My Honest Ezoic Review After Attempting to Switch From Google AdSense to the Ezoic Ad Network For Ad Monetization on My Blog.
A Mostly NEGATIVE Review of Ezoic
I recently applied (August 2021) with Ezoic for ad monetization and had a strange, interesting & frustrating experience that resulted in one of my websites being deemed ineligible for monetization with Ezoic. How things occurred made me question the legitimacy of Ezoic as an ad service provider and prompted me to write this review.
To be clear, I really wanted to come onboard with Ezoic & I wanted to like them. I believed that doing so would dramatically increase my ad rpm and actually found their technology based focus appealing.
But I am struggling at this point with the onboarding process and communication, or rather the lack thereof of helpful communication from Ezoic. I also remain suspicious as to the source of bot traffic that they allege on my website and cited as the reason for my sites disqualification – as I have never experienced the type of traffic to a very minor post on my website UNTIL I started on this onboarding journey with Ezoic!
Context: My Website
The website I was trying to onboard with Ezoic was TheParenthoodAdventures.com. It is a WordPress website that is hosted @ bluehost. I currently get about 4,000 visitors /month at this website and about 5,300 views. I started this website in the fall of 2018 and it has about 200 posts in total. Many of the posts are just updates on what our family is doing – but there are a substantial amount of posts that also cover various parenting topics, family travel destinations, and some humourous aspects of life as well. The website is currently monetized with ads from AdSense and the Amazon Affiliate program.
The Issues I Experienced When Onboarding with Ezoic!
The number of issues I experienced in the onboarding process with Ezoic was, unfortunately, lengthy!
1) Technological Glitches
a) Ezoic’s System Not Sending Email it Claims to Have Sent: When I was attempting to complete all of the requirements for Integration – Ezoic indicated that I would be receiving an email from AdExchange – and that I needed to authorize/accept the request. I scoured my email inbox, junk folder and every other folder I have set up in my email application looking for that email numerous times. I also exhaustively searched all of my email folders and did everything else I could think of to try to locate this email that I supposedly received – to no avail. Ezoic’s website kept indicating that the email had been sent – and I could not request that it be sent again.
I eventually reached out to support @ Ezoic and (to their credit) they did respond quite quickly and indicated that I needn’t worry about the email – as the request had been approved. I don’t know how that could have been the case – but I was just trying to get past all these integration hurdles – so I wasn’t going to question things too much! Maybe the AdExchange request was bundled with the AdManager request??
Despite the fact that I was able to reach support at this point – things dramatically changed once a determination was made that I was ineligible for monetization – because of invalid/bot traffic. After that – there was no reaching support – AT ALL and I was banished to their support community they call TWIST. Maybe that name came about as a cruel joke – because it certainly felt like they were just TWISTING the knife into me as my frustration grew!
b) Ad Placement Holder Technology: I installed the Chrome extension to aid on setting up ad placeholders on my website. This is the avenue & method Ezoic recommended. The browser installation of the extension is about all that went right with this required part of Implementation. The entire experience was confusing & glitchy – despite me having watched the Ezoic produced video tutorial on their website several times.
The Ezoic Chrome extension seemed to repeatedly lock up my browser &/or make everything run painfully slow. At times it was like I was trying to control what the mouse does with a variable delay – which made it just pretty much impossible to control or know what result I would get.
I did manage to fumble through the process somehow, seemingly by randomly clicking on my site – but I really could not tell at all where these ad placeholders had actually been placed!
Oh, and Ezoic – how do I see/edit ad placeholders if deemed ineligible for monetization? The Ezoic Chrome extension wouldn’t show me anything after I was deemed ineligible…. I just wanted to make sure everything was removed.
2) Mysteriously Spiking Views & Visitors – on a Very Insignificant Post
On the 10th, 11th & 12th of August I did the onboarding I needed to do to get my part done for cueing up my site for monetization. Admittedly, I was rushing a little – since we were heading on vacation for a few days on Monday August 13th. On Wednesday August 15th I noticed that my website had some very unusual volume in both number of visitors and views on a very short and insignificant post from my oldest daughter about a Raspberry Pi based device (an OctoPi or OctoPrint for a 3D printer) that she had written back on September 20th, 2020. It is a very short post that you can view here: OctoPi!
