6/26 WWT: Summer Strategy

All right, awesome

We will go ahead and get started. So today's session is on how to improve your summer strategy so that your site is set up for Q4 success and make sure that you guys are really taking advantage of those high ad rates that we see in Q4

Especially this year, we know that it's an election year. We're already starting to see that revenue start to come in

So it's really going to drive up the RPMs that we're seeing across the board

So right now we just want to make sure that our sites set up really, really well

We're tapping into some certain resources. So that way when we get into Q4, everything is set up, we can just go about our normal process

And we can go from there. Perfect. So a little bit about me

My name is Iona Lefrono. I actually lead our publisher success team here at Ezoic

So if you have a dedicated account manager, I work really closely with them to make sure that sites are set up

well, get on calls with publishers all the time from all over the world. I noticed that somebody

was from Austria. That's awesome. It's one of my favorite things to be able to get to talk to people

all over the world, help them make money and see a ton of success in their business. So I've been

here for five years now. In my personal life, I play beach volleyball and soccer. I love to bake cookies

So you'll see an example later. I actually have a website on baking. I don't work on it very often. I

work with websites all day, every day. The last thing I wanted to do when I get home is continue

to work on other websites. But I do still love to bake. You guys will see an example of my site

later. And this is my dog Buka. I just got her a little bit ago. And so I take her on walks

as often as I can. So that's a little bit about me. So today's agenda, we're going to go over a couple

of things. So one is making sure that your site is set up really well on Azoic, making sure we have

certain ad formats, densities, et cetera. Number two is going to be going over how to diversify your

traffic sources. We know that with Google, there's a lot of volatility, and so we can set ourselves up

by diversifying our traffic source right now so that when we get into Q4, we know that we're going to

have traffic from all of these different sources, so it's going to be less volatile, and it can

actually really help promote long-term growth through this industry. And then the last one

is taking advantage of video. And we'll get into some really cool examples of publishers

that I work pretty closely with on how they developed their video strategy

and what traffic they're seeing on the flip side from that, which is a huge, huge gain

Because with increased ad rates in Q4, the more traffic we have, obviously

the more revenue you guys are gonna generate and be set up for success

So first things first, sorry, I'm gonna be hopping around to a couple of different slides

I wanted to give you guys very specific examples, so that you guys could see what I was talking about

So I might be jumping a little bit. The first one is just making sure that you have a really good ad setup

One of the things that I do internally is I actually work with a lot of our engineers

to come up with new tools and features to make your guys' lives as publishers easier

And one of the things that we've done is really improved how we set up sites on or set up ads

on sites and the way that we actually insert those ads. Google is constantly changing that threshold for Cora vitals and making sure that ads don't slow down sites too much

And so it's something that we have a dedicated team focusing on so that the way that we insert ads is fast

It's super user friendly and it's getting a lot cleaner. So I know that we have a lot of different ways

Some of you may have set up your site yourself for ads. Other people have had Ezoic do it for you

one of the things that we have done is Ezoics optimized setup and just allowing us to do it

We're seeing incredible results both with EPMB and with user experience metrics

So bounce rate continues to go down, engage time continues to go up, plus we're seeing an increase in EPMB

So if you have something like WordPress placeholders or you inserted them using the Chrome extension

or you just copied the ad code from the Ezoic dashboard and implemented that into your own CMS

I would strongly, strongly encourage you to look at the Ezoic optimized setup or get in touch with anybody

If you have a dedicated account manager, reach out to them. They can get you set up or you can go to support.esoic.com

And depending on your level, you can get access to support for somebody to help take care of that for you

it's gotten a lot better and it's my favorite tool in the world

I was definitely very involved in creating that. But like I said, it's a very clean setup

It's very evenly dispersed throughout the content and we make sure that it's not too many ads

But you do have that option to work through more dense or less dense

So that gets us to our second point. What does dense look like on your site

And the reason that it's in quotations is because dense is going to be very different for the different sites

