Last November, I attended an in-person event in San Diego that Ezoic and Flippa hosted together. I’ve kept tabs on both companies since (more on that below), and they just shared some fresh 2025 data in a webinar that you’ll want to see.
There’s a lot there, but two data points really stood out to me. I’ll focus on one this week, and try to put together a breakdown of the other one next week.
I also share my own internal testing and results so far related to this topic 👇
First-Party Traffic Earns 3X Higher RPMs
This relates to all the cookies talk we’ve ben having over the past few years.
Ultimately, it’s all about where your visitors come from and how much advertisers are willing to pay for them. TLDR: the more advertisers know about them, the more they’re willing to pay.
Ezoic’s data shows:
- Anonymous visitors from search or social might earn you “X” in ad revenue.
- Identifiable visitors from a first-party channel (like your email newsletter) can earn 3X that amount.
Check out the data screenshot:
First-party traffic = you own the relationship. You know their email, they logged into your site, or they clicked from one of your owned channels. Advertisers pay more because they trust that audience’s quality.
Ezoic has been really focused on this first party data, which I learned when I met up with them back in November. So much so, I moved one of my sites over to Ezoic in March to give this a try.
Since May, I’ve been collecting first-party data through my newsletter (with Ezoic helping on monetization), and the revenue difference is definitely there after a few months:
You can see that RPMs are already almost 40% higher with first party data. And they’re continuing to go up (this past weekend was the highest yet). So, not 3x, but… here’s why:
My problem is that most of my traffic right now is from Pinterest, which is a lot harder to get first party data from. So we’re ramping up the email newsletter to send daily to send more traffic to the site. Thanks to the Kit integration, this is increasing “Identified Users.”
I asked Gavin at Ezoic (who I met last year at the event) for some more data points and advice that I could include in this email. Here’s what he gave me:
- Own your audience: Don’t rely on Google Search alone. For this website, we don’t get a lot of Google traffic anymore. But we do have a lot of Pinterest traffic, and we now have daily newsletter that drives readers back to our site. A guide from me on getting an email newsletter started up.
- Capture user data easily: We added Google One Tap so visitors can sign in and we can build that user database.
- Boost ad revenue with 1st party data: We connected our email list to an identity solution (ezID) to lift CPMs. Ezoic users can instantly link with Mailchimp, beehiiv, Kit, and more. Our email list was on Kit, and we helped them in the process to get that integration set up.
For you case study nerds, here are a few good reads as well:
- How metric-conversions.org nearly tripled revenue and boosted engagement by 64% using first-party data, Google One Tap, and Ezoic’s ezID in this case study.
- How a political site used first-party data and a “Trump bump” surge to add $50,000 in Q4 revenue and dramatically boost engagement in this case study.
So yeah, I’ve been genuinely happy with how things are going with Ezoic since moving this site over. And, I’m really excited to see what happens as we gather more and more first party data.
They’ve made meaningful progress since I last had active sites with them: less focus on contracts, no negative noise, and a clear focus on their tech, which has always been excellent. For example, I was now able to connect my site to Ezoic through JavaScript – no more changing DNS, so that’s nice. And that means the ads are loading faster.
They won’t be a fit for everyone, but if you collect a lot of your user data either through newsletter or registration forms and you like drilling in with forward-leaning tech, I’d seriously consider giving Ezoic a try.
My site gets over 100k views/month, but I like the focus on first party data for the years to come. And I have a clear focus going forward on how to get more of that kind of data.
I’ll try to share the second big data point next week. For now, hope this was helpful. As always, hit reply if you have any questions or thoughts!