I suspect – but definitely can’t confirm, that the claimed invalid traffic that they cited for disqualifying my site may have been related to the uncharacteristic spike I witnessed for this post. Since Ezoic didn’t provide a lot of information and was unwilling to even provide a more detailed explanation…
By process of elimination of potential sources of invalid traffic Ezoic has identified in their email, I surmise that a potential explanation could be bots trying to login to the CMS login page, which I have a link to in my footer. I say this, only since I know I did not buy an old domain & have not redirected any other sites to this one – so that does not appear to be a plausible source of the issue. Likewise, I have never engaged or paid for any link building. So it must have something to do with bots trying to log into the CMS admin page??
The only other possible source of the invalid traffic I could come up with was maybe since I was using a site speed testing website to check things as I was enabling the Ezoic LEAP toolset – that maybe the site scans from that website (GMetrix) was tripping off Ezoic algorithms for identifying invalid traffic. But that seemed highly unlikely to me – since GMetrix shows you where the server that is performing the scans is located (Canada in my case) and I could see that the visitor and view counts were really low from there those days.
This type of thing has never happened before – and just coincidentally does a few days after I begin the onboarding process with Ezoic – whom I’ve changed my nameservers to point to, etc, etc… Again, forgive me – but it does make me SUSPICIOUS!
As I indicated I had not experienced these issues before onboarding with Ezoic. Was the switch to Ezoic the cause of these problems or it just coincidental? So did they cause these issues – and then reject me – because of these issues they caused? Seems a little inquiry would be in order – but apparently NOT to Ezoic!
3) Conflicting Communications/Information From Ezoic
The left hand at Ezoic did not appear to know what right hand is doing! You can see that from the emails shown above, as well as from what I was seeing on their website.
When I logged in the HOME screen would indicate that integration had been completed – and that now my website would be reviewed – which could take up to 10 days. Even after 18 days of completing the integration steps and 15 days after being notified I was deemed not eligible for monetization I was still seeing this message!
However, when I went to the MONETIZATION tab – I received the following message that indicated that my website had NOT been approved due to invalid traffic! So apparently the review had been completed – but they couldn’t indicate that on the HOME tab?
4) Website Anomalies
Before my little adventure of trying to onboard with Ezoic – my website had been running fine for many, many months! During the process of trying to onboard and activate LEAP (Ezoic’s set of tools to speed up delivery of webpages to viewers) – I started to experience some very serious and FRUSTRATING issues that I just simply had not experienced in the past!
I noticed menus that were extremely slow in loading & functioning, pages that loaded incorrectly with various images missing or collapsible menus fully extended in their display and errors loading some specific pages – where only the error would be displayed rather than any of the actual page.
Soon after the onset of such issues I recognized that I did have a caching plugin running on my site – and after going through some of the educational courses they had- I understand that it may have been one of the primary factors contributing to some of the issues I was experiencing with my website. So I did disable it completely.
If this was such a major potential issue I do feel that Ezoic really could have better drawn attention to such fact right at the beginning of the process of enabling LEAP. Maybe a pre-implementation check-list or something…. After 24 hours…
5) Time & Effort
Onboarding with Ezoic did take a significant amount of time for me over 3 days. I would estimate I spent upwards of 10+ hours in the process. This was a huge amount of time & effort for me that, in retrospect, I could have put to much better use in generating some content!
I did TRY to follow up with them and give them an opportunity to provide some explanation to what I could document with regard to the spike in traffic with my daughter’s OctoPi post. I tried to open a service ticket outlining my findings and asking them for more of an explanation – given the odd traffic patterns I experienced in the days immediately following my completing their onboarding process!
I think that knowing the amount of time & effort I had invested in onboarding with Ezoic made it especially upsetting to me that they we not even willing to take or invest a little time in me to simply respond to my email, let alone help investigate whether their systems or processes played any role in what I saw & experienced.
6) No Real Help or Access to Support
Once Ezoic unilaterally determined (without much of a real & plausible explanation) that I was not eligible for monetization due to “invalid traffic”, they instantly branded me a pariah and relegated me to using their user community “Twist” as my sole source of support. (“Talk to the Hand!“)
Ezoic’s help – was really of no help at all! In one of the rejection emails they sent me they provided a link to help me resolve the claimed bot traffic that indicated that I should change the WP admin login page location. But there was no actual RESOURCE to help me do so.