If we have a long blog content where the paragraphs are thick

we can probably put an add in every two to three paragraphs. If you have a list site, and so there's a bunch of bullets

every two list elements is probably going to be too many ads

and users aren't going to like that. So that's why we created this density scale of more dense to less dense

so that based on your site and the actual content of your site

you can go in and adjust that setting. So I believe I put it here

So when you go into your EuallyX ads dashboard and then go to the ad configuration tab

this is the system that's telling us how to insert those ads

So you can see here in this top right corner, density is optimized

This means that Ezoic is going to insert. or ads just about every three placements based on your insertion point. So because my site is a

recipe site and I have a lot of paragraphs, but I also have a lot of images, images are big and they

take up a lot of space. We can use that as an insertion point so that every three either paragraph

elements or image elements is that it is going to insert an ad after that third one. You can go

in and you can actually select this custom button, and then you'll see a scale pop up

and you can go less dense or you can go more dense. There are some sites that are very image

heavy where the images are very thick and pick up an entire scroll. So we have some publishers

that want to put an ad under every single image. So they can go in, do the max density

and take care of it that way. So there's a full scale depending on what type of site you have

does your content look like and what does that overall feeling really have for your users

The third point here is make sure that there are enough sizes to ensure maximum earnings Do you have this set up So if you gone in and limited the number of sizes that are available for testing

you're really just limiting the amount of revenue that you can make. There are all different kinds of advertisers from all over the world that have campaigns running for specific sizes

And so if you don't have those enabled, you're really just limiting the amount of earnings that you can get

Our machine learning is going to factor in user experience. So if we see any fluctuations in bounce rate or engage time per visit or engage page views per visit

we can take a look at that and our machine learning is going to say, hey, this size typically corresponds to a really low user experience

We're going to show this less. But on the flip side, if we don't allow that to be tested

there could be ad sizes out there that you're not taking advantage. of that perform really, really well for your user base because we know that advertisers in different

niches want to bid on different sites and find that end user that's going to give them the

ROI that they're looking for. So if we're limiting the amount of ads and those ad sizes

it's pretty detrimental to earnings. So there's a couple of things that we can do to give you a

feel or aesthetic for your site without limiting the number of ads

So like I said, you can get in touch with the support team or your dedicated account manager and chat through those options because there's a lot of variability and a lot of things that you can do

The last one is with this system, we've created an exclusion set so that you can say, hey, I don't want ads here

So in that same configuration tool, you can go in and set these exclusion filters, which is in this bottom left

And all you would mean to do is go into your site and find the class

I highlighted it here for you. So the ads weren't getting inserted in here, but I wanted a really simple example so that you can see it

But in here you can see that this div class equals related posts

I don't want ads showing up in here. So I would just copy that and add in a new CSS class, hit that plus button

And it will now say, do not insert ads in. into this location

So some of the most common places I see ads getting inserted

that people don't like them. It's typically things like an author box

or if you're on a home page of a site and they have the different tiles for different articles

with an entry summary or entry content. Those are still P elements on the page

So because we have this P insertion point, it's gonna tell the system

hey, we wanna put an ad in here. Of course, those don't look good

It's your homepage. We want it to be clean. If you aren't familiar at looking into code like this and reading the HTML

just get in touch with the Ezoic team. We have specialists covering the entire globe that can take care of it for you

So just reach out and say, hey, I'm noticing an ad in the location that I don't like

I need help removing it. We can go in here and take care of this for you

It's really simple. I spend a lot of my time going through and doing this

So definitely you guys are supported. We want to help take care of this for you

But I took a quick screenshot of what the site should look like

So as you can see here, this is little gift, so it's going a little quick. But you can see that every two to three paragraphs, there is an ad being inserted

So that means that the density throughout the entire site is going to be really clean

