To say that we’ve had a little bit of experience with Ezoic’s premium ad network would be somewhat of an understatement. In fact, we’ve been using their services for nearly a year and a half now, which is more than sufficient to understand its many strengths and few weaknesses. I dare say that without running a thorough Ezoic case study as we are at present, we might not have even been here at all.
Back when our (unnamed) case study domain was created about 7/8 years ago, it was mostly a hobbyist publication. We shared stories and writings but never had plans for them to go anywhere. Then we came across Ezoic and started monetizing through their platform. We realized that we could do a lot more, by writing inspiring, useful, and impactful articles for thousands of people to enjoy.
Ezoic’s high-earning ads meant that we could readily invest those profits into more content. Today, a team of writers is working hard around the clock to deliver their very best. This is thanks to those folks who’ve logged into our Ezoic case study domain. And, to Ezoic’s AI-powered ad network for that sweet, sweet ad revenue to keep us doing what we love the most – just writing stuff for you to read.
How Did Our Ezoic Case Study Came To Be?
But how did we get started, anyway? If you’ve been reading through our monthly reports, reviews, or comparison pages and whatnot, you might’ve spotted us mentioning this “case study domain”. What is this site, and where had this all begun? It was obviously necessary for us to have a working website to experiment with Ezoic, and the results from that, as you might imagine, are absolutely fantastic.
The domain itself is quite old, roughly 7 to 8 years in all. There was a decent amount of content there at the time, with an abundance of articles that you may or may not have come across. There was an entire bucket load of news content, short blog updates, product reviews, some sponsored articles, and perhaps a guide or walkthrough. To be fair, we never had a proper content strategy laid out.
As such, and despite the high volume of articles present, our Ezoic case study site attracted very little in the way of traffic. Plus, it came without any serious focus on keyword research or focusing at SEO (search engine optimization). For us, it was just this WordPress blog that we put together, and ran on a set-it-and-forget-it approach, with no plans to make a whole lot of money from it.
At least, we did keep it fairly up to date with new articles regularly. And, we did monetize the site, at the bare minimum. We’d write about sponsored content or included affiliates to bring cash back into our pockets. Crucially, we had ads running on our Ezoic case study domain, which was being powered by Google’s AdSense. Even for our humble needs in those early days, AdSense was inadequate.
The Moment We Switched From AdSense To Ezoic
Just to show you how ‘inadequate’ AdSense was, for the whole month of September 2020, we earned a grand total of $177 in ad revenue. As a business, it was clearly not a sustainable one, as we barely made anything in return for all our hard work. AdSense’s performance and income stream wasn’t the reliable source of cash that we hoped for, and we’ve been pretty disappointed with the returns.
With all that in mind, we started looking at other ad providers. Our immediate attention went to the other top ad networks like AdThrive and Mediavine. They were popular enough that there was quite a lot of chatter going around, so we tried. The keyword is “tried”, as our Ezoic case study domain was unable to meet their very high minimum requirements so that we could monetize on their service.
Upon applying with AdThrive and Mediavine, we were rejected from both. This thus showed us how inaccessible many of these premium ad providers are. You’d need 50,000 monthly pageviews as well as 100,000 monthly sessions just to even knock on their door, respectively. But that still doesn’t mean they will let you in. As we were looking around, a rather lesser-known (at the time) platform known as Ezoic came to mind, and we’ve stuck around ever since.
We noted that Ezoic had a minimum barrier of entry of just 10,000 monthly pageviews to monetize on their services. These days, however, they’ve removed that threshold entirely, and are now offering their Access Now program. This initiative was designed purely to help serve those publishers with monthly traffic of less than 10,000. Still, we never had this easy on-ramp option in the past.
We Started To Really Like What We’re Doing
The date of that migration was early October 2020. As a reminder, September 2020, which marked the final month that we’d be using AdSense solely, netted us ad revenues worth $177. As soon as we switched, mind you, our October 2020 returns were up to a massive $606. That’s a humungous 3.4x increase within just 30 days. It was substantially better than what we’d be earning through Google Adsense.
Just for a spot of context, then… In less than a month after switching over to Ezoic (not even a full 30-day cycle), we more than tripled our ad revenue compared to our peak with AdSense. We were pretty happy with that, and it inspired us to go back to square one. And, have a serious rethink about what we’re doing with our future content strategy, and it got us thinking about what else could we do.
The Content Strategy For Our Ezoic Case Study Site
We then realized that we could multiply our ad revenues by reinvesting the steadily expanding profits from Ezoic, and put them into creating new content. While we won’t be naming our Ezoic case study domain (to limit competition in that niche), we’ll try to be as transparent as we can. In that spirit, we could at least tell you that our new batch of content for maximal return on investment was mostly long-form, SEO-focused articles.
