Making use of an advertising network such as Ezoic or Mediavine to monetize your content site is one of the best ways to make your online venture lucrative.
An advertising network acts as a bridge between advertisers and publishers, and handles all the transactions and communications involved so you can get on with what you do best.
Creating content!
Ad networks gather and condense data from potential advertisers and then give it to possible publishers who host advertising space on their sites.
Once transaction data is supplied, the network's server sends the advertisement to your website.
This data is known as 'advertising inventory' for advertisers and publishers. So, for example, an advertising space might include desktop advertising, email, mobile, and YouTube.
Every ad is stored securely on the server of the advertising network and then delivered to publishers.
Although every ad network functions in a similar way, there are also key differences.
Therefore, it's essential that you understand the main factors and features of each before choosing ad networks like Ezoic and Mediavine.
But how do you decide which one is better for your site? Our article will help you decide by breaking down the features of both networks and their pros and cons.
But first, let's take a closer look at Ezoic and Mediavine.
Ezoic is a full-service platform that provides solutions for digital publishers who want to increase their revenue and enhance user experience, as ad earnings and user experience are intertwined.
Publishers can see higher revenues if they improve user experience, and Ezoic can help with this as they have solutions that can benefit publishers with websites, no matter their size.
Ezoic is also notable as the first ad network to include machine learning and AI to enhance its products and features.
Mediavine is one of the more exclusive display ad networks and is favored particularly by lifestyle websites, although it can be beneficial for other niches too.
As Mediavine is one of the most exclusive ad networks it doesn't just accept any site.
They receive about 75-100 applications every day, with just a small percentage of these websites being accepted.
All Mediavine asks is that you use them for at least managing display ads.
However, they also provide sponsored posts and affiliate marketing posts.
Big Data Analytics: This gives you valuable insights into your audience and what factors of your content and the website are affecting your ad revenue.
Leap: This is a virtual toolkit that helps you improve your website's performance. It discovers what might be causing poor performance and gives you automated solutions to a lot of the bigger issues.
SEO Tag Tester: This lets you play around with different page descriptions and headers to see which ones enhance your SEO performance.
Video Player: This enhances the results of streaming video on your site by taking advantage of unique machine learning.
Key Features Of Mediavine
Create: This is a WordPress plugin that lets you include structured data-marked content cards in your blog posts, which is particularly useful for how-to articles, listicles, and recipes.
Grow: This is a feature that helps with user engagement. By acquiring first party data it encourages users to receive high-performing, more bespoke adverts.
The Mediavine Dashboard: This is your own custom dashboard that lets you customize advertisements on your website, check RPM data, monitor your earnings, and a lot more! The website health check is an important aspect of the dashboard, and tells you how optimized your website is for adverts by denoting different colors to levels of performance. Red is the worst, and teal is the best.
Trellis: This is a WordPress theme optimized for speed that helps you meet user experience and Google's Core Web Vital performance guidelines.
What Is The Ad Setup For Ezoic?
One of the requirements for Ezoic is that your website and advertisements must be connected by cloud integration, and there are two ways you can do this.
Chrome Extension: This allows you to select ad sizes and locations without needing code.
You just need to activate the extension, then click selection regions of your website where you would like to place ads.
Cloudflare: If you're using Cloudflare as a content delivery network, then Ezoic will recognize it, and immediately link it to your website.
Once the integration is done, you can use the Ezoic Chrome Extension or WordPress plugin to create advertisement placeholders for the advertisements to be visible on your website.
Nameservers: This lets Ezoic act as a proxy and gives visitors to your website the optimized version of your website.
You just need to change the nameservers with your domain host such as Bluehost, GoDaddy, HostGator, or NameCheap.
WordPress Plugin: This plugin creates automatic placeholder ads on WordPress sites.
What Is The Ad Setup For Mediavine?
Mediavine only needs a script wrapper for ad setup. Basically, this is a master script that controls other scripts to the head section of your site's HTML code.
When the wrapper is installed, Mediavine will then monitor advertisement placement on your site.
There are two ways you can integrate Mediavine advertisements:
HTML Code: To do this, copy the script wrapper code and paste it into your website's HTML <head> section.
WordPress Plugin: This plugin lets you add the script wrapper automatically to your WordPress website.
When we're comparing the advertisement set-ups of Ezoic and Mediavine, then Mediavine is the clear winner.
As Mediavine is a full-service platform, once the script wrapper code is installed it takes care of everything else.
• Their ad testing can increase your income.
• Ezoic Affiliate lets you make money easier.
• Gives you total control of your advertisements.
• No rules about minimum visitors.
• Protects you from policy infractions.
• Set-up is quick and easy.
• Excellent analytics and reporting.
• Has a considerably lower payment threshold than other ad networks.
• Poor customer service and no option for help via live chat.
• Tricky DNS settings.
• RPMs may dramatically drop over time and become volatile between websites.
• You may have to purchase site accelerators to prevent yourself from losing traffic due to low speeds.
• Better advertisements and user experience.
• Potentially high RPMs (as much as $30).
• Better customer support than Ezoic.
• Gives you incentives for customer loyalty and website growth.
• Gives you transparent information regarding income splits.
• As Mediavine is an exclusive ad network, there is a high entry barrier.
• You don't have much control over where your ads are placed.
• The approval process can be slow.
As Mediavine and Ezoic are premium ad networks, they will help you earn much more money than other popular ad networks like AdSense.
Once your site has achieved decent traffic, it's worth applying for Ezoic.
However, there are significant issues with page loaded speed, so it's best to brace yourself for this happening.
We recommend looking into how similar websites (i.e. websites that use the same WordPress page builder and theme as you) are impacted by Ezoic's lag.
When your traffic receives an impressive amount of traffic and you meet the threshold for Mediavine, then upgrading to Mediavine would be a natural progression.
In fact, you may find that your earnings increase considerably after you've made the switch.
We hope our article has helped you decide which ad network is the most beneficial for increasing your passive income, but if you need more help, check out our
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