And it's going to be very evenly dispersed. meaning that users that are going to scroll really deep within the page

are going to see a very even and clean layout. But for users that we know because of our machine learning

aren't going to spend as long on the site, it might be a little bit heavier at the top

It just depends on what the user, who the user is and what our machine learning has told us about that user in the past

Getting into this second one, ad types, these are definitely the three top performers right now

So anchor ads, vignettes, and the universal player. Universal player is going to be the video that shows up within the content

That's related to the content of your site. But it's also going to give you that floating player in the bottom right hand corner

These three are definitely the highest earners right now. If you don't have these enabled, I would definitely encourage you to turn them on

Anchor ads are just normal in the industry now. I would say four years ago, it could be up for debate if people

liked it or not, but people are so used to them now that it really doesn't cause any issues

with user experience. Vignettes only happen when a user goes to a consecutive page view. So we know

that they're already interested in the content. They want more. They're okay with the vignettes

They only, vignettes are actually delivered through Google. So there's a lot of conspiracy theories

out there that vignettes are really bad for SEO. But it's only through Google. So Google's not going

penalize sites for using vignettes because that's where they drive a lot of their revenue from

So those are totally fine. And then the universal player, like I said, it's tapping into video RPMs

There's a ton of money right there, or there right now, and it's only going to grow

Last one, definitely make sure that UX performance. And I said UX and not speed because I want to make sure that we're focused on core web vitals

and not actual speed scores. So things like GT metrics and page speed insights

they're going to give you a false impression of what your site speed actually is

So definitely use Cora vitals either through your Google search console or through the Leap dashboard

Some people don't know this, but the information in Leap is actually the Google data

from their crux data is actually imported into Leap so that that information is directly

from Google. So it's not an Ezoic dictated thing. It is from Google. So some of the things that you can do

one, make sure that you are cloud integrated. It is fast. Trust me when I say, I've helped so many

sites switch from either a WordPress integration or some kind of JavaScript integration to cloud

And if we get that caching percentage to be above 80%, and we get all of our leap settings on

it's very, very rare that we don't pass core web vitals. I spend a lot of time and I have helped thousands of sites pass core vitals in my time here

These things do work and I promise they work. It is just going to be a little bit of back and forth in troubleshooting

but I think that happens with all different kinds of speed settings

The biggest thing is that these speed tools are powerful and they're intended to be powerful

because it's going to help you the most. But with that it can cause issues So I would definitely say keep all of the LEAP settings on when you create a new version That our default setting Each actual individual setting within LEAP you can add exclusions

to. You can say, hey, don't delay this JavaScript or don't lazy load this image specifically. You can

set page exclusion rules. So typically a home page is going to be built very differently than an

article page. We want leap running on all of our article pages. That's where users are going to

That's where most of our core of vital data is coming from anyway. So we want to get those

leap settings turned on for all of those pages. And if we need to exclude the homepage or turn off

certain features for the home page, let's do that. But let's make sure that the settings are

turned on and optimizing your site for the vast majority of your content

Cool. So that takes us to number two, where we are going to. going to diversify our traffic sources. Even two years ago, I would say that people could

pretty much solely focus on Google and they would have a really successful business. I think

you guys are in the industry. You've probably seen that that is no longer the case. And it's

pretty unfortunate. Google is really prioritizing the big players in the industry. I think

it's there's a couple things behind that, but I think part of it is there's just so much AI

content out there that isn't necessarily helpful that they're trying to find a way to work with

all of that content and still stay profitable and give the end user what they're looking for

So while Google is still considered the gold standards, it is coming with some volatility

Some people are lucky. Some people are less lucky. I know a lot of really, really good bloggers

who create great content, who are subject matter experts, who have done everything in terms of SEO perfectly

And unfortunately, Google just doesn't prioritize them anymore. And it's really unfortunate

So I think with that, we want to make sure that we are looking at some other options

