Testing ad sizes and positions is a super simple way to increase your ad revenue. Publishers who use Ezoic’s technology see increases in ad income of 50-250%. This is because Ezoic’s system is able to find the ad combinations that work best for your site based on how your users interact with the site.

What should I test?

You should test as many ad positions, types, sizes and formats as possible. Each variable can have an impact on revenue. But it’s hard to test lots of different ad combinations manually; it takes a bunch of time and sucks up lots of resources that could be used elsewhere - like creating content, working on a social media strategy or even an email campaign - you get my point! So using an automatic system will let you test way more permutations (think thousands!) than you could on your own - and the system will do a better job of collating and analyzing the results for you.  

The system also measures and reports user experience metrics, so it allows you to monitor the impact of your tests on user experience. So while you are making more money, you can make sure you are not negatively affecting your user experience metrics - you may even find they improve. Well placed ads are known to be a positive factor in creating a good user experience.

Why manual testing is so hard...

• The revenue from your site will often vary greatly by time of year, time of week, time of day as well as traffic source and geographics. To effectively compare different ad combinations, you need to use split testing and/or account for outside variables.
• Each ad placement affects the performance of other ads on the same page, both for CPC (cost per click) and CTR (click-through rate). So, you must test combinations of ad placements rather than each one separately because even though, for example, an ad at the top of the page, performs well, it may be costing you more money from other ads. 
• Effective ad optimization is done per user session, not per ad placement or per page. When you have a fixed number of visitors coming to your site, the goal is to make the most money from them over their lifetime - not just on a single page. So while testing ad positions, it’s important to monitor the impact on user experience. Even though an ad placement earns a lot, it may be driving your users away or causing fewer page views which could end up costing you more than it's making you.

What does Ezoic Ad Tester test?

• The position of ads on each page
• Type of each ad
• The size of each ad
• The colors (background, text color, etc.) of each ad
• How many ads to show on any given page
• When to show the user ads in their session (first page, later pages, etc.)
• The relationship between all the ads on the page (including display, native, and inline ads).

Anything else I should know?

Ezoic Ad Tester brings something extra other than just testing ads. Once the system ‘learns’ your traffic, it will dynamically adapt the position and types of ads it shows on any given page to suit the traffic - e.g. social traffic monetizes differently from say, search traffic - and also to the device the visitor is browsing on. This means you will make the most money while changing the ads for each visitor, depending on how they arrived at your site, and the device they are using. This is unique to Ezoic and adds a really valuable dimension to your testing.