Monetizing Your Travel Blog with Ezoic

You want to earn money with your blog? Maybe you’ve heard of Ezoic, but never really looked into it? Or are unsure if you can monetize your blog with it?

In this article, I’ll share my personal experience as a travel blogger with Ezoic, tell you about my story with Ezoic, and explain the pros and cons so you can decide for yourself if Ezoic is for you and your blog.

Edit January 2024: I haven’t used Ezoic for a few months now. The revenue was less instead of more as promised, the page speed was not great with Ezoic. And I don’t miss the constant technical problems either :)

What is Ezoic?

Welcome to my travel blog

Hey, I’m Tatiana and I’m the blogger behind The Happy Jetlagger. Since 2014, I’ve been sharing my personal travel stories on this blog. I don’t have a big team behind me, so I’m pretty much a one-person show: I’ve researched and tested all recommendations myself.

Ezoic may look like an advertising network, but it’s actually software that helps you place ads on your blog and generate revenue. Ezoic uses artificial intelligence to find out exactly which and how much advertising might interest your readers, and thus ensures, according to its own statements, that

a) the user experience becomes better
and
b) you achieve the best possible revenue.

Start with Ezoic

To embed Ezoic on your website, you need to register here. Unlike other networks like Mediavine or SheMedia, there is no complicated application process or minimum traffic requirement, so you can theoretically start right away.

However, this is not explicitly mentioned: You’ll only be assigned a personal account manager to help you set up Ezoic on your blog once you reach 10,000 pageviews/month of traffic, before that you’re pretty much on your own.

How to install Ezoic on your blog

Registering with Ezoic is a breeze and you’ll immediately get access to your Ezoic Dashboard, where you’ll see a to-do list consisting of four items. Once you’ve worked through these four points, Ezoic is ready to install and voila, the cash register can ring!

Sounds easy? Well, it’s not always quite that simple. I’ll go through it with you point by point:

1. set up account completely

Here you enter all the details about you and your site. This item is relatively self-explanatory and quickly completed.

2. integrate your website with Ezoic

Now it gets trickier: Here you will be asked to change the nameservers of your site in order to use the CDN (Content Delivery Network) from Ezoic. The best way to do this is to contact your hoster. I’m with The Happy Jetlagger at Hostpress*, where you can change the nameservers yourself in the backend, but with all-inkl, for example, this can only be done via customer support.

There is a second option that was shown to me at the time: The connection via a wordpress plugin to be installed. I don’t know if the option still exists, however, I had to install the plugin myself in the course of the setup additionally, because something (once again) did not run smoothly.

3. set up ad testing

Step 3 gets down to the nitty-gritty: Here you need to connect your Ezoic account to Google Ads Manager so that Ezoic can set up the Ads.txt. However, with a little help from Ezoic’s support pages, this is usually doable.

However, it gets difficult with the placeholders: there you have to define the places where the ads will appear later. Sounds easier than it is! Anyway, I was very happy that this point was completely taken over by the Ezoic support staff assigned to me and completely set up all the ad spaces for me. He also probably had to define each individual place for this, there is probably no automatic setting, as one might think with all the technology with AI etc.. Already crazy.

4. set up Leap

In the last point you should set up Leap. Leap promises in principle exactly what caching plugins promise: The page is optimized to pass the Core Web Vitals.

Problems with the setup of Ezoic

However, Ezoic also works without Leap. Maybe you already use a caching plugin on your blog. But here comes the twist: caching plugins often lead to conflicts in connection with Ezoic.

I, for example, previously used the paid version of WP Rocket, as it is included in my (rather expensive, but good) hosting package at Hostpress* and gave the site significantly better loading times. Unfortunately, I had to switch to Leap in order to improve the poor loading times without a caching plugin – a disadvantage of Ezoic for me.

All in all, setting up Ezoic is not as easy as it is made out to be. In any case, you should allow yourself enough time to take care of any stumbling blocks and choose the time so that you can get over any loading time problems or layout errors.

What is the support like at Ezoic?

Ezoic is originally a US company, but has a German branch and also offers German-language customer support. As much as I still struggle with Ezoic itself, I was more than thrilled with my onboarding experience at Ezoic. From day 1, I was accompanied by a dedicated consultant who was always at my side in countless emails and several video calls when things got stuck somewhere and I almost lost patience. (Thanks Stephen for your input!)

After the onboarding phase of several weeks or 2-3 months, depending on the situation, you are then handed over to regular customer support, which is also available in German on request.