I listed my two favorites here. There's a million other places that you can get traffic from

but I've seen Pinterest and Facebook really accelerate business growth, especially this year

as publishers are trying to find ways to diversify their traffic sources

So a couple of my favorite tips, I just wanted to give like a quick overview

because I know we only have 30 minutes here, and I want to give us some time for questions at the end

But for Pinterest, some of the biggest things to consider, you really should be posting three to four times a day at a minimum

That is really how Pinterest algorithm works is it's constantly refreshing and it's constantly

pulling in the new things because they want to keep the user who's trying to find information engaged

And so it is very much about freshness. It's also very visual

So this Pinterest works really well for your, you know, home improvement, cooking, beauty

any of those kinds of things. But I would also say that it is expanding

So if you do have a site that's not within one of those niches, test it out

There are still a ton of users on Pinterest that are searching for a wide range of things

It doesn't take that much time and it could generate a ton of traffic for you

So I would say just test it out, see how it performs. With that, it is very visual

So when you go on to Pinterest, you see all of the different tiles. People are going to click on things that look good

So I personally use Canva. Canva actually has a layout for Pinterest where you can go in and adjust the images that are in there

You can adjust the titles. You can change all the different information to make it look pretty

So that way we're driving more clicks. And when people click on that, it's going to come to your website where hopefully they like more information

they're going to stay on there. You also need to make sure that you're creating your brand through Pinterest

So what that means is you're going to go in and you will want to create a business account

with Pinterest. You're going to go in and create different boards based on your niche

So the easiest example is my baking website. I would have a board for cookie recipes

I would have another board for cake recipes. I would have another board for brownie recipes

I would have another board for bread recipes because when people come in and they see your content and they like it

they can go to your saved boards and see what's in there. And so just like we want to create a brand for our business, you can create the same brand within Pinterest in and of itself

which is going to drive a lot of results for you. Second or sorry, the last one is Facebook

So Facebook is really about building a community and sharing your content. content, Facebook is all about engagement and the timing of that engagement. So one of the main things

that you're going to want to look at is that what are peak engagement times? So I'm here in California

peak engagement times are probably going to be around lunchtime, noon, and after work. People are

taking a break from work or they're at the end of their workday. They're going to open up social

media. They're going to unwind a little bit and go on Facebook and start scrolling. So look at

what engagement times look like based on your niche specifically, where do your users actually come from

You can go into big data ytics and you can take a look at where specifically

your users come from. Are they in California? Are they on the West Coast

Are they mostly a European audience? And then once we know and understand what time they're going to be online

that's when we can go in and create a posting strategy on Facebook specifically

And there are plugins, there are softwares, there are all kinds of tools out there that will

automatically post and schedule your posts on Facebook. So you can take a Sunday afternoon, set up all of these different posts, and they'll just

automatically get delivered on that cadence. The last one is experiment with things

We did a ton of research into how to build a Facebook community, and Facebook actually has a pretty

good ytics platform to show the amount of engagement that you're getting on different things

So experiment not just with posts, but also with videos, polls, different questions, different

images, different image formats. See what your users engage with because the algorithm with

Facebook is all about timing. And so if you post something and immediately get three likes

they're saying, oh, users love this content. And they're going to promote. it more. So we really want to make sure not just our posting time, but our actual quality of the post is really high

so that we can get that initial engagement and that going to boost things moving forward One thing that I actually learned a couple weeks ago we definitely don want to just oh perfect

Yeah, sorry, I got a little confused. So last one, we want to take advantage of video

Video is definitely where users are starting to spend a ton of their time

So not just on YouTube, but all different. kinds of video formats, TikTok, you know, all of these services have included video because it

really is engaging. So one of the things of video and where I see people fail is that we don't

create a really good video strategy from the beginning. With video, if we start creating videos now

it does take a little bit of time for us to actually build up that audience and build up that

user base. And the reason why it's included in this session for building your summer strategy

is if we get started now, we're giving our system not just Ezoic, but also Google and their

serbs enough time to index your video content and get it shown to users. So that way we are starting

to get that influx of traffic in Q3 so that as we're into Q4, it's pretty smooth sailing and

we're just adding onto it so that we are tapping into additional traffic sources

So make sure that we have a very, very strategic video strategy

I personally like looking at what am I ranking for already in SERPs

What is that content? I already have the domain authority for that specific keyword

