I recently signed up with Ezoic to test on one of my sites. So far there have been fairly significant earnings improvements, but I have yet to fully look into how these have been achieved. I guess they also have to run their optimisations as something of a black box as otherwise I'd just take the improvements and use them for free.

My first concern about Ezoic is the lack of any independent reviews about their services. They run an affiliate scheme so virtually everything written about them by other websites is fairly glowing, followed by a "find out more" affiliate link at the bottom.

My other concern is how they achieve their improvements. Most of my earnings from this site are from mobile and to me it seems mobile provides a fairly reduced set of options for ad placement. (So how much scope is there for their big data / AI based tweaking) Therefore we are left with increasing the number of ads, which they have. Previously I ran 3 ads per page, with Ezoic I have limited it to 4, plus there is an anchor ad running.

Now that I have reduced this to 3 ads and removed the anchor ad it seems my earnings are close to where they were previously. In other words the increase was coming from running more ads, which is fine, but I can't see how this wouldn't affect UX - even though Ezoic claim to optimise this too. To be honest I think my site looks a little trashy now and I don't know if that is a good long term compromise.

I guess I'll let things run a little longer and keep tweaking. What strikes me as a little odd though is why Adsense would not be performing equally effective optimization themselves, if not on placement at least on responsive ad size / format...