Following up on very positive news in May, June brought more good news, with this case study site seeing significant percentage increases in all important metrics. Traffic, EPMV, Impressions, ad income, and affiliate income were all up.
This growth seems to be due to increased content output of topics well matched to my site’s content footprint, and enabling some other new Ezoic features.
Read on for further details.
Site Recap
The site is in the ‘Entertainment’ niche – established in January 2021. Monetized with Ezoic advertising.
Approx 350k words of content over 300+ posts.
See full site history, content publishing breakdown, and traffic history here.
June Statistics
Earnings on this site increased by almost 20% last month, overall revenue increased by another 40%, growing from $50 up to $85. In part, this was due to increases in ad revenue but also a surprising jump in affiliate revenue. Ad revenue grew modestly (though a significant percentage jump on the previous month), and Amazon affiliate revenue was 4-5x up on previous months.
The below screenshot from my Ezoic Ads dashboard shows the ad earnings of $60+ with a few hundred extra visits.
Monthly income is still significantly shy of what this site reached at its peak, but this month’s performance, in conjunction with the previous positive month has been a nice change.
I haven’t got any data to provide any hypotheses about why the affiliate income spiked so dramatically. I suspect that it was just a ‘lucky click’ in that someone who visited Amazon as a result of my link, ended up buying some other things, but the Amazon reports don’t support that in an obvious way either. The other more recent change which could make a big difference is that I have been publishing a lot of more ‘product’ related content (comparisons, x vs y, etc), so the visits to that content may be contributing to the commission increase.
I have continued relying on the Ezoic Niche IQ tool for new content ideas, and have now published almost 100 posts, based on this information. I can’t for certain claim that it has led to organic traffic gains in a significant way, but the content is all quite new so I’m still gathering the data needed to be able to determine whether this is a good long-term strategy.
One other thing that has absolutely contributed to the increase in EPMV was enabling a new ad type that Ezoic has developed. This makes people click the confirmation text if they want to see the rest of the article (below the fold), and when the visitor does this, a vignette ad is displayed.
If you have a website with Ezoic and have not yet done this, then you should definitely experiment with this setting to see if it makes a difference. Some website owners are worried about whether this will have a different impact on user engagement with your site, and potentially give bad signals to Google, but it is definitely worth a test with your site, and see what the impact is on revenue and organic traffic and make a balanced decision.
July Activity
July will be a relatively straightforward month with a focus on continuing to publish a large amount of content, heavily influenced by Niche IQ.
I’m curious to see if the improved ad rates continue and if my massive gains with Amazon were a random occurrence, or signs of something improving in terms of traffic and conversions.
