Ezoic
What is EPMV?
EPMV stands for "Earnings Per Thousand Visitors".This is how much money you earn, for every 1,000 visits to your website. It is calculated as follows:
EPMV = Total Earnings divided by (Visitors / 1,000)
Example Calculation:
In March, your earnings were $1000 (AdSense) + $5000 (ADX) + $500 (Native Ads) = $6,500
March Sessions - from Google Analytics - were 1,000,000 visits.
EPMV was $6,500/(1,000,000/1000) = $6.50 EPMV
The revenue earned by a website is affected by many things such as:
The number of visits, the number of ads shown during each user session, the bounce rate of each landing page, the pages viewed per visit, upstream traffic source, time of day, type of ad (display/native/inline), RTB bidding parameters of ad, Viewport size, connection speed of the user... etc. There are tons of other factors!
Yet, all too often publishers focus on RPM - Page Revenue per 1,000 Page Views [aka eCPM - the effective Cost Per Mille, Per Page]
RPM gives a good understanding of how much you're making from 1,000 page views, but takes no account of how many ads there were per page, so it's a blunt tool for understanding monetization success.
Think about it this way - you can increase your RPM simply by jamming in more ads per page, or by placing higher paying, flashier, more intrusive ads - job done, right? Let’s say you do this and RPM goes up from $8 to $10. But what is the impact on your users? Do those extra ads cause dissatisfaction and increase bounce rates? Might you be losing potential revenue on pages that might have otherwise been viewed?
Let's look at another example (below) and see how a lower RPM can make you more money (not less):
An increase in RPM from $8 to $10 (great!) BUT, because the bounce rate increased and the page views per visit metric dropped from 2.5 to 1.5, from 10,000 sessions, the number of page views dropped from 25,000 to 15,000. Doing the math: 15,000 page views at $10.00 RPM is $150.
But with the lower RPM of $8 (and fewer intrusive ads), there were more page views 25,000 page views from 10,000 visits @ $8 RPM is $200 in overall revenue!
Which scenario would you choose?
We really need a metric that takes into account all the factors that affect revenue - something that tells you the revenue you actually earn from your visitors; your bottom line as a business.That metric is EPMV!
EPMV will automatically take into account the impact your ads have on bounce rate and page views per visit. If the bounce rates go up (bad!), or the pv/v go down (worse!), then this is reflected in the EPMV.
Daily Traffic isn't telling you the whole story either...
Whether or not you use Ezoic, you need to keep track of your EPMV to help take into account seasonal changes in traffic going to the site. You need to know how well the site is being monetized irrespective of whether you had a big traffic day...
Example number 3 - Let's say you have a site that made:
It's got to be better to have made $500 vs $380, right?
Wrong! While it's better to have a higher income, just looking at daily earnings as a monetization metric doesn't tell us that the previous Sunday was better monetized.
Which Sunday was better? EPMV tells us:
EPMV or 'Session earnings' is the only reliable way to measure revenue while taking into effect outside factors such as seasonality and UX changes.
It’s much more important to monitor the value you create from each visitor to a site, rather than trying to manage individual ad pricing - CPM or eCPM - or, manage 'page yield' / RPM, or use daily revenue as your guide.
RPM, CPM and daily revenue monitoring can give you a signal, but are also prone to giving off false positives (e.g. higher RPM, but lower overall earnings) and are not a reliable or scientific way of monitoring your monetization success.
Interested in improving your EPMV? We recommend that you check out this interactive article for additional insights into how you can improve your EPMV.