Advantages and disadvantages of Ezoic at a glance

Advantages

• regular income
• Independence through another source of income
• Passive income: once set up correctly, it (almost) runs by itself
• good support

Disadvantages

• Changed layout or great influence on the blog design
• Possibility of cannibalization of affiliate revenue (you can exclude advertisers, but still the question remains whether your own affiliate links might not go down)
• Incompatibility with many plugins
• Influence on page speed: Although Ezoic advertises that its solution automatically improves page speed, I cannot confirm this. In pagespeed tools such as Google Pagespeed Insights and GTMetrix, scripts originating from Ezoic are always criticized. However, I would like to point out at this point that I cannot provide any empirical evidence for this and that I am not a real expert in this field.

Earn money with Ezoic: these are the earnings

Ezoic uses a very practical key figure to make revenues comparable. EPMV means “Earnings per Thousands Visitors”, i.e. revenue per 1000 visitors. For me, in August/September 2022, EPMV increased steadily but now does not get above $5.

However, this may also be because I have switched off many options that generate more revenue for a more pleasant user experience: I don’t use Vignette ads (these are screen-filling pop-ups that appear when you click on the blog), blocked certain topics (e.g. ads for online casinos) and switched off the ad testing function, where the AI keeps testing new places and ads appear uncontrollably in the most impossible places. This then looks better, but unfortunately also reduces the revenue.

In the case of travel, by the way, the EPMV is probably generally lower; sectors such as finance, etc. probably achieve a better EPMV as a rule.

Here you can see the evolution of EPMV for my blog since August 2022:

Is Ezoic worth it for my blog?

Each case is individual, and I can only report from my experience with Ezoic for this blog. However, I am often asked if Ezoic is worth it. From my point of view, Ezoic only makes sense if you meet the following requirements:

• min. 10,000 pageviews/month Then you will be assigned a personal support representative during the introductory phase. Also: at least with travel (maybe it’s different with more lucrative topics like finance, I don’t know) the revenue is disproportionate to the change in blog layout and work with the setup. Better make sure you get more traffic first!
• very good technical knowledge of blog topics When setting up Ezoic, as well as afterwards, small problems keep popping up. If you get personal support, it’s really super dedicated, but it helps immensely if you know a bit about the technology behind your blog yourself!
• no Elementor In the beginning I used Elementor Pro* with the Hello Theme and actually designed all pages with individual templates. It looked great, but it kept causing problems with Ezoic: ads were displayed in the wrong places, the layout was shot, the pagespeed just couldn’t be improved etc. I was also told by Ezoic that really good loading times are difficult with Elementor (they already are without Ezoic). I have not tried other page builders such as Beaver Builder, but I could imagine that this causes similar problems. In general, Ezoic probably works best with cleanly programmed, widely used off-the-shelf WordPress themes.

FAQ about Ezoic

Below you will find some questions that I also asked myself during my first steps with Ezoic.

How I came to Ezoic

For a long time I have run this blog rather hobbyist, until I have invested so about 2019 really very, very much time and money for various plugins, page builders and a very good hoster. At some point, this was reflected in good rankings on Google (which just takes time) and increasing visitor numbers. But then came a time with the evil C, which was quite counterproductive for my theme of travel (and preferably far away).

And since I also had worries in my job as a flight attendant, the blog stood still for the time being. I didn’t want to specialize in banana bread recipes or shift to traveling around the local area; that’s just not me. So 2020 and 2021 were relatively lean years, although I already had a good foundation with the blog.

I think it was the same for many travel bloggers, anyway in 2022 more and more blogs appeared using Ezoic. I knew Ezoic before, had heard good and bad – but most of all I had one thing: No desire for advertising that spoils my blog!

However, I found the prospects of regular income without any particular effort of my own really tempting, especially after what were for me lean years overall.

My personal conclusion after 9 months with Ezoic

I would like to start the absolute adulation here, but unfortunately there are some points that still bother me about using Ezoic. I still haven’t managed to get the load times down to a level that produces optimal or at least very good core web vitals, and I think Ezoic contributes a good portion of that.

The test completely without Ezoic in comparison is still pending, but I think after switching from Elementor Pro and Hello to a very fast block theme and various optimization measures, the blog here should really load faster without Ezoic. Especially if I can then use WP Rocket again, which has always led to conflicts with Ezoic.

On the other hand, a constant source of income is always tempting and also offers a certain degree of independence. And basically, I’ve changed my mind about advertising and have fewer reservations now – you really get used to it.

However, I for one will reconsider whether to continue using Ezoic here on the blog now, or at least suspend it for the next few months.