If you’re a web publisher, placing ads on your website from a provider like AdSense is pretty much a no-brainer these days. Having ads on your web properties can increase your earnings substantially. While Google AdSense is the biggest and most well-known ad provider there is, there are better choices available to you as a website owner. Ezoic is one of these choices.
Ezoic vs. AdSense, which is the better ad provider for web publishers?
Comparing earnings, tools and overall user experience, Ezoic is a far better choice for web publishers than AdSense. From a revenue standpoint, Ezoic will outperform AdSense by a wide margin. This is because Ezoic uses a process called header bidding to increase the amount advertisers pay for ads on your website.
Keep reading to learn the key differences between AdSense and Ezoic, plus I’ll show you what my earnings looked like when I switched from AdSense to Ezoic.
Whether you're looking to put ads on your website for the first time, or wanting to increase your earnings from ads, you'll want to sign up for a free Ezoic account today.
Contents
What Is Google AdSense?
In case you’re new to the process of monetizing your websites traffic with ads, let’s talk a bit about AdSense first. Once approved, Google AdSense allows you the ability to place advertisements throughout your website.
These ads can be created and placed manually by you with some code or you can turn on what’s called “Auto Ads” and AdSense will automatically place ads on your website. These ads appear in the header, sidebar, footer and in between your content.
The ads are targeted to your viewer, meaning that visitors to your site will see ads that relate to their interests and previous searches on the web. You make money when a viewer clicks on one or more of the ads.
The amount you make when a visitor clicks on an AdSense ad is determined by the particular ad, it’s placement, and how much competition there is between the advertisers for a spot on your page. I’ve personally seen AdSense clicks that are worth pennies, as well as clicks that are worth dollars.
The amount per click is also determined by where in the world your viewer is from. If your website visitor is located in the United States, Canada, or the UK, you will have higher paying ads appearing on your site and will make more money than if your visitor is from India, China, Sri Lanka, etc.
This is because advertisers pay more for advertising into the markets they make the most money from. Advertisers can also choose not to place ads in these markets at all. This is true no matter what company your using to get ads on your website.
According to Wikipedia, 11.1 million websites are currently using AdSense to partially or completely monetize their sites. While this is a huge number and makes AdSense the single biggest ad network in the world, based on my experience, I believe that the majority of these websites using AdSense are leaving a LARGE amount of money on the table.
What Is Ezoic?
Ezoic is an ad network founded in 2010 that covers the basic services provided by AdSense, plus a whole lot more! In fact, I shouldn’t technically even refer to them as an “ad network”.
While Ezoic provides the benefits of a premium ad network, being an ad shop is just a part of what they offer web publishers. Ezoic is a technology company that provides a ton of additional services and benefits to website owners. But before I get into the extra benefits, let’s focus on the ad side of things.
Much like AdSense, Ezoic will place ads throughout your website, but they do it in a MUCH smarter and more profitable way. Ezoic uses header biding, multivariate testing and artificial intelligence to increase your earnings substantially over AdSense.
Header Bidding
You may have previously heard mention of the term “header bidding” but what exactly is it?
Header bidding is an advanced feature of programmatic ad buying where advertisers take part in an auction to determine the highest bidder for a particular ad location on a website. Header bidding insures that online publishers get paid the highest amount for ads displayed on their website.
What this means is that when a visitor arrives to a page on your website, a mini auction takes place behind the scenes between the advertisers who are competing for your audience. This auction takes place very quickly in just a matter of milliseconds, and the winning bidder gets to show their ad to your audience.
Header bidding ensures that you as the website publisher always gets the highest amount an advertiser is willing to pay for placing an ad on your property. Let’s face it, you’ve created a valuable audience with your website content and marketers are willing to compete for that audience.
Ezoic’s Ad Tester and Multivariate Testing
Ezoic also uses something called multivariate testing. It’s a bit of a mouthful to say but thankfully it’s easier to explain. So what is multivariate testing?
Multivariate testing is the process of testing multiple variables over time to ultimately determine the optimal combination of these variables for the desired outcome.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t quite as easy as I thought! So let me explain it this way. When using display ads on your website there are a huge number of variables to take into consideration. These variables include the number, size and placement of all the ads on the site. These variables have an effect on user experience, bounce rates, and overall revenue earned.
You may be familiar with the concept of A/B “split-testing.” A/B split-testing is used to determine if variable A or variable B provides better results in a given situation. The multivariate ad testing performed by Ezoic is A/B testing on steroids!
Many ad networks, Google AdSense included, offer the same basic layout of ads to every visitor. They’ve determined through testing that this ad layout works best for the majority of the websites users.
