If you open your Ezoic dashboard, you can spend literally all day poking around, running reports, toggling settings, and changing just about every single aspect of your site if you wanted to.
But not every setting or tool is equal; some provide basic changes, while other settings and tools can (if used correctly) cause your income to skyrocket.
This article will reveal several of these tools and tricks that you can use to significantly increase your site’s revenue.
Sometimes, you really do need a massive new content strategy to completely change your website’s direction to start earning more money; other times, you just need to click a button to see an extreme difference.
Here are 10 Ezoic dashboard tricks you can do in the next five minutes that will help your site earn more money.
1. Use BDA to Check “Pages Without Revenue”
If you go to your Big Data Analytics tab, then navigate to Content > Pages Without Revenue (you can see your report here), you can quickly see if any of your pages aren’t making revenue.
Take this publisher, for example. These pages get thousands of views per week(!) and readers spend well over a minute looking over each page. This is a perfect page to put ad placeholders on!
This can happen for a number of reasons, but a common reason is that you simply don’t have any ad placeholders on the page. If that page is getting a lot of traffic, simply turn on ad placeholders to ensure all that traffic is getting monetized. It’s a super easy quick win.
2. Enable Ad Mediation
You can read more about ad mediation here, but essentially, by enabling ad mediation you ensure you’re always getting as much ad revenue as possible from ad networks bidding on your site’s placeholders.
As one of Ezoic’s top publisher success managers told me, enabling ad mediation takes “all of 20 minutes to get done and can make a significant impact in terms of additional revenue and to help drive up competition which increases the amount advertisers are willing to pay for ad space, and thus how much a publisher can earn.”
This is another super simple, easy win you can give your site. It may take a little longer than the five minutes I promised (sorry) but you can still set this up almost instantly.
Here are the exact steps you need to take to enable ad mediation if you haven’t already:
- Go to your Ezoic dashboard, then EzoicAds > Adsense|Mediation (can be done here)
- Fill out the invite boxes
- Wait 20–30 minutes for Mediation Dashboard email to arrive in your inbox
- Head to AdSense Dash > Account > Access/Authority > Third Parties > Will see “Not active” switch to “Active”
- Back to Ezoic dashboard > Mediation
- Enable Mediation if it is not on yet
- Click “Add Network” next to AdSense and fill in the required information and click “Save”
- Required info: email (Must be the same as what was used for the AdSense Account), phone number for AdSense account, and a zip/postal code
Enabling ad mediation in your Ezoic dashboard can provide your site with a significant boost in revenue. By having ad networks increase competition with each other, you ensure your site is earning as much revenue for your hard-earned real estate as possible.
3. Complete Your “Top Optimizations” Tasks
This little trick is available to every Ezoic publisher with access to Ezoic Levels, and provides you with a series of simple, easy tasks that greatly optimize your site for revenue.
Publishers with access to Levels should do all these optimizations (found in the “Top Optimizations” section) to ensure they have a great setup. These optimizations show you what might be going wrong with your site, and where opportunities lie for increased revenue:
These are basic ways to optimize your site, making it a smoother experience for you, your audience, and advertisers looking to place their ads on your site.
4. Set Up Your Ads Correctly
This is a special tip, because it includes a ton of simple tricks to set up your ads correctly on your site. Vetted by some of Ezoic’s foremost product and advertisement experts, here are several ways to optimize your ads:
Ad Setup
- Wrap any manually placed ad units
- Use Ezoic WP plugin to generate placeholders (if on WordPress)
- Add additional ad placements through inserting code or Extension
Ad Placeholder Setup
- Generally have 1 ad every scroll; usually 2–5 paragraphs based on content length
- Make sure to utilize high performing / high visibility ad placeholders such as Top of Page Ad + Under Page Title Ad under the initial image
- AI (mobile)/Enhanced (desktop) Placeholders — automatically inserts ads outside of manually created placeholders, used to identify more opportunities by testing locations
- Create more placeholders = more impressions = more revenue
- Put ad placeholders ‘above the fold’ to perform better than those below
Ad Types Setup
- Enable all ad types as each additional ad type can generate between 10–25% more revenue
- Opt in for ‘Beta Formats’ which will enable additional ad types as they’re released
- Sidebar ads — especially if lots of desktop traffic
- Adaptive sizing — to show multiple ad creatives within a single ad placeholder, can have +35% uplift compared to one creative
Other
- Check BDA > Content > Landing Pages (can be found here) to identify top pages and how they could be improved on different device types (i.e. mobile experience)
- Use Caching + Leap for Core Web Vitals / Site Speed — improves UX, revenue, can improve traffic
- Leverage Humix / Flickify for extra revenue, SEO benefits
- Leverage NicheIQ — SEO tag testing, content strategy, and beta test Page Booster from Trailblazer to improve lost traffic
I know, I know — that was a lot.
The good news, you only have to do as much as you want. In a way, your site will never be “perfectly” optimized — and that’s fine. The digital landscape is always changing, and you can always be improving. That means you can choose what improvements to focus on, one day at a time. Hopefully that big list gives you some easy ways to start.
5. Update Your Optimization Goal Setting to “Revenue-Focused”
Ezoic gives you a few options for what you want your site to really be in terms of optimization: either “revenue focused,” “user experience focused,” or some customized balance of the two. You can find this toggle here.
