Xenforo and Ezoic

[SatGuyScott]

My forum is approching 20 years next month and has had a good run. Traffic is still very good in fact has gone up over the last year. My problem is ad revenue and that revenue has gone down about 75% over the past year.

Unfortunately ads are needed to pay the bills to keep the site going. In order to control costs we moved from 2 dedicated servers to one dedicated servers and then moved to a VPS which brought down costs and also the performance is also excellent.

But with that said our ad revenue now is just a little more than what it costs to keep the site going. I never started my site to make money so as long as its paying for itself I am happy.

We run ads from Google Adsense, PubGalaxy and MoneyTizer. This month while traffic is up for the money earnings are down by almost 50%, and that has me worried.

I have been getting contacted by a company called Ezoic that claims to help sites increase their earnings by up to 300%, they keep telling me how much my site would be a perfect fit.

I know a few people using Ezoic and they are very happy with it for them it works as advertised. The big issue though is they are not running Xenforo, they are all Wordpress sites.

I searched here and found a bunch of old threads about Ezoic and Xenforo, but nothing recent.

I signed up with them and yesterday their proxy was activated with them that caused me all kinds of issues, many finctions of Xenforo were broken, and I couldn't log into the admin control panel. The activation of their service came at a bad time as I couldn't login to their site and adjust the settings (ie turn their caching off) which would have fixed the issues. Instead I changed the DNS back to my own name servers which fixed the issues.

I am tempted to turn it back on again but before I do I wanted to check here and see if anyone is using Ezoic with Xenforo. If you are, I have a few questions.

1) Are you earning more money after switching over?
2) How are ad placements? Can you specify where the ads go or are they auto interested?
3) I offer a ad free usergroup for those who donate to the site, can I restrict ads from being shown to that usergroup?
4) Anything else I should know or perhaps other ad networks I should be looking at? We do over 3 million pageviews a month.

Thanks for any feedback or advice you can give.

 

[Slavik]

If I recall correctly, Ezoic has had numerous integration issues with XenForo that end up breaking the site. So if you do end up going with them, proceed carefully.

 

[SatGuyScott]

If I recall correctly, Ezoic has had numerous integration issues with XenForo that end up breaking the site. So if you do end up going with them, proceed carefully.

I think the main one is their caching which you can turn off now.

But this is why I am checking to see if anyone is having issues now.

 

[MySiteGuy]

Ezoic has been a pain for me when working with clients who use it. Proxy performance issues and failures, the slow down of page rendering, longer time to first byte, user complaints about too many ads, etc. If you have the traffic to support it, I suggest finding someone who can setup header bidding for the site to increase the average RPM.

They approached me about my own sites, and when I found they wanted to sit between my enthusiast sites and their users, I passed.

 

[Suzanne O]

You might be better off with less ads but more memberships.
As what @Slavik said you have to proceed with caution with all ad companies, especially the one that is mentioned.
So get creative and have a donation button instead.

 

[kontrabass]

I'm late to the thread but I found myself in your shoes last year. Same old forum (20+ years), traffic is stable (up the last year), google search updates are actually helping us. For us, when we switched to Raptive (formerly AdThrive) our revenues really had a big boost. We've been with them for just about a year now. I'm not putting any affiliate stuff here, and YMMV, but they've been very receptive to our needs (we use xenforo conditionals to insert different HTML classes, which in turn Raptive uses to customize ad layouts between guest, registered members (fewer ads), supporting members (even fewer ads), and gold supporters (no ads at all). Sensitive ad categories are selectable, and any bad ads can be reported to a receptive help desk.

Let me know if I can answer any questions. I used adsense back in the day, but have never used pubgalaxy or moneytizer.