Capping off the spookiest month of the year, October 2022 saw a continued trend of declines in our case study domain’s monthly ad revenues. From decent earnings of $18,476 in August 2022, it then dropped to $17,963 in September 2022. As of October 2022, it settled even lower again, where ads netted us a new low of $15,155. That figure is even below that of March 2022’s ad revenues.
Breaking it down, it’s worth reminding you that our case study domain is a part of Ezoic’s premium program – the latter of which is our ad network provider of choice. Among the perks that come with upgrading to a higher tier is increasing the chances that high-paying, A-tier advertisers would show up on your website. Through this, our case study domain earned us about $3,441 in display ads.
Furthermore, we’ve also been making good use of Ezoic’s mediation service – where you could have ads from other ad network providers running alongside Ezoic. Thus, through bidding data, only the highest-earning ads will appear, even if that means Ezoic having to replace one of their ads for one from AdSense, for example. That netted our case study domain another $1,209 for October.
Combined with base ad earnings altogether, you’re looking at $15,155. Right off the bat, we’ll have to subtract $2,200 from that figure – which is the monthly fee for joining Ezoic’s premium program. TL;DR, the biggest contributor to these decreasing ad revenues – despite us putting even more cash and effort to bring more and higher-quality content – was thanks to a huge Google core update.
| October 2022 Ad Revenue From Ezoic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (Total) | $15,155.53 | |
| Traffic | Visits | 387,408 |
| Pageviews | 475,004 | |
| Engaged Pageviews | 262,370 | |
| ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) | $39.12 | |
Key Figures
Specifically, a Google search engine algorithm core update that occurred in late September 2022, which is still plaguing us today. You can see in the graph below how far our case study domain has grown since October 2020. It spiked massively around June 2021 as we ramped up and doubled down our content creation process. Since then, we’ve only really seen an upwards trajectory.
But, our Achilles Heel was the fact that the case study domain had most of its traffic coming in from Google. With two-thirds of site traffic coming from Google, it’s expected that a big core update such as this can have a major impact on traffic inflow as a whole. It might be good… It might be bad. For our case study domain, it was sadly the latter, with a roughly 20% drop compared to September.
To be specific, we’re seeing red across the board. Across all of October, our case study domain saw over 387,000 page visits, and more than 475,000 pageviews, with around 262,000 of those latter being classed as engaged pageviews. Correspondingly, this marks a roughly 17.17%, 16.61%, and 17.61% drop, respectively. Our October 2022 EPMVs (earnings per thousand visitors) also declined, too.
From an average of $39.81 in September, it fell to $39.12. The downward change in the latter had further exacerbated October’s decreasing ad revenues. On the bright side, we’re earning more than double per week in October 2022 compared to October 2021… Around $3,000 versus $1,500 every week. So, it’s not too bad, but I had been expecting a continuously upwards growth trajectory.
Studying Some Data
In prior months leading up to October 2022, we’d sometimes see ad revenues of $600 to $700 and beyond in a single day. But as of October, our highest-earning day gained us about $550. All other days noted daily ad revenues somewhere in the low to mid-$500s. Or, on some of the worse days, about mid to high-$400s in a day, with the final days of October trending in the low-$400s.
Nevertheless, this hasn’t deterred our plans. As you might know, our case study domain is focused on creating long-form SEO content. While ad revenues have been going down lately, we’ll be working hard in the following months to keep up a positive momentum. I’ve learned that when it comes down to Google core updates, there’s not really much that we publishers can do about it.
The best thing that we can do is keep on creating content and ride out the storm… With the hopes that the algorithm may update itself again in the coming months to favor us once more. After all, this situation isn’t merely restricted to our case study domain. Other publishers are likely seeing a similar drop-off in earnings as of late. Or in some cases, even worse than what we’re experiencing.
One of the things we’ve been delving into lately, as a way of building an alternative revenue stream, is creating video-style content. Another perk of joining Ezoic is that you’re able to host videos there, instead of say, YouTube. With that in mind, you could take advantage of Ezoic’s clever monetizing system by putting ads in those videos to earn an additional source of income.
Our Future Plans – Video Ezoic Flickify
Throughout October 2022, those videos – which we embed alongside written content on our case study domain – earned us an additional $470. Not a lot in comparison, but every penny does help. That’s something that we’ll continue to do for the foreseeable future as an extra money-maker besides our long-form, SEO-focused, written articles. But, what else have we got planned?
As much as I’ve tried to look past the drop in traffic, it’s inevitable that we’ll have to do something before Google’s algorithms correct themselves in our favor. Over the past month, we’ve written almost 100 articles, which will start to rank and gain traffic over time, in the next 12 or so months. So far, our case study domain already has nearly 2,000 of these long-form SEO articles written out.
So, what’s next? Well, I have enough data and analytics to effectively isolate our best and worst-performing pages on the case study domain. What I’ve done then is find the top-300 articles, and what I’m focusing on now is managing those articles more carefully. This entails updating them regularly, alongside making subtle improvements or adding further optimizations to those top articles.
Seeing that they’re already earning handsomely for us month over month, our strategy – besides creating fresh, new content – is supporting those already-published articles. Hence, keeping them fresh enough that we could continue to keep them appearing on the first page of Google. In time, their lucrative earnings will somewhat dull and minimize the initial low gains of the newer pages.
Video Overview
If you’re keen on getting a more in-depth update on our case study domain’s October performance, feel free to check out this video that I’ve put together down below. While you’re there, we also have plenty of other articles on Ezoic. We’ve got everything from troubleshooting ideas, detailed reviews, guide articles, month-on-month revenue reports, tips and tricks, as well as an AMA page…
Supporting Payment Evidence
To help show that our earnings are as honest and authentic as possible I will include some additional evidence.
As mentioned for this month we will receive a payment from Ezoic and another payment via Adsense. Below is the email confirmation from Payoneer.
Payoneer Ezoic Income Payout Proof
Note that this is the second month we have asked for the Ezoic Premium Fees (currently $2,200) to be taken out before the payout. This helps reduce the international exchange rates if you are constantly converting dollars to pay Ezoic Premium Fees, ask your Publisher Success Manager about this option if it might help save you money too.
Here you can see the payout from Adsense via Ezoic’s mediation tool for £1,072.50 which is converted from $1,286 that was owed.