I looked on the Internet and could only find one article that SEEMED to right on point – only to find that it was an article that was written in 2013! Yes – 8 years ago. Sorry – I’m not going to use something that is that old to make changes to something as important as the location of my WP admin login page location!
There were some other posts I discovered as well – but I felt uncomfortable with the solutions they provided – so I just kind-of put the whole thing on pause….
7) Ezoic’s LEAP Application / Tool Set
LEAP is Ezoic’s system and tools set to help accelerate website performance. The issue I have is that they only give you 10 days to use this system for free. If you use them for monetization – it is free. But if you do NOT get approved, like I didn’t, then after 10 days you have to pay for it – or they take you off the system.
My FIRST thought (unfortunately) was this was somehow the plan Ezoic had hatched up all along – to get me to pay for LEAP – now that I was kind of stuck & had invested all this time and energy (and pointed my domain registrar to their DNS servers….etc). In other words – a SCAM! But they would also be losing some ad revenue – so it probably really wasn’t. Regardless, I still harbored some suspicion….
The Pros & Cons of Ezoic – From My Experience
The Pros of Going with Ezoic
- I liked some of the educational videos – like the ones explaining how caching work and why it is important to disable any caching plugins you may have on your site.
- I do like their technology focus – despite it failing somewhat here.
- I like their adtxts website and technology. It does make controlling and managing your ads.txt file much easier – especially with multiple websites!
- I still like to think that I would get more ad revenue from their platform – but I have no way to confirm or disprove that yet.
- I liked the LEAP features – but was not willing to pay for them after I had been rejected for monetization – which would have made them FREE to me to use.
Cons of Going with Ezoic
- I think that Google AdSense may be closing the gap on them a little with some of the new technology & features they are rolling out on the AdSense platform. (Experiments, AdSense Opportunities, Optimization features, Auto Ads, Page Exclusion…)
- If you don’t make it into their inner circle – there really aren’t any means of communicating with them or receiving any support.
- Communication is poor. I citied several examples above where the left hand is apparently unaware of what the right hand is doing at Ezoic.
Advice if You are Considering Applying to Ezoic for Ad Monetization:
- Take some of the positive Ezoic reviews with “a grain of salt” – in that Ezoic has an affiliate program that rewards affiliates with lifetime residuals of a referral’s earnings. Just something to consider. You can read more about their affiliate program HERE.
- Make a sitewide backup immediately before doing anything with Ezoic!
- Deactivate any caching plugins you may be using on your site!!
- Don’t speed test your website before or during applying to Ezoic for monetization.
- Don’t install their WordPress plugin until after you are approved. There are many reports of trouble when un- installing the plugin.
- Don’t activate any other Ezoic features until you have a decision on monetization eligibility – unless you are willing to pay for those features out-of-pocket if you, for some reason, like me, are NOT approved… Wait to activate LEAP!
- Change nameservers back if your website is not accepted for monetization.
Conclusion & Current Status
So was I being dealt with disingenuously? Was there a ploy to bait me with monetization and the no pay model for LEAP – but then reject me so I would have to pay for LEAP, etc for 6 months while I wait for a chance to reapply? I don’t think so. I still don’t like how things played out – but I don’t really think that there was a scheme to bait-and-switch me or to scam me.
But could Ezoic have done better? Absolutely!
Ironically, I had no issues getting accepted into AdSense a couple years ago when I first applied – which people have said is more difficult. So I really didn’t expect any trouble onboarding with Ezoic – and was very surprised when it did.
Am I going to re-apply when my 6 months of being banished are over? I’m not sure. I think I will see how things are going then and see how I feel then. As I said – it is interesting to see the new features and technology being implemented on the Google AdSense platform – and maybe I will just stay there until I can jump to something like Mediavine or AdThrive.
Current Status & Updates: So the end result is that I am forced to stick with AdSense for now. I will re-evaluate the situation in 6 months and make a decision at that time. In the mean time – Ezoic is welcome to reach out to me to help me sort out what happened – if they are so inclined. I will update this post with any further developments.
Let me know what your experience has been with Ezoic down below. Thank you!
Sincerely,
