Ads are an easy and fast way to make money on your blog! Read my experience on how one small change increased my earnings like crazy in the first month! I'll be sharing my review on Ezoic and how Ezoic helped increase my earnings compared to Google AdSense.
In this article, I'll explain how signing up for Ezoic helped increase my earnings compared to using just Google AdSense. The goal is to give you an introduction of why ad income is a good choice for your blog, what Ezoic is, and my experience using it.
This is my personal experience and all results are my own from using Ezoic on my blog. I cannot gaurentee that the process or pay out results will be the same for you and your blog. I am speaking to my experience only at the time of joining the network in Sept 2019. This post is NOT sponsored.
UPDATE*** Ezoic no longer requires a pageview minimum for application!!
Table of Contents
- Make money on your blog with ads
- Making money on a new blog with Google AdSense
- My blog traffic
- How to make even more income with ads
- Discovering Ezoic
- What is Ezoic
- Ezoic was built to be easy
- Connecting my blog to Ezoic
- My first month
- My second month
- My final thoughts & review
Make Money on your blog with ads
While there are many methods to create income on a blog (affiliates, sponsored posts, digital products etc.), I find that ads are talked about the least.
One reason is that ads may generate less income compared to other methods, and the rates can vary day to day. Other established blogs, tend to lean into the affiliate or digital product space and often say that ads 'cheapen' the look of their site and they'd rather not host ads.
However, for newbie bloggers with a limited amount of traffic or for bloggers in certain niches, ads are a terrific source of income! They can certainly help pay for blogging expenses and more. While I am working my way towards sponsored posts etc., at this time, I find that leveraging ads to create income is great for me and my blog.
The other benefit is, ads are a form of scalable income. As you grow your traffic, you can use ads to increase your earnings.
Making money on a new blog with Google AdSense
I launched the first version of my blog back in January 2016. It was a very simple blog page and I used it only as a means to share my recipes with family and friends. After learning more about blogging as a business, I 're-launched' my blog in late 2017 with a determination to generate income.
At that point, I had signed up for Google AdSense as most new bloggers do.
Google AdSense is the most attainable ad service that doesn’t require you to have a minimum level of traffic in order to be accepted.
For my first month of using Google AdSense I had 618 page views.
I made a whole $2.75 for that month, which really only generated from a few peaks. As you can see from this chart, on most days I made $0.00.
*note, page views can vary between Google AdSense & Analytics as they are counted differently, which is why it’s less here.
I figured this was expected since my traffic counts were super low and sporadic.
As I became familiar with the world of blogging and the money that can be made from ads, I also learned that the payout for Google AdSense is pretty much pennies compared to other networks.
Don't get me wrong - I was still very proud to almost make $3.00 in a whole month. It proved to me that monetization through blogging WORKED!
Now, my job was to scale that up to real, tangible income.
My Blog Traffic
About a year and a half later in July 2019, and I hit 10,000 monthly page views for the first time ever. YES!! I was only able to work on my blog at a super part-time rate (there was a lot going on in my life during late 2018 - early 2019) so I was really proud to be obtaining this level of traffic!
I mostly achieved this by using Pinterest (if you want to learn more about my Pinterest journey, check out my articles on creating better posts, creating better pins and using Tailwind.)
When I hit the 10k mark, I was still only using Google AdSense for my ads and I was making a steady $0.58 a day on average (at 10,000 pageviews a month).
Using Google AdSense, I generated $17.93 for the month of July.
How to make more even more income using Ads
At this point, I was becoming much more educated on ad income and blogging as a business. In the back of my mind, I was dreaming of the day where I could get to 50k sessions per month so that I could apply for larger ad networks such as Mediavine. They require 50k sessions (not pageviews) as their minimum for acceptance but the payouts are much larger than Google's.
Even though my blog didn't meet that condition, I felt like 10k pageviews was still substantial. I figured it would be worth spending some time to research networks that accepted newer blogs, but I had a hard time finding a reputable company that had a decent pay rate.
Discovering Ezoic
While browsing through Reddit, I saw that a user had commented about applying for this network called, Ezoic. At the time, they required a 10k pageview minimum, and the payout average per 1,000 page views (EPMV) was relative to other big-time networks.
*UPDATE* Ezoic no longer has a page view minimum in order to apply!!
Ezoic no longer imposes pageview limits upon new sign-ups. Removing the previous threshold of 10,000 monthly visits to use Ezoic's Monetization features has allowed us to eliminate the long-running narrative that as sites grow they somehow qualify or earn a chance to work with higher-paying advertisers from different ad networks or third-parties that have historically excluded them. - Ezoic
The thought of making as much as $10, $15 (or more) per 1000 page views was absolutely thrilling. That's income I could ACTUALLY USE and put towards blog expenses and life expenses!
September 2019 marked my third month with 10k+ page views. My traffic was holding steady since hitting the 10k mark in July. I figured it would be a good time to apply to Ezoic and I was accepted!
What is Ezoic?