Okay, great, but what about the users that fall outside of the majority? This is where Ezoic’s built-in multivariate ad testing really shines! Ezoic’s Ad Tester will learn, through A/B split testing thousands of variables across thousands of users, to combine all the variables in such a way that the visitor will have the best experience possible and the publisher will profit the most.
They do this on a user by user basis. For instance, they know from a users previous browsing history across the web what that individual user’s tolerance is for the overall number of ads and their placement.
If “user A” will tolerate more ads without bouncing from your site, Ezoic will show them more ads. If “user B” has a history of bouncing when too many ads are shown, then Ezoic’s ad tester will be more conservative and show fewer ads to that user. Or perhaps Ad Tester will place ads in different positions that provides better results with that particular user.
Ezoic’s Multivariate Ad Tester identifies categories of users through ongoing testing to determine the perfect number and placement of ads. It’s all about maximizing your earnings by visitor.
Imagine trying to do that level of split-testing on your own? It would be impossible! Multivariate testing benefits everyone including the user, the advertiser, and the website owner, all while maximizing revenue from each visit to the site.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
To accomplish all that testing, Ezoic uses artificial intelligence to run the whole show. Ezoic has developed its programmatic algorithms to maximize everything having to do with ads on your site.
This machine learning continuously tests and learns over time based on the actual visits to your website. No human in the world could possibly optimize to this level.
Online marketers have all heard stories about website owners increasing their conversions and earnings dramatically just by changing the color of a single button on their site. This is what Ezoics artificial intelligence can do for you by displaying the ideal number of ads, in the best locations, on a user by user basis, all without breaking a sweat.
Ezoic’s AI will slowly and continuously over time optimize your websites ads to maximize earnings. Just thinking about trying to accomplish all this testing on my own causes me some serious anxiety! Ad optimization can make the difference between a few coins jangling in you pocket and actual money in the bank.
If you’re ready to see what Ezoic has to offer, you can sign up here.
AdSense vs. Ezoic: Clicks Versus Impressions
There’s one more thing to understand before I show you my AdSense and Ezoic earnings. I mentioned above that AdSense pays you based on ad clicks. If nobody clicks on any of your ads, you don’t get paid.
(AdSense technically does pay for impressions as well, but the rate in my experience is so low it barely registers. Clicks are what make you the money.)
Ezoic on the other hand, pays based on ad impressions. Let that sink in for a minute. It’s a really big deal! Visitors to your website can earn you income just by visiting your site and enjoying your content. That’s all there is to it.
There’s no selling or particular action that your visitor needs to take to earn you money. If you create good, engaging content on your website, your visitors will naturally be viewing the ads at the same time. The longer an ad is onscreen the more revenue you generate.
Also, it’s important to point out that the Ezoic ads on your website will refresh every thirty seconds or so, giving you the ability to earn additional revenue the more compelling your content is.
I love this part! I don’t like selling, but I do like writing high-quality articles that are helpful to my readers. The more helpful the article or content, the longer a visitor will stay on my site. The longer they are on my site the more income I can make from showing ads to that visitor.
Take that AdSense!
Ezoic or Adsense: Which Earns More?
Now it’s time to dive into the numbers and see whether Ezoic or AdSense earns more money. Ezoic has case studies on their site that show website owners who’ve switched to Ezoic increasing their revenue between 39% and 106% or even more! Let’s see if my numbers bear that out.
Let me tell you that before I put AdSense on my first website, I didn’t have any intention of using AdSense long-term. I knew there were better alternatives but my website was young and didn’t have a ton of traffic yet. It didn’t meet Ezoic’s requirements (more on that below) so I applied and put Google AdSense ads on the website using their Auto Ads feature.
My Google AdSense Earnings (30 Days)
(Unfortunately, I had to blur the other information because it’s against AdSense policies to share).
So as you can see, I earned $41.34 on AdSense in 30 days. Not too bad (I thought) considering the relatively low traffic on the site. I earned an average of $1.38 per day with a high of $3.06 on February 18th. It was exciting to earn my first income through ads on my site, but it wasn’t exactly life changing dough.
Now let’s take a look at my first 30 days on Ezoic.
My Ezoic Earnings (First 30 Days)
I turned on Ezoic ads on my site on February 23rd and as you can see my earnings in the first 30 days were $198.56! That’s an increase of more than 380% over my AdSense earnings!!!
The results were instantaneous. I hadn’t changed anything on my site except for turning on Ezoic ads. So when comparing Ezoic vs AdSense in the earnings department, it’s no contest. Ezoic wins hands down!
