My experience with Ezoic: earn money as a blogger

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 tell you about my personal experience as a travel blogger using Ezoic, tell you about my history with Ezoic, and explain pros and cons so you can decide for yourself if Ezoic is something for you and your blog.

Earn money: Sign up ➜ directly with Ezoic via this link*!

What is Ezoic?

Ezoic* may look like an ad network, but it’s actually a 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.

To the registration at Ezoic*

However, this is not explicitly mentioned: Only from a traffic of 10,000 pageviews/month you will be assigned a personal account manager who will help you set up Ezoic on your blog, before that you are 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 your site’s nameservers to use Ezoic’s CDN (Content Delivery Network). The best way to do this is to contact your hoster. I am with The Happy Jetlagger at Hostpress*, there you can change the nameservers yourself in the backend, but at all-inkl for example you can only do that 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: this is where you need to connect your Ezoic account to Google Ads Manager so that Ezoic can set up Ads.txt. However, with a little help from Ezoic’s support pages, this is usually doable.

But with the placeholders it gets difficult: 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’s the twist: Caching plugins tend to conflict 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 to improve the poor loading times without the caching plugin – a disadvantage of Ezoic for me.

All in all, setting up Ezoic is not as foolproof as it might suggest. 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 customer support. As much as I still struggle with Ezoic itself, I was and am beyond thrilled with my onboarding experience at Ezoic. From day 1, I was accompanied by a super committed consultant who always stood by me in countless e-mails and several video calls when things got stuck somewhere and I almost lost my patience. (Thanks Stephen for your input!)

After the onboarding phase of several weeks or 2-3 months, as the case may be, you are then handed over to the regular customer support, so to speak, which is also German-speaking if desired. Here I can also only report good experiences!

Want to try Ezoic for yourself?
Sign up here!*

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
• Possible impact on pagespeed: Although Ezoic advertises that its solution automatically provides better pagespeed, I can’t quite believe it. In pagespeed tools like Google Pagespeed Insights and GTMetrix, scripts originating from Ezoic are always criticized. However, I would like to point out here that I cannot (yet) provide any empirical evidence for this and, moreover, I am not a real expert in the field. So this is purely a matter of subjective feeling :)

Earn money with Ezoic: these are the earnings

Ezoic uses a rather handy metric to make revenue comparable. EPMV means “Earnings per Thousands Visitors”. For me, in August/September 2022, EPMV increased steadily but now does not get above $5.

But that may also be because I’ve turned off many opportunities that generate more revenue for a more pleasant user experience: I don’t use vignette ads (which are full-screen pop-ups that appear upstream when people click on the blog), I’ve blocked certain topics (such as ads for online casinos), and I’ve turned off the ads testing feature, 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 haven’t tried other page builders like Beaver Builder, but I imagine it 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.

In any case, I do not want to demonize Ezoic, on the contrary! I think it really depends on the individual constellation and orientation of the blog. I also personally know cases that are very happy with Ezoic and get good revenue! My tip: Just try it out!

New: Tips for blogging
I always get questions about how it works with a travel blog, how technical things work or how to make money with a blog (spoiler: It’s not that easy!). Therefore, I decided to give a look behind the scenes here on the blog. I hope it helps you a little bit! Feel free to leave feedback here as a comment or DM me on Insta and let me know if you’d like to continue reading blogging tips.