Ezoic - Opinions / experiences

Here's mine...

[surfgatinho]

I recently signed up with Ezoic to test on one of my sites. So far there have been fairly significant earnings improvements, but I have yet to fully look into how these have been achieved. I guess they also have to run their optimisations as something of a black box as otherwise I'd just take the improvements and use them for free.

My first concern about Ezoic is the lack of any independent reviews about their services. They run an affiliate scheme so virtually everything written about them by other websites is fairly glowing, followed by a "find out more" affiliate link at the bottom.

My other concern is how they achieve their improvements. Most of my earnings from this site are from mobile and to me it seems mobile provides a fairly reduced set of options for ad placement. (So how much scope is there for their big data / AI based tweaking) Therefore we are left with increasing the number of ads, which they have. Previously I ran 3 ads per page, with Ezoic I have limited it to 4, plus there is an anchor ad running.

Now that I have reduced this to 3 ads and removed the anchor ad it seems my earnings are close to where they were previously. In other words the increase was coming from running more ads, which is fine, but I can't see how this wouldn't affect UX - even though Ezoic claim to optimise this too. To be honest I think my site looks a little trashy now and I don't know if that is a good long term compromise.

I guess I'll let things run a little longer and keep tweaking. What strikes me as a little odd though is why Adsense would not be performing equally effective optimization themselves, if not on placement at least on responsive ad size / format...

[EditorialGuy]

It was actually their other requests that I found more galling, e.g. change your DNS to ours, change your CDN to ours, give us access to our Adsense account. No way, Jim, not unless you can produce a good reason (and they don't).

It's because that's how the system is designed to work. There's nothing sinister about it. Still, no one is being forced to use Ezoic (or AdSense, or any other ad platform). I can say that it's working great for us, but--as the saying goes--one man's meat is another man's poison.

[Dimitri]

Once in a while, a guy from Ezoic writes to me, (from a contact form on my site), saying how great my site is etc... very stereotyped :) ... I never had the time to study it deeply, so it's still in my todo list, when I have time i might give them a try.

[thegirl]

I regret using them, or at least trying them on the website I rely on for paying my bills, rather than my smaller one. They'd emailed me every so often for a few months asking if I wanted to try, and so I finally decided to do it. I'm traveling right now so I have not been good about keeping up with everything... so I didn't notice until about 2 weeks into trying them out that my traffic had dropped 60% and my other ads (through Ziprecruiter) had completely crashed... There went rent, and bills.... Ezoic swore it couldn't have been them, because with their numbers, I was earning more with them than I was with Adsense. Well, that may be true, if I had 100% of my traffic, but now I'm earning less, guys. I quickly reversed everything, impatiently waited through the weekend, and the next week saw traffic slowly coming back. It's still not back to normal, and only now, about 2 weeks later, am I seeing Ziprecruiter recover. I lost a LOT of money from that experiment and am now doing what I can to increase traffic to make up for it. I have no idea what happened, but I think it would be way too much of a coincidence for it NOT to have been the fault of Ezoic, when the traffic crash happened the day after I started using their service. :-/

[adsenseuser]

I keep getting hassled by one of their agents as I was looking at joining them. I'm glad I didn't after reading this and have added her to my spam list now.

[CommandDork]

It must be their time of the year to reach out again. I just got two inquiries from them (two different guys). Then Sovrn came calling too.

Must be needing to make a quota or something.

[Swanny007]

I have completely dumped Ezoic now. My biggest concern was how slow my site loaded as a result plus the revenue increase wasn't there across the board. For example it might have higher earnings per user on desktop but not on tablet or mobile. So in the end I would say if you do try out Ezoic watch things closely over time based on device size in terms of performance. Even though I was on the so-called free plan they were not transparent on how much they were making off of me either. They do plaster ads on the site *at times* but in theory everyone may see a different amount of ads so I can't say everyone else saw the same as me.

Fingers crossed that AdSense Auto Ads performs better over time because that will be mainly what I use going forward.