Initially, we ran around 20 of these SEO articles monthly from November 2020 to August 2021. Then, we went in hard, and are now writing more than 100 of the same articles every month. Again, these are keyword-focused articles, and each one is about 3,000 words in length. The entire set of articles was all designed around significant keyword volume knowledge and hours’ worth of research.
We’d cherry-pick to find the most popular keywords and terms to create a detailed article on, and set to work. Beyond that, we also optimized them for our on-page SEO guidelines. In other words, we’ve managed to create a streamlined process and formatting to best maximize SEO as much as we’d possibly could. It was in the hopes that we could pull in ample organic traffic from Google search.
Plus, we did all this without resorting to link building. The long game later began, as we had to wait a long, long time. Once an article was published, we simply kept our heads low to crank out content. This was unavoidable, as we realized that our long-form SEO articles would take at least 6 months or so to start ranking and pulling in serious traffic to start to break even with our initial investment.
Ezoic Publisher Success Managers Really Helped
As we steadily kept growing, we managed to catch Ezoic’s attention. In particular, they hooked us up with a Publisher Success Manager, once we got to a certain size. Having spoken with them, they personally helped us out with best optimizing our Ezoic case study site. For example, they assisted in tweaking the placement of ads on our site, such as maximizing the number of ads that we could show, and leveraging its artificial intelligence.
Plus, our managers also guided us on fine-tuning the performance of the site in general, such as the speed of page loading times, analyzing caching, and much more. Although, It wasn’t just those subtle improvements that proved to us how valuable it was to have that personal touch. However, Ezoic has a great team of people that are always ready to help, such as the fantastic technical support staff.
We Kept On Waiting, And Waiting, And Waiting…
As we noted earlier, our content typically took a while to start ranking in Google and began pulling in traffic. On average, we’d give a 6 to 9-month timeframe, although some articles took at least a year or more to rank sufficiently before it’ll cover the initial cost of commissioning it. As we waited, we went ahead and continued with our original content plan, and made enhancements along the way.
Some of those alterations were aimed at extending our reach SEO-wise. For example, we focused on including secondary keywords, matched keywords, as well as related terms in our articles. This is an addition to the primary keywords that the entire 3,000-word long article itself is primarily based on. Hence, a single article could likely broaden its scope to a wider audience, covering numerous topics and hundreds of different keywords.
As time passed, our keyword research became more granular at sniffing out those keywords that we want the most. Specifically, ones with extensive search volumes and how we could add to the many other sites that are covering that same keyword. Could we improve on what they’ve done already? Or, could we add our own flavor, touch, and attention to detail given how long our content is?
It’s practically a waiting game, as we followed through with our content strategy month after month, and often with no sign that we’d make any profit at all in the end. All the while, we believed in what we sought to achieve, and really went all in. During those months, we steadily upped the quality of our articles, and built-up a solid crew of writers to contribute more to our future growth.
How Quickly Did Our Ezoic Case Study Domain Grow?
Here’s a quick summary of our month-on-month growth since we first migrated form AdSense over to Ezoic. As of writing, this table is up to date until the latest full month (February 2024), but we’ll periodically update it as the months tick on by. For more details, click on the respective months to read up our extensive revenue reports:
| Ezoic Case Study Domain Growth Metrics | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traffic | EPMV | Monthly Revenue | |||
| Month | Visits | Pageviews | Engaged Pageviews | ||
| Oct-20 | 35,719 | 41,272 | 24,441 | $16.97 | $606 |
| Nov-20 | 44,131 | 51,306 | 30,311 | $21.79 | $961 |
