Do you like gamification to improve your productivity? Than Ezoic Site Scores are for you!
I love the way you can get badges and scores with Ezoic to not only see what you have to do next, but also get some instant gratification.
A lot of publishing on niche sites takes time to improve. It takes 6 to 12 months to start ranking a new article on Google, but Ezoic is helping you to speed things up with achievements.
I’m a sucker for gamification of my daily tasks, so this works out perfectly for me.
What is Ezoic Site Scores?
Ezoic Site Scores is a scoring system to measure niche website optimization. As a publisher progresses through the Ezoic Levels, they’ll unlock new optimization tips and tricks to see where to improve.
It’s the gamification of optimization tips and tricks.
Optimization levels
Each level has optimization you can make to your EzoicAds account that fit your particular level. The most basic optimizations start in Beginner.
Beginner
Created Placeholders
A placeholder is a potential ad location.
Ezoic’s technology will learn how your users behave on your site and then provide them with a custom combination of ad sizes, locations, and number of ads from the available placeholders that best suit their browsing behavior.
Place at least 10 placeholder on each device type, desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Anchor Ads
Activate anchor ads. A “sticky” type of ad unit that remain in a fixed location as the user scrolls on the page. They are available for both mobile and desktop.
Anchor ads are important for monetization because they are typically high earners due to the high viewability and engagement of these units.
Ads.txt
Ads.txt is an industry standard way to reduce ad fraud on your website.
It’s a small text accessible from the root of your domain that contains a list of all the ad networks you’ll allow to show ads on your site.
Sellers.json
Sellers.JSON is similar, but it’s SSP’s (Supply Side Platform) version of the publisher’s ads.txt file.
In the file, SSPs and exchanges are required to list all their authorized reseller partners along with their seller ID and any detail on the legal entity that owns that company.
Sellers.JSON gives ad buyers information on every reseller involved in serving ads on your side, and can result in more confidence and likelihood to increase ad spend.
Novice
Placeholder Density
Placeholders are potential ad locations.
Ezoic’s system uses the placeholders on the page and information about each user to provide a unique combination of ad sizes, locations, and number of ads that promote a positive experience while generating more revenue.
In order for Ezoic’s technology to achieve the best results, there needs to be an ample amount of placeholders available to test.
They recommend adding 8-15 placeholders per page and including as many sizes as possible.
AI Placeholders
Having more placeholders for Ezoic’s system to test is directly correlated to increased revenue and improved user experience.
By including AI placeholders alongside the ones added manually or through Ezoic’s Chrome extension, you can easily increase revenue on your site.
Adsense
Ezoic is a Google Certified Publishing Partner, and with this comes additional benefits to you as a publisher.
One of these benefits is being able to link your Adsense account directly to your Ezoic account to help with optimization and monetization.
Objectionable content
Ezoic helps to keep your site compliant with Google Policy with our Objectionable Content filter, which scans your site for objectionable words.
Any pages that are flagged for objectionable content are prevented from showing ‘Google Ads’ to keep your site safe, and the pages are listed in a report in your Ezoic dashboard.
It’s important to check these reports and clean up the content if possible so that you can continue monetizing those pages while staying compliant with Google Policy.
7 days above 25%
In order to provide each user with a personalized experience, Ezoic’s technology needs to understand how they interact with your website.
This requires enough traffic being sent to Ezoic’s platform to gather data on user behavior and use that to customize the experience.
This means that you need to direct at least 25% of your traffic through Ezoic’s ad optimization.
Intermediate
Pages without revenue
Our system has detected that there is a large percentage of pageviews that aren’t generating revenue. Typically this is due to placeholders not being present on the page.
We recommend checking the pages without revenue and making sure there are 8-15 placeholders per page to help increase revenue.
Adaptive sizing
Adaptive Sizing is an intelligent system that analyzes when to show multiple smaller ad sizes in a larger ad space.
An equal or lesser amount of pixels are shown, but there are multiple creatives rather than one, larger one.
Consent management
Ezoic’s Consent Management App gives you the ability to configure and setup cookie permissions for visitors to comply with GDPR & CCPA regulations.
These new regulations were designed to give EU citizens (GDPR) and California residents (CCPA) more control over their personal data.
Publishers that collect and store data need to let their users know that it is being collected, and they need to grant users the ability to remove that information (‘opt out’) should they wish.
Using Ezoic’s Consent Management App, Ezoic automatically maps IPs and switches out ad tags based on visitors’ responses.
Unwrapped ads
Unwrapped ads are ad units that are showing on the Ezoic version of the site, yet not being tracked or optimized by Ezoic.
