
Fashion
February 25, 2016 at 8:16 pm
We currently use Ezoic at ApparelSearch.com
Have been using them for one full year. So far, a good experience. Very good customer support. My favorite part is that it made my fashion site mobile friendly. It was important for Apparel Search to have a mobile friendly site.
Thunder
April 11, 2016 at 8:38 pm
I have been looking for more information about Ezoic, too, and I have yet to find much in the way of credible reviews. It sounds almost too good to be true, but it sounds like it could be a huge hassle if it’s a scam.