January is usually a pretty scary month for any publisher, content creator, or anyone else who’s dependent on ad revenues to make a living. With the holiday and end-year ad spending budget running dry, January’s when you’ll see advertisers pulling out left and right, causing CPMs to sink faster than a rock. As expected, our case study domain saw similar declines this past January 2023, with ad revenues of around $11,944.
It’s a lot worse for us, because if you’ve been with us over the past few months, our ad earnings aren’t too rosy. Owing to a Google Core search engine algorithm update right around August and September 2022, it has only been downhill from there. From $18,476 in August, it’s gradually fallen to $13,188 by December… If you need a month-by-month earnings report card, check out the handy Revenue Reports tab up there.
January 2023, the start of what we hoped to be a good year, is beginning on a slightly sour note. To start, our case study domain attracted around 321,000 page visits, and over 392,000 pageviews, and of the latter, a solid 231,600 were classed by Ezoic as ‘engaged’ pageviews. While impressive in a vacuum, these marked 3.67% and 5.25% declines in page visits and pageviews between December 2022 and January 2023.
On the slightly bright side, engaged pageviews fell by under 1%. Nonetheless, that still hasn’t helped the fact that our total January 2023 ad revenues – around $11,944 – dropped by 9.43% compared to December. The other brutal figure to note is our case study domain’s EPMVs (earnings per thousand visitors), which had a 5.98% drop. Still, with an average EPMV of $37.17, at least it’s better than January 2022’s $34.37.
| January 2023 Ad Revenue From Ezoic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (Total) | $11,944 | |
| Traffic | Visits | 321,326 |
| Pageviews | 392,034 | |
| Engaged Pageviews | 231,662 | |
| ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) | $37.17 | |
Key Figures
To further break down the earnings data, it’s worth reminding you that we do have Ezoic’s mediation tool, which allows our case study domain to be monetized alongside Google AdSense. TL;DR, if Ezoic realizes its own ads may not earn you as much as Google’s, it’ll swap out the ads in the placeholder for AdSense units instead. In short, Ezoic’s mediation ensures that publishers can maximise their revenues as much as possible.
In the case of January 2023, of the $11,944 monthly total, about $1,021 came from mediation. Elsewhere, approximately $3,473 were attributed to us being a part of Ezoic’s premium program. This is where you’d get premium, high-paying, big-brand advertisers to showcase their ads on your webpage. Hence, earning more than regular ad partners. Of the latter, it makes up the rest for the month, netting us $7,352.
Speaking of, there is a fee attached to Ezoic’s premium program. At the minute, we’re paying them $2,200 upfront, every single month. It’s costly, and I don’t like the pricing model where you have to pay upfront. It does, however, make certain that you’ll always earn more in ad revenues than what you’re paying to Ezoic. With that in mind, it’s also disappointing to see that daily ad earnings are also seeing a steady decline.
Our best day throughout January 2023 earned us around $455. Meanwhile, the rest of the month saw a modest mid-$300s to low-$400s, generally speaking, in ad revenues per day. Then, we’ll compare that with December 2022, and we can immediately see that December’s daily ad revenues are usually higher… In the low-$400s to mid-$400s, peaking in the $500s range, with (expected) huge drops during Christmas.
Looking At The Data
So, what’s causing this repeated decrease in ad revenues? Well, as we’ve mentioned in our other monthly ad earnings reports, the biggest factor to consider is the late Q3 Google Core update. This eventually lead to a horrid Q4 2022, with a gradual month-on-month decline in ad revenues. Now, we’ve done a few things that we hoped could stem the tide, and slow down or entirely cease the diminishing site traffic inflows.
If you’re not yet familiar, our case study domain mainly focuses on making long-form, 3,000-word content that is keyword-optimized, with a lot of thought put into them to maximize their SEO. Over the past few months, we’ve been undertaking content refresh for those blog posts. Our hope is that by keeping all that content and the articles fresh and updated regularly, Google might begin favoring our website more.
Moreover, we’ve begun experimenting and tweaking all the other SEO-related aspects of those long-form articles. Even minute fine-tuning, such as exact-matching secondary keywords or changing up how media are shown on a page… And it has yet to bear fruit, and some of our case study domain’s pages are slowly falling outside the top 10 of Google’s search results. For now, we can only hope that it’ll level out soon.
Lately, we’ve also expanded the scope of our content to make up for the loss. That includes hosting a few videos on Ezoic’s video hosting service. Then, embed that alongside our long-form, written content. It thus allows you to monetize those videos through Ezoic’s ad network, and earn you a bit more ad revenue. In this past January 2023, our videos have yielded around $272… Every penny helps, even a tiny bit.
Our Future Plans
So, if you need to maximize earnings from your content, we’d highly suggest taking a look at Ezoic’s video hosting service. On that note, there have been other neat additions within Ezoic that we’ll be using to the best of what they may offer in the near future. For example, we previously talked about NicheIQ, which is Ezoic’s keyword recommendation tool. If you’re already on Ezoic, it’s a handy little tool to check out.
Recently, Ezoic also launched new ad types that you could load up onto your webpage, including side rails. These are ad placeholders that would stick onto the side of a page, left and right. As a user scrolls through the webpage, the ads would scroll alongside, with the page. It’s mostly ideal if most of your audience uses a PC (or maybe also a tablet), as it requires the screen to be wide enough, with a central column.
Still, it does make good use of the otherwise empty margins along the side of your webpage. Over the long run, it would no doubt help to show more ads on a page, which could be a boon for ad revenue. Other than this, I’ve also been experimenting with Ezoic’s Leap service. This is their website optimization tool, and they can be rather handy if you’re trying to improve your site’s Core Web Vitals. Or, how speedy your site is.
Since Google pays close attention to Core Web Vitals when ranking websites, I’ve been playing around with options such as disabling ads over the fold. While this may slightly kneecap potential ad earnings, this may boost our case study domain’s page loading speeds. So, let’s see how well this fares in the coming months. For now, though, if you’re a fellow publisher, you might find our other resources here fairly insightful.
Video Overview
I’ve created an extensive starter guide on how to make money by creating content online. Between some mistakes and learnings that I’ve learned from over the years, these pointers may be handy if you’re also in the business of content creation. For those who are starting out with Ezoic, we also have guides on how to get started with setting up Ezoic. And, our list of tips and tricks for optimizing the best out of Ezoic.
Elsewhere, we’ve even discussed some of the ways how to do keyword research. As well as, some of the best free keyword research tools that you can find. On top of that, understanding how to optimise the SEO of your content to get a better chance of ranking well in Google. If you have any queries, feel free to hit me up in our Ask Me Anything section. Or, you could watch this video below for an extended summary…
