Ad Tester Addition to the Ezoic WordPress Plugin Means Simplified Placeholder Set Up

It’s no secret to us that the world of publishing can be confusing at times. The battle of creating quality content, managing it, and monetizing it can feel overwhelming. 

Our recent development added Ad Tester to the Ezoic WordPress plugin to take some of that difficulty away. Located under the “Ad Settings” tab, the new addition to the Ezoic plugin takes the guesswork out of adding placeholders and simplifies the process for you. 

In this blog, we’ll unpack how the addition to the plugin can make placeholder set up easier for you and how to use this new tool on your site today. In addition, a lead product developer at Ezoic is hosting a webinar, Thursday, Sept. 16 at 9:30am PT, to give a live demo of this latest update!

1. What is the update?
2. What makes Ad Tester in the Ezoic plugin different from other ad placement options?
3. How do I use the Ad Tester update to the plugin? 
4. How do I use this to my site’s advantage?

1. What is the update?

This update involves a new addition to the Ezoic plugin that will let new users create a default set of ad placeholders and have them be automatically placed in Ezoic-recommended locations on their site. 

What makes this tool even more personalized for you is that the user may also relocate the placeholders as needed via a variety of options.

It will be accessed via the Ezoic plugin and will guide users through the process of adding ad placeholders to their site seamlessly. 

In the most basic sense, this new feature will allow Ezoic users to customize their ad placeholders and ad settings in new, improved ways.

2. What makes Ad Tester in the Ezoic plugin different from other ad placement options?

There are a few key things to consider here. First, it’s not the same as the Ezoic Google Chrome Extension. Instead, the Ad Tester addition to the plugin is located in the Ezoic WordPress Plugin. This means the functionality is going to be a little bit different. Namely, the ads will be hard-coded into your site in a different way and makes the placeholder setup process nearly instant. Additionally, this update will not include a visual representation of where ad placeholders are on your site, although you can still view them when you open the Chrome Extension.

Below, you will find  examples of what it looks like when you view your different placeholders through the Chrome extension (under_page_title) and the Ad Tester update to the Ezoic Plugin (labeled with wp_under_page_title). The key difference is that the placeholders created using the WordPress plugin feature “wp_” before the name of the placeholder.

Second, and this one is big, the update to Ad Tester within the Ezoic Plugin gives you Ezoic-recommended locations for all your placeholders. Before, users had to come up with their own locations for ads. Now, Ezoic gives a recommended set of placeholders (which you can edit and tweak) based on best practices. It even gives a distinction between “post” pages and your home page in terms of placeholders. The placeholders will be more accurate across different types of pages because of the coding method used. 

In plain speak: The ad placements will be better and more consistent across different types of pages, which means higher earning potential for you as your ads serve each visitor better.

Each placeholder can be edited to meet your site’s needs and standards.

Third, this update will make it easy to carry your ad placeholders over when you change themes. This will apply mostly to publishers who initially set up their placeholders using the plugin.

3. How do I use the Ad Tester update to the plugin? 

You’ll first want to make sure you have the Ezoic plugin installed. This capability is available for those publishers who are cloud integrated or those who use WordPress CMS. Those looking for the best experience should cloud integrate to make full use of the plugins feature set, but can also use the ad settings features while WordPress integrated.

Then, you’ll see this page (below) and you’ll want to hit “Let’s Go.”

“Let’s Go” will take you to your full list of placeholders as shown earlier, then will give you options to edit individual placeholders if you choose.

It’s important to note that this will not show any placeholders created using the Chrome extension. 

Those are the basics of how to use it, although there are more details on the support articles (which you can find here and here) for the Ad Tester update to the Ezoic Plugin. 

4. How do I use this to my site’s advantage?

The update to the plugin brings you plenty of advantages as a publisher. Above is an overview of just a few ways this update could complement your efforts. Let’s dive into each section!

• Potential Revenue Increase
  • This boils down to the fact that many Ezoic customers set up their placeholders incorrectly, or they don’t add enough placeholders in general. When this is the case, they will be leaving money on the table, because our machine learning will not be learning to its full potential. The way the Ad Tester update to the plugin works is that it already has a full list of Ezoic-recommended locations, tailored to your specific site. This essentially removes any possibility of user error, and instead has each placeholder named correctly, and enough placeholders on each page to maximize the potential of our machine learning.
• Setup Time
  • As you can see, no other ad inserting option comes close to the time this plugin will take to come up with a full set of ads. With the simple click of a button, there is an entire comprehensive list generated, all hard-coded into your site.
    • One caveat, however, is that this time save will mainly apply to new sites setting up for the first time. This is because the placeholders for pre-existing sites have already been subject to the machine learning process, so it would not necessarily be advantageous for a publisher to start their placeholders from scratch.
• Ad placeholders that work…
  • I’ll make it simple: they work (pretty much) everywhere! Since the plugin works from within your WP admin, Ezoic is able to hardcode the placeholder code snippets directly into your website and its source code. Compared to the old method, where we used an HTML copy of a website, this method is theme-change-proofed!

Wrapping things all up

Hopefully this provided a little more insight into what the Ad Tester addition to the Ezoic plugin will look like. Overall, we’re really excited about this update because it’s going to simplify adding ads to your site. 

For new publishers especially, adding placeholders has never been easier. This update will cut down on time spent squinting and verifying spots, to now give you a quick way to know where your ads are while also knowing they are in locations we know will work. Not only that, but now publishers will be able to take advantage of money left on the table in sub-prime placeholder setups.

At Ezoic, we always want to make things easier for our publishers when we can. Your sites are important to us, so products like this are what it’s all about.

This week, we have plenty of announcements coming up that will give more capabilities to our customers. For more information, head over to the Customer Week page for a full list of updates!