Ezoic is primarily a platform that shows ads on your blog page, and automates and manages ad networks in order to do so.
However, managing ads is the tip of the iceberg for Ezoic.
In the background, Ezoic will test out new ads, access new ad networks, experiment with ad placement, improve SEO, optimize your site speed and a whole lot more. To put it simply, Ezoic is WAY more than an ad network.
The system LEARNS based on user experience (what your users respond to and like) and then it applies those learnings so you can make more money. Their tools will actually improve your site, resulting in an even HIGHER payout.
The best part is, they make it really easy to do all these things. I am genuinely impressed by their app dashboard, making it great for non-techy people like me to enable and disable certain features.
I’m not tech savvy, so this layout totally took all the worry out of all the technical bits that I feared I had to learn in order to make this work.
I feel comfortable relying on Ezoic to handle those pieces for me (Ezoic is a Google Certified Publishing Partner), but I am still able to closely monitor performance with their advanced reporting and insights (reading charts is something I CAN do!)
Ezoic was built to be easy
As I mentioned, I’m a part-time blogger so my time is really valuable. I don’t want to be fussing around for hours figuring out how to insert an ad here or there, or spend time with A/B testing and tracking performance over weeks for each single ad.
Ezoic utilizes AI to do that all for you!! Machines and AI are able to figure out things a lot more and a lot faster than I ever could.
I realize that to some, placing your trust in company to handle an important element on your blog can be scary. However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you have to rely on professionals and their expertise so you can scale and grow your business.
With everything that goes into running and managing my blog, it would be inefficient for me to manage every aspect of an ad network. I have no idea what goes into it and frankly, I don’t want to. I’m not intentionally being naïve; I have an eye on it but I want to focus on pushing out great content and working on my passions.
My goal right now is to build my earnings as much as possible while I continue to drive traffic.
Connecting My Blog to Ezoic
Connecting my blog to the Ezoic platform was pretty easy. I admit there were a couple of spots where I had to take to some to figure out, but I got through it.
Upon my acceptance, an Account Manager reached out to me to assist me with integration. She was even able to do some of the tasks for me which was a great help. She was there for me for any questions I had and she was friendly and helpful with every response.
So far, I would rate their client service an A+. I was SUPER impressed by the fact that I had a devoted account manager to talk to, given that Ezoic is free to use. I don’t have that for the other programs I use that I DO pay for.
There are multiple routes you can take to connect your site. I did the easiest one, which was downloading a WordPress plugin and going from there. It took, maybe a couple of hours to get it all sorted.
The dashboard guides you through the steps, but you can also reach out for support.
A couple of other things you may need to do:
- Grant Ezoic with read-only access to your Google Analytics account *not sure if this is still needed since the minimum traffic restriction has been lifted!
- Set up an ads.txt file.
- An ads.txt file helps publishers (bloggers) determine who can represent their ad space in front of buyers. This helps ad companies verify the publisher.
- I was directed to create an account at adstxtmanager.com, connect my blog and authorize access to Ezoic & AdSense. That whole piece went very smoothly.
My first month using Ezoic
My account was activated during the last week of September, so I’m going to count October 2019 as my first full month.
I'll get right to it. With Ezoic, I generated $175.92 in the month of October, which averaged around $5.67 a day.
To recap this change…
- The month prior to switching to Ezoic, (let’s just say Sept 1-30 for argument’s sake), I had 12,582 page views and I earned a total of $11.84 with Google AdSense.
- In October, I had 23,494 page views and I made $175.92 with Ezoic. I made about $7.50 per 1000 page views.
Is your jaw dropping?? Mine did!!! What a difference from AdSense!
I started to see a big uptick in traffic on one of my pins which I believe drove the traffic growth in October. I can't say for sure that Ezoic was able to do anything for me in my first month with SEO/Optimization, but it's possible that helped too.
My Second Month Using Ezoic
The second month of using Ezoic was even greater.
In November, I had 46,277 page views. The majority of my traffic came from Pinterest and with the holidays underway, the uptick in traffic is expected.
I earned $322 in my second month using Ezoic. That's a 83% change vs. October.
My final thoughts and review of Ezoic
Needless to say, I am beyond thrilled with my first couple of months with Ezoic!! I’m so happy that I was accepted and signed up when I did. I was under the impression that I had to wait until my traffic was way over 10k page views to apply to any ad network.
If you're interested in hosting ads on your site, I definitely encourage you to explore Ezoic. I'm a part of several blogging communities and I see so many bloggers say they're fine to stay with AdSense and hold out and wait to be accepted into a large network.
Don't wait. Do not wait!
You could be making money! You could be covering those hosting fees, plugin purchases, paying your bills!
Google AdSense pays pennies compared to what you could be making. I'm very pleased with the Ezoic pay rate. On top of that, the dashboard is so user friendly and their support team was fabulous.
I went in looking for a way to make extra cash and I ended up finding a top-notch team and partner to help me grow my blog.
