It seems the last article I done on Ezoic, Ezoic Review – Adsense Partner, got a lot of attention from both those that have used Ezoic and people that work for Ezoic. At first sights, I thought Ezoic was too good to be true – it said it could increase my Adsense earnings by 300%! However, I struggled to integrate Ezoic and, at the time, did not have the minimum amount of traffic per month to use their services (you need a good amount of traffic to make the experiments worthwhile).
Thankfully, even though I am not as much a part of my old website as I was when I first created the Ezoic review, it now has enough traffic to be accepted by Ezoic for experimenting. So as I am writing this article, AskWillOnline.com is currently undergoing experiments by Ezoic to increase it’s Adsense earnings. Although the experiments have not finished yet, for those that are unsure about using Ezoic on their own website, I thought to make an article to give you an insight of my thoughts of the service and I am afraid it is not the best of news so far.
Firstly, I thought it was necessary to show you one the experiments Ezoic is testing on AskWillOnline.com:
Unfortunately, I cannot show you what the website looked like before the experiment so this is what Ezoic has come up with to increase Adsense earnings at the moment. I think, to begin with, I will go through the positive points I have noticed:
- Ezoic do quite a lot of experiments – From refreshing the website on numerous occasions I have noticed around 5 iterations of the design which seems a good number of experiments.
As bad as it is, I can’t really think of any more real positives! Here are the problems I am facing with Ezoic:
- They can have five adverts on one page at a time – This seems a good thing. However, on a typical website, having five adverts (and large adverts too like above) just ruins the look of the website. Although it may increase earnings, I am scared by what it is doing to my website’s bounce rate and other important statistics.
- The location of some of the adverts are dire – I mean there are adverts splitting bullet points up in the middle of articles, there are adverts preventing sidebar widgets from being seen, used correctly and more.
- Design is not as good as I thought it could be – Instead of optimising the design of AskWillOnline.com (which I had paid quite a lot of money to create!), Ezoic have scrapped it and made their own design, which kind of annoys me since the design of AskWillOnline.com was good before this – they could have experimented with sizes and locations with that design instead of making a new one.
I guess I am just being picky. What I can conclude with, though, is that if you want to use Ezoic, you need ot understand that making money from Adsense is #1 on their agenda and everything else does not matter to them in the slightest. Yes, it will probably improve your earnings but at what price to your traffic? Surely most bloggers know having 5 huge adverts with three of them above the fold is always going to do that…I mean, it isn’t rocket science?
If you are interested in signing up with Ezoic, you can do so by clicking here.
Jannie
August 20, 2015 at 8:36 am
I was contacted by them today about running Ezoic on my site. Are you still using them anywhere? Would you recommend them to any specific types of websites?
Will Green
August 23, 2015 at 6:16 am
The website has stopped using them as Ezoic was proving to not live up to expectations or AskWillonline.com I would suggest trying them out and giving them time to implement their monetizing strategies and review them after a set time period as Ezoic could work better for different types of websites.
Raj @ www.ThePrimalDesire.com
August 27, 2015 at 5:58 pm
Hey Will,
How long did you use them both times you tried? What kind of traffic did you have before/after each of these short trials? Did you select layouts that you REALLY didn’t like and remove them from the testing the way John Cole had suggested on your previous post?
I know where you’re coming from: I have put in a TON of time and effort in customizing every pixel of my site (teaching myself, since finances wouldn’t allow for having someone else do it for me), and to give up that control to an automated test is scary. If I do go forward with Ezoic, I will be letting my subscribers know that there may be some unfavorable versions in the next few months but that the same great content will be available throughout.
As a free service, you can’t expect the level of design that you’ve paid for in setting up your site to be included in each of the many layouts that are generated by Ezioc. Would you say that you went in with unrealistic expectations? If you had been better prepared for the testing process, do you think you would have still considered the service?
Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts!
Will Green
August 30, 2015 at 7:49 am
Hi Raj,
The first time I could not use them as AWO did not have enough traffic. The second time the site was accepted and we tried them out for around a month. The traffic sources stayed the same – only the theme of the website and advert locations changed. They suggest the layouts and then the statistics suggested they were not as effective we had liked so we stopped using their service.
