Can EPMV on my niche go above $1-2?

skiwi

I'm maintaining a blog about trading cards and when checking average CPC rates from Google I see that ads usually have a maximum CPC of $1, which is understandably a lot less than high CPC categories. I like writing about it and am knowledgeable about it, however not a great lot of people Google for information.

Now my question is, can I get an EPMV of more than $1-2 with a seemingly inherently 'bad' niche? Can Ezoic help me in any way by offering better ads? My niche has low page views, low CPC, it does however have a considerably higher amount of affiliate sales, I can have 2.5K visitors and gain maybe $2.50-5 in advertising this way, but in a good month I can get $100 in affiliate sales.

What would you advise? Does it even make sense to use ads if earnings cannot get above $1-2 EPMV anyways? I do have the ad amount limited to 3, 4 or 5 ads depending on the article length, but have all categories allowed. I don't want to completely spam users and I think that the UX is not good enough if I don't protect my users at all.

Heather

skiwi Hello Heather here I hope you are well. I have taken a look at your Ezoic account and can see that there is a lot of opportunities for you to grow your EPMV.

As a first step I would recommend doing the following:

1) Fill out your Privacy policy
2) Set your optimization settings to either balanced or revenue focused
3) Remove the max ads per page app
4) Remove the restrictions placed on your site here: https://pubdash.ezoic.com/ezoicads/adrestrictions/adrestrictions
5) Fill in sellers.json
6) Start to use Flickify
7) Authorize Google search console and start to use NicheIQ topics https://pubdash.ezoic.com/nicheiq/webmaster-auth
8) Install a sidebar on your site and then update this with sidebar ads
9) Add in the Native ad placeholder and a top and bottom of page ad placeholder

Once you have done that the next steps are to work through this document: https://www.ezoic.com/epmv-your-website/ If you have any questions as you work through this process please do let us know. thank you

skiwi

Heather Thank you for your reply! I indeed did forget a few things when switching to a different experiment this month. I have set the optimization settings to revenue focused and I removed a ruleset disallowing anchor ads, that was not my intention. I'll look into the other points later today.

I have one current question though: I want to add Amazon native ads, is it correct that I can add this in Ezoic? In EzoicAds > Ad Positions > Ad Types > Anchor Ads > Custom Code? And what does the Always Compete option from the Additional Settings tab mean?

Heather

skiwi No problem I'm happy to help. 🙂

For the Amazon native ads you can use these alongside Ezoic, once you have added the Amazon native ads to your site all you need to do is go to the Script removal tool here https://pubdash.ezoic.com/settings/content/scriptremoval and allow the Amazon script to show. Please note that by having the Amazon native ads on your site it will water down your Ezoic EPMV and so it will be important to take into account this revenue as part of your overall site EPMV.

For the Anchor ads custom code this is if you wish to replace the Ezoic anchor ad with another one that you have a custom deal on.

For the Always compete button this is for if you have a long history of having ads on your site and want the AI to prioritize certain ad sizes. We don't recommend using this on the whole as it can slow down the ads from loading.

skiwi

@Heather I had time to look through the other suggestions but still have lots of questions, please bear with me.

1) Where can I fill in my Privacy Profile? My site itself does have one.
2) Optimization is set to revenue focused.
3) I haven't removed the maximum ads amount as it really became too much.
4) The only restriction I have is that there should be no vignette ads from the home page towards an article.
5) I seem to have a sellers.json, however when I navigate towards it I get a 404 from my WordPress. Any suggestions?
6) I just tested out Flickify and made the first article, it is a really neat tool!
7) Google Search is authorized for NicheIQ.
8) How do I install a sidebar on my site?
9) How do I add in native ad placeholders? Shouldn't it have been automatically?

And I have some more questions:
a) Is it safe to disable Humix videos or make them less annoying, especially the pop-out to the right bottom is very annoying in my opinion?
b) Can I track my eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associates Central accounts within Ezoic? I really like all available analytics!
c) And perhaps most importantly, I enabled Amazon Recommendation ads on my website and I verified that the HTML is shown (<div class="there-after-content" id="there-1242880973"><script src="//z-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/onejs?MarketPlace=US&adInstanceId=c4a56f50-17de-415c-a95e-e1608a13f634"></script></div>), however the ads do not show. Why?

Hoping to hear from you soon!

Heather

skiwi Hello, sure no problem I'd be delighted to help you with this, to make things easier to read and refer back to I'll separate the answers out into blocks below.

