I was talking with someone who was getting ready to jump ship on Ezoic do to having a low, like really low, EPMV around $4-6 on pure organic traffic from the US.
Instead I asked if we could work through looking at all the current ad placeholders and really look to see where the issues were. When checking they were just not aligning well to his highest trafficked posts which dropped his income.
I would also like to add he wasn’t getting little traffic as he is about 12k monthly pageviews currently, so his low EPMV wasn’t due to a bad traffic day or ad blocker, it was a placement issue.
I hear you and your “but I have an account manager who did my placeholders”, and to this I would say, how do you know they did it right. Are you so willing to believe in someone else making you income that you wouldn’t learn?
The other thing I hear frequently is that “I am making $14 EPMV currently” like that is an excuse to not make sure the best placements exist for getting you the max monetization value.
There are many reasons why you would want to look at your Ezoic Ad placeholders, the biggest being are they actually optimized for your visitors and your site?
Additionally, you want to ensure you are getting the right returns on your ads and a lower EPMV will typically signal that you have either poor ad placements, or your traffic is from a non-English country.
The last reason is that maybe your traffic has changed where it comes from, maybe you built your site and were doing excellent but now most the traffic is from mobile devices, this means you may want to re-evaluate ads and format.
If you are experiencing a dramatically low EPMV then you need to take some time and learn why the value is so low. This could be something as simple as a lot of overseas traffic to your site, this would typically provide a lower value.
If it is down to traffic the only thing you can do is try to work on adding more search value to traffic from English speaking countries like the UK and the US. Without this traffic the ad value tends to drop incredibly fast.
If you are getting the traffic for your website from US and other English countries then you may have issues with placeholders not being set and being unable to load reliably to display an ad.
Many optimize their site for desktop as they are writing their blog posts and researching from their desktop or laptop. The problem is in todays world more and more traffic is coming from mobile devices.
If you aren’t focused on your mobile design and the traffic begins to increase from that source you may have walls of text which cause bouncing or ad issues that you aren’t aware of.
You should take time to look into your Google Analytics and see what the majority of your pageviews are coming from, this will tell you where you may need to look and understand from the visitor standpoint.
The last thing I see from ad setups from sites is more a focus on the longest post they have and assembling placeholders from that alone. While this is the best place to start, you then want to load your most visited post and see how those placeholders align.
If not aligned well then you may want to further optimize the ad placements within that post since your visitors like that post if you optimize it you can increase your income almost immediately.
This step requires a chrome browser which many people run already, you then need to go to the Google store and search for Ezoic or follow this link. This tool is all you will need to use to link your browser with Ezoic and view or manage placeholders.
In addition, you can’t use this to add placeholders when you are actively signed into your website. You can either log out and view or set them or use Googles “incognito” mode with the plugin allowed which then lessens logging in and out.
You will need to enable the extension to run when you launch incognito mode, this is pretty simple and fast to change in the Chrome browser:
Now when you right click on a link and tell Google to [ Launch in Incognito Mode ] you will have the ability to check out the ad placements on the given page and see what you have and if there is a need to optimize.
When you have a page loaded in Chrome you will just want to click on the Ezoic button in the toolbar [ looks like their logo ] this will pop open and have a button to [ Activate Placeholders ].
Now when you view your post or page you will see all the placeholders for ads that it is setup for. There are a lot of best practices around how many ads should show on screen at any one time, if I remember off hand it is that there should never be more than 1 or 2 on screen at any point.
Where you need to think about this though is that your text on a desktop may have one ad per section of the post showing, for a mobile device though this may be multiple scrolls without any ad.
This doesn’t mean you want to jam the ads in to make it have one at all times but you do want to look and see if you have long sections on your mobile browsing where there is no ad within long scrolls as those would be missed opportunities.
One thing you are always thinking about to be successful is the viewers or visitors to your site and what content would help keep them on site longer or get more clicks to sales.
I would suggest adding to this understanding a further breakdown of how they are viewing those posts also, if most of your traffic to sales pages is mobile then maybe you want to look at that page on mobile also.
I know it sounds idiotic but a vast amount of website owners actually don’t know what their pages look like on mobile since they don’t tend to interact with them in that fashion, heck I do that myself and I know better!
Many people who sign up for ads with people like Ezoic don’t take the time to properly understand how and why the system works which leads to less than optimal results.
The thing is they don’t know that they are getting less than optimal results because they have never investigated how they have things configured. They don’t know their visitors and they don’t know how to maximize potential earnings.
I would always suggest learning everything you can about any tool you choose to add to your site, especially when it can dramatically increase your financial outcomes.
As to conversions, the person I mentioned at the start of this post, after we optimized his ads placeholders has had a week of ads with an EPMV moving from $16 to now $19. This means his income on 12000 visits has gone from less than $100 to now may push close to $180-200!