I can understand your concern Raj. AWO is more about new visitors from organic traffic so the variation in themes did not concern me. For those that repeatedly come back to websites, such as your subscribers, changing the theme and layout so often may upset them and affect your traffic.
I don’t think I went into Ezoic with unrealistic expectations. They said they could improve Adsense earnings on AWO by 300% which never happened. I think Ezoic gave out unrealistic expectations and were not clear enough in the whole process as, at first site, it does all seem a bit too good to be true which AWO found out.
Give it a go if you want. But, I would be more worried about using them if you have many subscribers that are already use to your current theme and layout.
Hope this helps,
Will
Jared
September 5, 2015 at 1:53 am
I’m currently in the first week of testing with Ezoic on my website. I’d say everything mentioned in these reviews is accurate. I will say this though, in just a few days we are seeing some very positive results in revenue. But at what price? I’m really interested to see more results as it relates to user experience as the testing continues. The layouts are cool to see constantly changing and as hard as it is for me to “let go” (built this website from scratch like many of you), I’m willing to do so if it will help a) user experience and b) generate income.
Having said all that, a lot of the time it looks like ads and content just threw up all over my site. It’s clear it’s just a computer algorithm rolling these out in different layouts because I have terrible open white space, ads in the middle of bulleted lists, ads partially blocked or blocking other things. It’s strange. Like I said, I’m fine with changing my layout if it means my users are happier, bounce rates reduced and generates more money. But sacrificing the professionalism of the site is what I’m most concerned about.
All in all, I will continue to just wait and see. Will give it some time. My Ezoic representative has been helpful in answering my barrage of questions and emails and the company is legit. Just hoping we can clean up some of the sloppiness of designs and ads.
Jannie
September 9, 2015 at 4:28 pm
Any more webmasters who recently used Ezoic who would like to chime in? I’ve gone through the whole setup process and will start running them in a few days, but if most of you decided to leave them within a few weeks then I’d rather just stick with my current layout.
Ron
September 18, 2015 at 1:52 pm
I’m currently in week 1 of using Ezoic and haven’t seen much of a change in ad revenue. I’ll end up giving it another week or two, providing my traffic remains constant, and see if there are any major changes.
Liam Quin
October 7, 2015 at 8:07 pm
I’ve been using Ezoic on http://www.fromoldbooks.org for a month or so. Revenue is slightly down – more importantly, sales and donations dropped to zero because Ezoic removed the “Donate “button and made the link to the Buy button not work 🙂 I’ve worked around those problems and it is looking like some of the experiments they’re running are more promising. The look is very very different and I’m not sure I like it, but hey, it’s made me think about some stuff.
Liam Quin
October 9, 2015 at 4:50 pm
Ron, you should give Ezoic 6 weeks, or long enough that several experiments have had more than 4,000 visits, I think, if you can stand it.
So far I’ve had a slight drop overall, but after fixing some problems I’m interested to see what happens. It does need some diligence to make sure things are still working (e.g. my Buy link stopped working at one point!)
Swagath
January 8, 2016 at 12:11 pm
I am using it for the second time for my site http://www.oyecricket.com. Fingers crossed…as you guys said, lots of ads cluttered around – so design wise sucks but just hoping it could really increase revenue. Site seems to be sluggish for sure. Hope Ezoic can walk the talk.
CCL Live Score
January 29, 2016 at 3:25 pm
must be an act of stupidity.
Swagath
February 18, 2016 at 8:04 pm
Update: Pain in the ass! Effects WordPress posting – often find WP going down with origin error! Despite an Excl Pages app. I am afraid it is no way a hassle free thing at all.
Swagath
March 17, 2016 at 9:56 pm
Update: Ezoic tried its best to solve my origin errors, especially Jan Creidenberg who went out of the way to help me but in vain. I believe the problem was with godaddy not entertaining my request to whitelist certain IPs which could have run the Ezoic system smoothly. Anyways all the best to Ezoic and this is something they can work around with to avoid such issues.
Gayatri Mantra
May 19, 2016 at 11:05 pm
This is Great. Please I Have tried using them but looks odd with ads placement but hope the tester finally optimize a static position.