Interestingly, it can sometimes feel like your site has way too many ads and that it must be negatively affecting user experience, right? But if you take a closer look at your Big Data Analytics, you can easily see if this is actually true, and in many cases, it’s not — users are staying longer on your site, earning you more revenue!
That’s why you can change your optimization goal to “revenue focused” and see for yourself if user experience is affected or not. In many cases, users don’t mind a more revenue-focused website at all — it’s how the internet works and what the majority of internet users have come to accept.
Switching this toggle to make your site “revenue focused” will weight revenue more than UX metrics when making decisions on what ad combinations to show. It’s worth mentioning that the Ezoic system will always optimize for UX just depending on how big of a focus the publisher wants.
6. Turn On “Enable Ads” Toggle in Humix
Another suggestion that ties in with increasing your revenue is to make sure you have this Ads Configuration toggle switched on so that you can earn video ad revenue on any Humix videos shown on their site:
We’ve talked about Humix extensively here on the blog, and there’s a good reason; recent Ezoic research has shown that of publishers who recently enabled Humix on their site, 60% have already seen a notable increase in revenue and 57% have seen a notable increase in site engagement by their audience:
This toggle can be an enormous boost to your site (this publisher saw a 35% increase in revenue just by using Humix without ever creating any videos of their own).
7. Turn Off Ad Restrictions
A lot of publishers are rightly concerned with showing low-quality, controversial, or polarizing ads on their site — think pro-gambling ads, home remedy advice, celebrity gossip, etc. Publishers don’t like thinking their users would ever see anything irrelevant or low-quality on their site, so they restrict and limit what ads can be shown on their site.
While this might make sense in theory, there are several factors about this decision that greatly hinder how much ad revenue they make.
Ezoic’s AI will only show the most optimal and relevant ads possible to each user of your site, based upon all the available data we have about them and your site. This means Ezoic’s AI simply wouldn’t show one of your users a specific ad category if the user had never given any indication of being interested in that ad or topic.
However…
If you turn on ad restrictions, your users might never see these ads you want to avoid, sure. But you’re also limiting the data that the Ezoic AI can use to make better, more informed ad choices for your users. This leads to a lower ad quality overall, since the AI has limited data to work with.
That’s why we recommend you turn off ad restrictions, and trust the AI to only show the right ads to the right users, and trusting 90% of your users won’t see gambling ads every time they log into your site! Maybe a tiny portion will; but only because they’ve demonstrated explicit evidence that they might actually be interested in that topic. Make sense?
You can turn off as many ad restrictions as you want here, and you can trust that the Ezoic AI will use this newfound data to ensure that your users see better ads, not worse ones — making you more revenue in the process!
8. Change Your Traffic to “100% Ezoic”
Similarly to turning off ad restrictions, allowing Ezoic to get 100% of your traffic gives our AI far more information to work with when it comes to optimizing your site for user experience and ad revenue.
Restricting this traffic to Ezoic slows down the Ezoic AI research, prolonging the timeline for you to earn more revenue and see serious breakthroughs to your site. In order to give you and your site the fastest timeline to a high-quality user experience and high levels of revenue, give the AI as much data as possible for the fastest results (which can be accessed here):
9. Create a Flickify Video and Put It On Humix
Another lightning-fast way to open a new revenue boost is to use Ezoic’s article-to-video converter, Flickify. Another incredibly beneficial tool for publishers, countless Ezoic publishers have used this tool to become video content creators overnight.
With the meteoric rise of video content and its massive popularity, video content creation has become increasingly necessary for publishers looking to stay ahead of the curve. But not every publisher is well-versed — or even interested — in creating video content.
Fortunately, Flickify can turn any of your written articles into high-quality videos in a matter of minutes, to be uploaded somewhere like Humix where it can earn even more revenue. Simply go to the Flickify dashboard (which can be accessed here), click “Add New video,” and quickly upload one of your written articles to be converted into a high-quality video:
Once you customize and create your video, you can simply click on the “Share to Humix when it’s rendered” tab so your video will automatically upload to Humix, which can earn you revenue:
10. Turn on the “Maximize Revenue” Button
There’s a lot we covered in this article — is there any way to do all this even faster, you may ask?
There sure is.
Ezoic just created a new “Maximize Your Site’s Revenue” button you can access directly in your dashboard here:
Here’s a full breakdown of what this button does, but essentially, it optimizes your site’s revenue in over a dozen ways instantly:
Ezoic Ads:
- Ezoic Traffic 100% (All Device Types)
- Anchor Ads On
- Vignette Ads On
- Auto-Insert Ads On
- Enhanced Placeholders On
- Sticky Sidebar Ads On
- Native Ads On
- Left Side Rail On
- Right Side Rail On
- Adaptive Sizing For All Placeholders On
- Floating Video Unit On
Humix:
- Humix On
- Humix: Grow On
- Humix: Engage On
This button is perfect for publishers who are still learning how to conduct high-level data analysis but still want to maximize their revenue in the meantime — all with the push of a button.
In Conclusion
Ezoic takes pride in giving publishers complete access to every important data point they can think of, pulling highly accurate reports and revealing key insights that can take your site to the next level.
There are countless ways to improve your site, both from a macro and a micro level. Sometimes, all you need to do is toggle a few switches to really open the floodgates of income, and any of these 10+ Ezoic tricks should help tremendously with your ad revenue.