Now you probably noticed in the graph above a down slide after my peak earnings of $13.70 on March 8th. The whole world knows what happened in the second half of March 2020. I’m not even going to say the words here because advertisers don’t want to advertise on pages that mention the “C” word.
It was bad, and the entire world’s economy basically went kaput in the span of a week. My website’s traffic and revenue dried up overnight. Having said that, with only two weeks of solid earnings in the first 30 days, Ezoic totally crushed my AdSense earnings! That’s absolutely incredible!
The good news is that after a rough couple of months in the spring of 2020, my website started growing again and Ezoic’s machine learning and Ad Tester have continued to improve the earnings on my site significantly. Take a look.
Additional Benefits To Using Ezoic vs. AdSense
In addition to the huge increase in earnings, Ezoic also offers a whole host of additional benefits to my website that AdSense either doesn’t provide or can’t touch, including features such as Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics, caching, site speed accelerator, and video hosting just to name a few.
Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics
Being a technology based company, Ezoic accumulates a huge amount of data about the websites it works with, and they share this extremely detailed information with you through what they call Big Data Analytics.
The Big Data Analytics reports can show you:
- Real-Time Data – This report shows you what’s currently happening on your site including the number of active visitors, estimated earnings down to the minute, active pages being viewed, and visitor location.
- Revenue – You can really dive into the revenue reports section to break down earnings for certain periods and compare them to previous periods.
- Content – These reports are all about the content on your website. You can use them to break down earnings, engagement, bounce rates and a whole lot more on a page by page basis. This allows you to see exactly which articles and pages on your site are providing the best earnings so that you can create more relevant content along the same lines.
- Traffic Sources – You can get into this report to determine exactly where your traffic is coming from and the exact earnings coming from these sources. For instance, if your spending too much time every day engaging in social media for your site, you can use this report to determine if the results are worth the time you’re spending.
This is barely scratching the surface of the information that Big Data Analytics can show you. The bottom line is that you can actually profit from this information. Even AdSense and Google Analytics combined can’t get to this level of detail.
Ezoic’s Caching App
Ezoic also has a bunch of built-in apps that you can use to do all sorts of things like serve your site as AMP pages, add GDPR compliancy, and add SSL security certificates. My favorite feature, however, is their CDN caching app.
By enabling Ezoic’s CDN caching, your website visitors can get your site delivered to them from a server close to their location from anywhere in the world. This caching can significantly speed up your website, and a faster site will earn you more money.
The Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator
Ezoic also offers their Site Speed Accelerator (SSA). The SSA is an app with multiple settings used to help speed up your site even further. It optimizes your images, provides lazy loading (loads your images only when they’re about to be seen on the page), handles CSS, and provides options to reduce the impact of various scripts running on your site.
There’s no way around it, placing ads on your website will slow your website down. Ezoic’s Site Speed Accelerator works hand-in-hand with the caching app to keep your website running quickly.
Ezoic’s Video Hosting and Video Ads
On top of all this, Ezoic always seems to be adding cool new features. For example, they now provide a way to monetize your video content. I’m currently making short (under a minute) videos that summarize some of my website articles. I’m then uploading and hosting these videos directly on Ezoic.
I then create some playlists and add these videos to my articles. When a user comes to the site, the playlist autoplays with an ad before each video, earning me additional revenue. The videos are also getting directly indexed by Google which helps to bring more traffic to my website. Now that’s a beautiful thing!
Ezoic Helps Protect Your Website
This is a big one that many people aren’t aware of, but Google AdSense can be strict. Cross the line by placing too many ads or accidentally breaking a rule and you can find your AdSense account shut down with no notice or reason (and no one to talk to).
As an Ezoic publisher, many of the ads on your website will be ads from Googles ad exchange, same as AdSense, but as a certified Google publishing partner, Ezoic is able to provide a buffer between you and Google that helps keep your account safe.
Ezoic for instance won’t show more ads on a page than Google will allow, no matter what buttons you accidentally push. Ezoic will keep you from accidentally breaking any rules that would otherwise get your AdSense account closed.
Ezoic also protects your website from outside forces through it’s Cloudflare integrations. This is a benefit that is overlooked by many, but it’s not to be underestimated.
So these are just a few of the many additional features and functions that Ezoic provides over AdSense. They are just part of being an Ezoic publisher.
Ezoic vs Adsense: Some Additional Comparisons
So now that we’ve seen the revenue contrasts between AdSense and Ezoic, plus some added features Ezoic provides, let’s compare a few more import areas where we can see differences between these two companies.
Payments
Both Ezoic and AdSense offer net-30 day payment terms. This means that approximately 30 days after the end of the previous month you will get paid. That’s great overall, but the difference here is that Google AdSense has a payment threshold of $100.