Heather

1) This URL will take you to the page within your Ezoic dashboard to add in your Privacy policy: https://pubdash.ezoic.com/settings/privacy/privacypolicy
2) Great thank you

Heather

3) Please be aware that this can decrease EPMV. It's best to leave the volume of ads on the page to automation - our system will never display more ads than is allowed to according to href="https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1348737?hl=en-GB" Google Policy and in terms of there being too many ads it's important to bear in mind that the Ezoic system tests thousands of ad combinations!

As a Publisher you will be going to your website multiple times a day, the Ezoic technology sees this and increases the number of ads that it shows you believing that you are a reader who isn’t affected by ads. This means that your experience is not typical of what your readers are seeing. You might hear us referring to this as being a ‘super user’.

So even though you may be seeing lots of ads, other users visiting your site may not be seeing the same thing. It's best to allow the system to have ample placeholders to test (we recommend 10 - 15 per page).

If you are concerned about your readers' user experience we suggest the best practice is to uninstall the max ads per page app and change your Optimization settings to ‘user experience focused’. Sites that have their Ezoic dashboard set up this way find that they earn more revenue over time and their user experience metrics improve as the Ezoic technology is placing the ad templates on your website that help reduce bounce rate and promote time on site.

Links: https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/optimization-goals?id=optimization-goals</p>

Heather

4) ok
5) On this page you just need to add in something that identifies the site with your Ezoic account - for example your initials or first name https://pubdash.ezoic.com/ezoicads/adtransparency/sellersjson
6) Thank you for your feedback - we really love hearing from our Publishers on the different tools I'm glad you enjoyed using it. 🙂
7) Great
8) For instructions on how to install a sidebar on your site please reach out to your themes Community or customer support
9) To add in a native ad placeholder you just need to follow these instructions and select the placeholder type native ad horizontal or native ad vertical depending on where you would like to position the native ad: https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/guide-to-creating-placeholders-for-ezoic-ad-tester

Heather

a) Please can you help me to understand what you mean by 'safe' to remove Humix videos
b) Not currently, as you level up with Ezoic you will be able to access an API key which will help you to automatically take the data from Ezoic and put it into a data centre of your choice to do this
c) For the Amazon ads please can you direct me to where they should be seen on your site and I can look into this for you? thank you

skiwi

@Heather Thank you again! I fixed some of the points, I'll summarize my remaining questions here:

1) Do I really need to add ad placeholders manually? I was under the impression that Ezoic AI and/or WordPress integration would do this automatically? It seems quite daunting.
2) With safe I meant on whether it would affect my revenue, but maybe I will keep them as pop-out, as I think that viewing duration matters a lot?
3) The Amazon ads should be showing below my articles, it doesn't seem to work however, even not when Ezoic is turned off. I'm at a loss for now..

I also did in-fact remove the ad restrictions and put it on User Experience, hopefully it helps!

Heather

skiwi No problem I'm happy to help. 🙂

1) with the native ad placeholders these up until recently needed to be added in manually, I have added in the native ad placeholder for you.

2) Yes that's correct, the videos have a greater benefit to your site outside of the revenue, this includes the standing with Google, the increase of user experience metrics and the increased potential around building your brand and traffic as videos through Humix are indexed separately on Google to the written content.

3) I have taken a look at your original site without the influence of Ezoic and am unable to see the Amazon native ads on your site. Please can you check to see that you have logged out of your content management system and then view your original site - this article explains how to do this https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/how-can-i-view-the-old-nonezoic-version-of-my-site and then confirm if you can see the Amazon native ads and we can go from there. thank you

skiwi

@Heather The numbers are still preliminary but EPMV seems to have increased from $0.80-$1 lately to $2-3 now, so that's a start! The Amazon native ads seem to work fine if you're from the US and UK, I got some friends to confirm that for me.

I see one of my replies automatically got collapsed, not sure why, but I'll repeat the question here.
My https://therealisticcollector.com/2023/03/26/sorare-uncovered-everything-you-wanted-to-know-in-6-questions article shows ads within the bulleted lists, how can I resolve that?

MichaelH

Thanks for bringing this to our attention! I have added a filter excluding lists from AI ads. Please allow some time for this filter to take effect. Please note that excluding these locations will lead to a slight drop in revenue.

skiwi

Final update for those interested. My EPMV is nearing $5 on good days now! Also one article got picked up by Google Discover and those days even brought in an EPMV of $6.50, not sure if having more visitors matters that much or if the article itself was simply generating more EPMV. Google AdSense mediation also probably helped a fair bit. Finally it feels worthwhile again!