These unwrapped ads can impact Ezoic’s performance – both revenue and UX – because the system isn’t able to measure how those ads impact all the other ads on the page or the user experience.
5,000 visits to Ezoic-optimized versions
Ezoic’s technology improves revenue and user experience by testing and customizing the ad experience for each user to the site.
Ad Tester and other Ezoic products leverage data from visitors to your website to make decisions on what ad sizes, locations and density of ads should be shown based on browsing behavior and personal preferences.
Send at least 5,000 visits through the EzoicAds system.
Advanced
Long page placeholder density
Ensure you have enough placeholders on pages with more than 1500 words.
It is recommended to have a minimum of 10+ placeholders on a standard page and continuing to add another in-content placeholder every 2-3 paragraphs in longer content.
Placeholder variety
Placeholders are potential ad locations that the system uses to provide each user with a custom combination of ad sizes, locations and number of ads.
When using Ezoic’s Ad Tester technology, it’s important that each page has 10+ unique placeholders that include various sizes to be tested.
The more placeholders that are available for the system, the better the improvements in revenue and user experience.
AMP placeholders
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source project led by Google to ensure that mobile webpages operate at optimal speed.
Ezoic’s technology runs on AMP the same way it does on mobile web, as long as there are placeholders for the system to test.
Oftentimes the AMP version of the site is different from the mobile web version of the site, and placeholders don’t translate properly, resulting in poor performance on AMP.
30 days above 50%
Ezoic’s technology improves revenue and user experience by testing and customizing the ad experience for each user to the site.
This means that each user will see a unique combination of ad sizes, locations and density of ads based on their unique browsing behavior and personal preferences.
For 30 days, send at least 50% of your traffic through EzoicAds optimization tool.
40,000 visits to Ezoic-optimized versions
Ezoic’s technology improves revenue and user experience by testing and customizing the ad experience for each user to your website.
This means that each user will be provided with a unique combination of ad sizes, locations and number of ads that encourage higher engagement and drive more revenue.
As this is done on a per-user basis, Ezoic’s system needs to understand how each user engages with the site.
It does this by leveraging visitor data to learn how your users behave on the site and predicts the ad experience that will suit their browsing behavior and personal preferences.
Send more than 40,000 visits through the EzoicAds system over time.
Experienced
Page categorization
It’s important for publishers to understand which articles on their site are receving the highest engagement from visitors, as well driving the most revenue for the business.
While Landing Page and Page reports in Big Data Analytics provide these insights, each individual page may not have enough visits/data to fully understand the value they provide.
Setting up Categories within Big Data Analytics will allow you to view data for groups of articles on your site.
This provides valuable insights into which topics your visitors find the most engaging, and which topics are deemed more valuable to advertisers.
Understanding what drives engagement and revenue allows publishers to make smarter decisions on what topics to cover in future articles.
Author tracking
For publishers who employ a team of writers to help create content for a site, it’s important to understand the ROI behind articles from specific authors.
By setting up author tracking, you’ll be able to see better understand which writers provide the best engagement to your visitors, as well as highest Page RPM.
Responsive ads setup
This is an advanced optimization that can be set to deliver a specified ad size for a defined minimum screen size.
This can be done in a placeholders settings from the Monetization tab of the Ezoic dashboard or directly on a placeholder’s settings from the Ezoic chrome extension.
Sidebar sticky ads setup
A sidebar sticky ad stays fixed in the sidebar while users are scrolling down the page, which results in high viewability and is typically one of the top performing ad locations for a site.
Video ads
Generate video ad impressions by enabling and monetizing video content using the Ezoic Video player.
The Ezoic Video Player uses custom machine learning technology to improve the outcomes for streaming video on your website.
These outcomes include better search engine optimization (SEO), increased video playback numbers, optimized video placement, and maximized ad revenue, along with custom video analytics to help monitor performance.
Uploading video to Ezoic’s platform allows you to get the most out of their video content by offering more direct control and customization than other third-party streaming platforms, while remaining easy to use.
60 days above 90%
Ezoic’s system is constantly learning how users engage on your website and using that knowledge to make better decisions about which ad layout to show to each user.
By increasing the amount of traffic you send to Ezoic, more data is available for the system to use in the optimization process. This means better and faster results.
For 60 days, send at least 90% of your traffic through EzoicAds optimization tool.
Conclusion
Ezoic site scores really is a fun way to work on optimizing your site for the best ad performance. You gain experience, revenue, and badges!
Joost Nusselder is The Content Decoder, a content marketer, dad and loves trying out new tools en tactics. He's been working on a portfolio of niche sites since 2010. Now since 2016 he creates in-depth blog articles together with his team to help loyal readers earn from their own succesful sites.
