Something is wrong! EPMV lower than Adsense Impression RPM

PierreEustacheC

I know it takes time for the Ezoic system to optimize. At this point, however, it's devaluing ad inventory for my domain.

The EPMV with more than 8 placeholders (including sticky placements that refresh) (and more than one pageview) is less than Impression for a single ad unit when I was with Adsense last week. Would you trust me if you did not have access to the data? It's unbelievable!

The system has access to my Adsense historical data. There's no price floor for ad auction based on that?

It was with the same low traffic. Fewer ad units. And advertisers were willing to pay. However, with Ezoic, the U.S. is among the countries with the lowest EPMV.

Also, I set up Direct Ad Orders with a price priority of $0.99 CPM. A lower bid should not win.

Please find out what's wrong. Is it revenue not reported? bot traffic?

I don't want this experience to be short!

Mohammad2306

There seem to be multiple factors at play.

The ad placeholder set-up on your site is very limited. Did you remove the WP ad placeholders?
https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/setting-up-ad-tester-placeholders-with-the-ezoic-wordpress-plugin

The ad placeholders you added are quite restrictive. You also placed a floating sidebar placeholder right above other sidebar content, or perhaps you added more sidebar content below it later on. Either way, that should be adjusted (-> https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/what-is-a-sticky-sidebar-ad-how-can-i-add-a-sticky-sidebar-ad-to-my-site).

The Direct Ad order apps are likely reducing regular ad impressions. However, it's your preference. It's not clear how you are using them.

As for traffic volume, you'll want to verify that the number of visits to your site, under 50 per day, is expected. Are you also seeing that in Google Analytics? We want to make sure there is nothing else blocking visits. About 40% of your traffic is unknown/direct (-> https://analytics.ezoic.com/reports/trafficSources/trafficSource). With a low traffic volume, that could even be you browsing the site yourself.

PierreEustacheC

Thank you for the answer, Mohammad!

Still, the impression RPM on Adsense is $2.10 on average. So, for each ad unit on the page on average. (unfortunately, I can't upload images to show).

The ezoic custom channel on my Adsense account reports a $0.79 impression RPM since Mediation is active.

The question is: if other advertisers beat AdSense's bid of $0.79. How come the EPMV (not even impression RPM when I remove Humix earnings) is $0.42 for March 30 (less than $0.79).

You see! Clearly, there's a problem. (more placeholders than the twelve already set up won't fix it).

1) I did remove the WP placeholders. I add placeholders manually and no longer use the Ezoic WP Plugin). I add placeholders where I know I got $20-30 with Ezoic ack in the good days (2018-2019 with just 6 placeholders). Still, I follow all other Ezoic best practices: 8+ unique placeholder positions, 10+ placeholder options, 5+ sizes per placeholder/device, adaptive, fuild-sizing, sticky placeholders, etc...

2) It's an attempt to stop advertisers from bidding low by displaying affiliate ads instead (like charity ads). However, it seems it doesn't work.

3) Google report is different than Ezoic Analytics but close. I want to optimize my site before working on traffic recovery. unknown/direct is not only me. I did not visit my site yesterday (March 31) but I got 20 of those traffic. I'll investigate further (if it's IG or something else). I thought you could find out with data at the server level if it's something I can block on Cloudflare.

I saw an improvement on March 31, from $1 to $4 EPMV. Pinterest saved the day (I'll focus on that).

I'd appreciate further help!

PierreEustacheC

When I look at the firewall events of Cloudflare, I see a lot of IPs trying to access my domain via this query string:
?ez_view_original_only=on

I know it's the URL to access the original version of my site. but is it your system doing that in background? It gets blocked by Cloudflare (Browser integrity check). The IPs are:
50.17.23.226
34.203.221.191
52.91.26.0
3.235.158.1
3.235.15.241
94.200.122.130
50.17.23.226

All are the same details:
ASN: AS14618 AMAZON-AES
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0
HTTP Version: HTTP/1.1

HarryB

Hi Pierre - I would definitely recommend inserting more placeholders if you can. Our recommendation is actually 10-15 per page at least (and ideally more than that) - it doesn't mean that you'll see more ads, you'll continue to see the same number of ads, just in more combinations of locations.

I'd also say that we're at the worst period of the year for global ad rates, but we are starting to pick up out of it, so you should see continual improvement over time.

The requests that you're seeing may well be coming from Ezoic, but if that's the case then they'll be discounted from your traffic stats as we don't include bot requests like that in our reporting.

As an additional recommendation - do what you can to try and increase traffic - writing more content is the most effective way of improving your organic reach, and will lead to an increase in your inventory value, and improve your ad earnings.

PierreEustacheC

Hi Harry,

I just set up firewall rules to allow those IPs. It would assure me to know that those IPs belong to Ezoic.

I'll stay positive...

I'll start working on improving the site traffic.

In the meantime, what I ask is to stop advertisers from bidding low on my inventory with a price floor.

Tucker_P_Ezoic

We can't control what advertisers bid on the site - the floor is based on what they're willing to pay for the ad space. If we artificially set a floor at a higher rate than what they're willing to pay, you wouldn't be earning at all. That's why it's important to focus on the optimizations that we know from millions of data points daily help to increase ePMV on the site - and that's what we're pointing you back to here.

Just back to the direct ad order you setup --- is that an actual ad campaign you've setup with an advertiser directly / outside of Ezoic? We just want to make sure that's what it's being used for, because it could be hurting your overall fill rate / revenue if it's not setup properly.

PierreEustacheC

Hi!
1) Thanks!
2) not an actual campaign.