| Dec-20 | 45,137 | 52,249 | 31,588 | $19.99 | $902 |
| Jan-21 | 55,497 | 65,674 | 39,520 | $12.60 | $699 |
| Feb-21 | 52,170 | 61,038 | 35,065 | $19.80 | $1,032 |
| Mar-21 | 62,459 | 72,677 | 43,888 | $19.00 | $1,186 |
| Apr-21 | 71,785 | 83,988 | 51,381 | $16.76 | $1,203 |
| May-21 | 74,103 | 86,461 | 54,147 | $22.65 | $1,678 |
| Jun-21 | 169,886 | 195,252 | 126,315 | $33.18 | $5,636 |
| Jul-21 | 151,294 | 172,909 | 110,605 | $35.67 | $5,396 |
| Aug-21 | 168,613 | 193,528 | 122,706 | $34.59 | $5,831 |
| Sept-21 | 182,545 | 209,016 | 131,008 | $38.12 | $6,957 |
| Oct-21 | 196,213 | 223,502 | 143,260 | $36.29 | $7,120 |
| Nov-21 | 217,309 | 247,787 | 155,561 | $40.40 | $8,779 |
| Dec-21 | 247,568 | 282,644 | 180,626 | $47.66 | $11,799 |
| Jan-22 | 339,313 | 389,738 | 240,188 | $34.37 | $11,633 |
| Feb-22 | 341,089 | 391,128 | 240,440 | $35.44 | $12,087 |
| Mar-22 | 400,022 | 458,979 | 278,879 | $40.34 | $16,136 |
| Apr-22 | 437,153 | 514,648 | 292,088 | $40.23 | $17,585 |
| May-22 | 475,553 | 566,450 | 314,912 | $39.19 | $18,637 |
| Jun-22 | 455,218 | 559,644 | 299,271 | $42.18 | $19.199 |
| Jul-22 | 488,689 | 604,283 | 326,642 | $36.03 | $17,609 |
| Aug-22 | 504,074 | 614,438 | 343,568 | $36.65 | $18,476 |
| Sept-22 | 451,257 | 549,607 | 307,241 | $39.81 | $17,963 |
| Oct-22 | 387,408 | 475,004 | 475,004 | $39.12 | $15,155 |
| Nov-22 | 350,986 | 431,359 | 238,321 | $40.92 | $14,319 |
| Dec-22 | 333,577 | 413,774 | 233,338 | $39.54 | $13,188 |
| Jan-23 | 321,326 | 392,034 | 231,662 | $37.17 | $11,944 |
| Feb-23 | 301,159 | 382,007 | 212,841 | $40.00 | $12,055 |
| Mar-23 | 396,135 | 514,905 | 272,570 | $35.37 | $14,011 |
| Apr-23 | 380,150 | 497,375 | 497,375 | $33.82 | $12,857 |
| May-23 | 399,279 | 621,985 | 271,176 | $33.59 | $13,412 |
| Jun-23 | 316,552 | 471,602 | 217,266 | $35.33 | $11,182 |
| Jul-23 | 377,305 | 477,740 | 252,423 | $26.79 | $10,126 |
| Aug-23 | 346,953 | 424,724 | 228,179 | $26.66 | $9,248 |
| Sept-23 | 217,358 | 265,420 | 145,061 | $29.58 | $6,428 |
| Oct-23 | 169,359 | 207,109 | 114,746 | $24.58 | $4,162 |
| Nov-23 | 152,667 | 181,267 | 102,551 | $26.71 | $4,077 |
| Dec-23 | 124,581 | 148,345 | 80,976 | $21.84 | $2,721 |
| Jan-24 | 122,430 | 142,702 | 78,119 | $15.02 | $1,838 |
| Feb-24 | 110,737 | 129,959 | 72,800 | $17.33 | $2,001 |
Finally, The Goods Times Are Here For Our Ezoic Case Study Site
Note, that our monthly ad revenues mentioned up above don’t account for Ezoic’s handy mediation tools. In essence, it’s a feature whereby you’d allow Ezoic to automatically pick Google’s ads (through AdSense) over its own if Ezoic’s AI and machine learning algorithms find that Adsense would earn you more. It’s practically a win-win and does help to complement our already decent daily returns.
For the most up-to-date (as of writing) report on our Ezoic case study domain’s ad revenues, here’s a snapshot of our ongoing March 2022 performance. As you can see, a single day’s ad revenue is now 3x higher with Ezoic than that we’d used to earn across an entire 30-day period with AdSense. It’s a mind-blowing experience to witness this much growth in what is a relatively short span of time.
If you want to learn more about Ezoic and our honest take on it, feel free to flip through our detailed and extensive review of Ezoic. There, we’ll note its many features, benefits, and how our Ezoic case study site’s financials have fared overall since we switched. In addition, you’ll get a more defined conclusion as to whether you should (or shouldn’t) choose Ezoic over the competition.
Spoiler alert – it’s absolutely worth making that jump over to Ezoic. If you’re concerned about the risk, know that Ezoic has a guarantee in place where they promise to earn you 25% more in ad revenue. Or, they’ll pay the difference! Should you desire more information or aren’t sure about where to start, feel free to hit me up on our Contact page. I’ll be more than happy to have a chat.
The End Of The Road
Note, as of updating this (March 2024), we’ve since ended our Ezoic case study here. In total, after 3.5 years (or around 42 months) of regular reporting, analysis, and updates, we’ve decided that the time is right to end it here and move on to something new. Still, there’s plenty more content, guides, and insights that we’ve yet to share with you yet, so don’t go anywhere! In the meantime, if you want to learn more about why we’ve ended our case study, check out our update here.