Payment | Ezoic | Google AdSense |
---|---|---|
Term | Net 30 | Net 30 |
Threshold | $20 | $100 |
So you’ll get paid by AdSense every 30 days IF your balance is over a hundred bucks. Ezoic has a payment threshold as well but it’s only $20. To be honest, this is mostly only important if you’re a new publisher. If you’re a more established publisher, a $100 a month threshold won’t be a big deal to overcome.
Ezoic & AdSense Eligibility Requirements
Both Ezoic and AdSense require an approval process and have some basic requirements before accepting a website for ads. The requirements are pretty similar for both and include:
- Must be at least 18 years of age (if underage, a parent or legal guardian will need to create an account).
- Have a website (neither of these companies work with social media sites)
- Having interesting and unique content that steers clear of topics such as graphic adult material and/or violence.
There is one main difference between Ezoic and AdSense, however, when it comes to traffic. AdSense has no traffic requirement. If you have a fully set-up website with useful content, it’s likely you will be accepted by AdSense even if you have little to no traffic.
Ezoic on the other hand has a requirement that your website needs to have 10,000 pageviews a month before acceptance. This makes some sense though, if there is little to no traffic, there will also be little to no earnings. Plus Ezoic’s AI needs a certain amount of traffic for it’s testing to really get to work.
Ezoic, however, has been known to bend the rules here. If they can see that you have a well-done website with some great helpful content that they believe will do well in their system they may make an exception.
Basically, if they look at your website and can see it’s just a matter of time before traffic increases they most likely will be more than happy to accept you as a publisher.
If fact, if you fall into this category, I can probably help you out. If you’ve got a high-quality website with over 1,000 monthly visitors and you want to add Ezoic, drop me a line here. I can make an introduction for you to my account manager. He’s a really great guy and can take a look to see if Ezoic can accept you early. (No thin, lousy content websites please.)
Support (AdSense and Ezoic)
When starting something new and somewhat technical like placing ads on your website, having great support is important. The process isn’t difficult, overall, but it goes a whole lot smoother with someone to answer your questions.
This is area (like earnings) where the best choice is clear. Ezoic has an awesome support system! Just drop your account manager an email or create a support ticket, and Ezoic will get you sorted in no time.
With AdSense it’s next to impossible to talk to anybody. The best you can hope for is to post a question in their online forum. Maybe another AdSense user will answer.
What Does it Cost To Use Ezoic and AdSense?
The good news here is it is completely free to use either one of these services. AdSense gets paid by taking a portion of the fee advertisers pay for the ad (currently 32%). This happens before you ever see it, so the amount reported to you is all yours.
Ezoic, on the other hand, gives you closer to 100% of the advertising fees! You might be asking yourself how this is possible? It’s simple, Ezoic makes its money by keeping all the earnings of a single ad placed at the bottom of each page. That’s it!
Should You Use Ezoic Over AdSense?
After comparing Ezoic and AdSense in-depth in this article, I think it should be a pretty easy decision. Ezoic, in my personal experience, outperforms AdSense in every single way.
From the significantly higher revenue, to the added benefits, and outstanding support, Ezoic is likely to provide your business with a big boost just like it has mine.
But what if you’re already using AdSense, and make a substantial amount money from them on your website? It can be a little scary to leave a sure thing and try something new. In this case, Ezoic’s got another feature you’re gonna love! Ezoic has the ability to set up your account so that you can split-test Ezoic and AdSense at the same time so that you can directly compare the earnings between the two.
You can show 50% of your traffic (or whatever percent you’d like) AdSense ads while the other 50% see’s Ezoic ads. So without any guesswork, you’ll know which one is the right choice for you just by looking at the data.
I did this on my first website with Ezoic. My account manager set it up so that a small percentage of traffic still went to AdSense ads just so we’d have a baseline comparison. After seeing the results, I couldn’t wait to flip the switch to 100% Ezoic ads!
If you want to see what your earnings look like with Ezoic, you can sign up here.
Final Thoughts
No matter how you look at it, the ability to earn substantial revenue from ads on our websites is a game changer. In my case, it’s allowed me the freedom to write about topics and cover areas of interest that aren’t directly tied to affiliate programs.
If you have experience, or are currently using Google Adsense, I recommend that you run (don’t walk) over to Ezoic and sign up. This move alone can double or even triple your income from ads.
If you’re new to having programmatic ads on your website, your best move is to skip AdSense altogether, and try out Ezoic. Putting ads on your website has never been easier…or more profitable.
Ready to give Ezoic a try?…Click Here!
If you have any questions or comments, just drop them in the comments below.