Go in and do that Google search and see if videos are showing up near the top

If they are, I would create a video because now we're kind of stacking our odds

So not only are we going to show up for the written content and get that blue link

we're also going to show up in the video content section and try and drive additional traffic to our site using humics

So one thing that you guys, I have a Semrush account. So that's why I used this one

But I believe all other SEO tools also have this. But you can actually come in and using their keyword tools

you can filter for specific video searches. So you can see the search volume and the keyword difficulty for specific videos

I have a feeling that this kind of information is just going to start growing and growing and expanding and being more useful

So when this is getting started for you, definitely make sure you take a look, whatever tool that you're using, go in filter by video

and see what you can rank for. So look at both your site, what do your users like

Let's make sure we're creating videos for your users that are already coming to the site

But then our second side is we want to look at SEO. We want to look at high search volume, low keyword density

you know, find that low hanging fruit in video specifically. And then you can go in and create those videos

This is an example. So obviously the NHL play. playoffs were just happening. The Hockey Writers is an EZOIC publisher. We've been working really

closely with them on their video content. So you can see here that this Humix video, which is the

link, is actually showing a third in this result page, and it's third after the New York Times and

NHL. So that is really highly competitive. There are so many other NHL news news

sources that could be posting these things. But this humics video is actually showing up third

in Serbs, which is really, really huge. This is showing us specifically that Google is prioritizing

video because we know that users want to see video. So if you haven't already

strongly, strongly consider a video strategy and make sure that you are spending time

doing some research, getting those videos uploaded to Humix. And then hopefully we can get you showing up in SERPs just like this

Last one, of course, it's going to be a shameless plug. If you don't have a video strategy already and you don't know where to get started with video

try Flickify. I created this video just for fun. This is Buka, the dog that I talked about, and my sister's dog, Archie, who are best friends

And so I went to Flickify in my account. I just gave the AI prompt generator and said come up with a children's story about Buka

the Bernadoodle and Archie the Golden Doodle. And it went in and created an entire script and plotline for Archie and Bucca's adventure

And it also populated it with these amazing images. There are images of them walking through a jungle

There's others with a pirate chest or treasure chest and a pirate ship in the background

So we use multiple AI services for video, for images, for scripts, for all these different things to create video content that is highly, highly tailored to what you are looking for

So you can either put in a URL to a content page on your blog

You can tell the AI script generator, hey, come up with a story about X, Y, and Z

or I can just plug in chocolate chip cookie recipe, and it will go in and generate all of that

Once you start and have that first step done, the second step, you can go in and actually make a ton of edits

So you can change the images that it's using. There are stock images and videos

You can add things in, remove things, change the script. You can change the tone of everything as well

So there's a lot of features in there. all these Zohic customers get a free credit to start out with

So take a look at it, play around with it. I am very, very confident that video is the future

and that's why we're investing so many resources into video specifically so that we can help you guys as publishers maintain that traffic

maintain that growth, knowing that the industry is slightly shifting more towards video

So if you haven't already or if you need some help, definitely reach out to the support team

If you're having issues with Flickify specifically, you can reach out to support at Flickify.com and they can help you out

But definitely go in, get that account created, make a first one

The credits don't apply until you actually render the video. So you can go in and create 30 different videos, play around with it

Once you find one that you like, once you render it is when it actually uses that credit

That video, you can upload. to your YouTube channel. You can get it added to your Humix channel. You can get it added to

whatever you'd like. So that was all we had for today. Any questions