Ezoic Vs AdSense

Ezoic Vs AdSense is a broad subject and could cover many things, but my guess is that there’s one big burning question and this is which one earns more money for your website. Opinion varies but generally it seems that most people are of the opinion that Ezoic beats AdSense in terms of earnings per 1000 page views.

By how much that difference is, varies wildly. Some people say they earn 3 times as much with Ezoic, with others (a small proportion) saying that it’s only about 1.2 times. Very few say they earn more with AdSense though.

I’ve found, on my small site here, that Ezoic outflanks AdSense by at least a factor of 2 and sometimes more. I’m not sure why, perhaps they just manage to target the Ads better or, since their whole platform got upgraded earlier this year, it’s just been a whole lot better for the user experience all round.

Is Ezoic Better Than AdSense?

This is a hotly debated topic and regularly crops up on Reddit. My opinion, after some teething problems is that yes, Ezoic is better than AdSense. There’s a few reasons why;

Ezoic Offer Better Metrics

It’s much easier to drill into the metrics on the Ezoic platform, using the Ezoic Big Data Analytics. They cover all manner of things in there, from bounce rate, engagement rate, which pages provide the highest ePMV (effective price per thousand visitors). You can do all that by integrating AdSense with Google Analytics I suspect but it’s a bit fiddly to get right, whereas Ezoic just does it.

Ezoic Offer LEAP

Ezoic are, these days, far more than just an ad platform. They realised a while ago – and we discussed it in our post about whether Ezoic will slow down your website – that advertising causes some pretty big slow downs on your website. So they developed LEAP which helps speed it all up again, whilst serving Ads.

AdSense have no such system in place. Their ads slow your site down and they don’t seem to care.

Ezoic Offer A Caching CDN

Ezoic also offer, as part of LEAP, a caching CDN (Content Delivery Network). This caching CDN is quite configurable too. But why is it important? Well, there’s a couple of reasons;

• A CDN puts your content closer to your users – where-ever they are.
• CDNs reduces load on your server – by serving everything from the CDN many requests won’t even touch your server.
• A CDN can improve your reliability too. If your server goes offline for whatever reason, the CDN will still serve your pages, in many cases.

All of those things help speed up your site. Ezoic provide that as part of the service. Google AdSense provide none of it.

Ezoic Offer a Chrome Extension To Set Up Your Placeholders

With AdSense and Ezoic you can set your ad serving preferences to simply place ads where-ever the individual services feel is best. Almost no-one I speak to does that though because most of the time, they get it wrong. I’ve seen my sites have ads placed in the middle of critical instruction steps, or in the middle of paragraphs. It makes the content hard to read and is an awful user experience.

So I set up specific placeholders. I’ve actually coded my site to do it automatically for me but that’s another story. If you don’t want to do it in code, or fully automatically you can install the Ezoic placeholder extension from the Chrome Web Store. This then lets you place the advert placeholders visually, including setting the alignment with your content, what size ads you want and any additional borders, colours etc. AdSense offers no such tool to my knowledge.

Ezoic Gives Better Revenue, Generally

Certainly for our websites it does. And many others say the same thing in various online marketing forums where it is discussed. We saw around 1.5 – 2.0 times the revenue from Ezoic when we switched and it’s maintained that way throughout the year.

One Downside To Ezoic Vs AdSense Though

Ezoic’s AI is, allegedly, quite picky about the order in which placeholders should be encountered on your page. Each position that you want an ad to appear (or should I say, that you suggest an Ad might appear if Ezoic’s AI deems it appropriate) needs to have a unique placeholder ID in the Ezoic account you’re using. If you use the same placeholder ID in two places, only one will be filled with an Ad. This can be good if you want the AI to choose between a spot of course.

But the placeholders must also be sequential, or at the very least, each placeholder that is lower on the page than the previous one must have a higher number in the placeholder system. It’s a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with the system. But suffice to say, AdSense just uses the same piece of code at each placeholder point.

This means, if you’re generating your placeholders programatically then AdSense is easier. For example, I place an Ad Placeholder between every second comment. With AdSense I can loop through the code and if x is divisible by 2 I print the AdSense code. But with Ezoic I have to print a very specific piece of code.

Do I Need AdSense To Use Ezoic?

According to Ezoic themselves you do not need an AdSense account to sign up for Ezoic – but your site must adhere to AdSense’s policies. This is because Ezoic will sometimes delegate advertising to AdSense, and they are a certified AdSense partner and would not want your site to jeopardize that relationship.

The full details of this can be found from Ezoic’s knowledgebase article.

Is Ezoic Trustworthy?

A quick search on Google asking this question brings up a Trustpilot review of Ezoic which says that Ezoic is a useless company and that they’ll break your code and not make you any money.

That’s nonsense. Just nonsense. Is this site broken? You’re reading it right now and I keep a very close eye on the performance metrics and the look of the site. If it was broken I would’ve moved away from Ezoic in a heartbeat, so clearly that review is out of touch with reality.

Other reviews on Trustpilot bemoan how Ezoic has rejected their site and they’re not at all transparent or helpful. Again, in my personal experience nothing could be further from the truth. Ezoic have always been approachable with me and have always been very helpful. A few months ago I was raising ticket after ticket because I do thinks a little bit differently to others (i.e., I use Gatsby from WordPress and have some of my own programming behind the scenes) and some things weren’t quite working right for me. The Ezoic support team were very patient and answered all my issues.

I wonder how many of those TrustPilot reviews are from competitors trying to besmirch Ezoic?

Ezoic Vs AdSense In Relation To Customer Support

This is a rhetorical question but when was the last time you tried to contact AdSense Support? Did you get an answer? If you did you might want to buy a lottery ticket cos you obviously have better luck than most of us.

My sites ran AdSense for years before I switched to Ezoic. In fact I only switched to Ezoic initially because Google kept sending me e-mails saying I had ‘invalid traffic and my ads were now limited‘ while they decided what to do.

I tried reaching out to Google Support for help, but all I ever got back was a canned email response to read their policies and make sure my traffic wasn’t violating them. How on earth can I decide where my traffic comes from? It just arrives – largely as a result of searching on Google. So if I had invalid traffic it was because Google were sending it to me!

After the third time, and no ability to even write to anyone at AdSense I turned to Ezoic. And literally any time I have had a problem I can reach out to someone at Ezoic. You cannot do that with AdSense. At all, ever.

So, if you want support, Ezoic win hands down vs AdSense for this reason, notwithstanding any of the other reasons.

Summary

This is my brief overview of Ezoic Vs AdSense. I’m firmly of the opinion that Ezoic beats AdSense hands down on so many factors that it’s really not a competition at all. If you’re looking for an Ad provider for your websites, Ezoic is definitely worth a look. Their entrance requirements are fairly relaxed – although you will have to have a site that complies with the AdSense policies too – and their support has always been excellent. It’s an added bonus that the revenue they give is better than AdSense too.

My Ezoic experience these days just ticks over and looks after itself. The teething problems I had when I switched to Gatsby are all resolved – and if you’re using WordPress it’s even simpler. If you’re currently using AdSense it’d be worth trying Ezoic for yourselves I reckon.

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Featured Image by Eduard Egorov from Pixabay