Clickio Review (Adsense Alternative)

Clickio are an advertising platform that manages the ads on your website to squeeze more revenue out of your ad inventory. I’ve been using them for about a month and am very please with what they have done for me so far, so decided to write a review.

How I discovered Clickio

I discovered Clickio by pure chance – I was looking for a GDPR cookie plugin for WordPress and registered on their website because I thought this is what they provided. I’m not sure why I thought this but it led to me being contacted by their Head of Publisher Development, Lindsay Smith.

He told me about what they did and asked if I would like to join. I was hesitant as I didn’t really know much about the company so said I would consider it in the Autumn (it was Spring when we first made contact).

Lindsay wasn’t pushy and accepted my wishes and I forgot about it. Then I got another email in the Spring asking if I wanted to consider a partnership. I agreed to move one of my smaller websites over to the Clickio platform for one month as a test.

How did Clickio perform?

After a slow start (which Lindsay warned me would happen), Clickio’s systems kicked in and as the month progressed, revenue increased until it surpassed what I had been earning with Google Adsense.

Adsense revenue

The screenshot below shows the revenue generated by my test site from Adsense in October 2021:

As you can see, it is around the £50 per day mark.

Clickio revenue

The next screenshot shows the revenue earned the following month after moving to Clickio (up to 26th November):

It wasn’t until around the fourth week that I started to see significant improvements in revenue, but it was significantly higher than what I was getting from Google. Hopefully, this level of revenue will be maintained, but I will come back to update this post in a month or so when I have had the chance to test Clickio for a longer period of time.

How Clickio works

I won’t pretend to understand exactly how Clickio works – personally I don’t really care as long it makes me more money – but I’ve tried to provide a brief overview below.

Clickio uses many of the same technologies as Google Adsense. However, they have a larger supply of ad partners and so there is more competition for the ad space. Header bidding means that inventory can be offered to multiple ad exchanges simultaneous, which leads to increased revenue.

Requirements to be accepted as a Clickio partner

Unfortunately, Clickio has higher entry requirements than Adsense. At the time of writing, Lindsay informed me that to be accepted as a partner, websites should:

• Get a minimum of 100K monthly pageviews
• be earning at least £500 via Adsense

What are the downsides of Clickio?

The entry requirements above mean that only larger sites can benefit from Clickio’s services.

In addition, I found that my website was slightly slower when using Clickio ads – this is perhaps due to the on-demand header bidding. Not unbearably slow but there was a noticeable difference.

By default, Clickio also have a NET60 payment cycle. This means the revenue that I earn in November will not be paid into my bank account until the end of January – essentially a 3 month waiting time.

For me, this was a long time to wait, particularly as I didn’t know an awful lot about the company and if there would be any payment issues or if the realised earnings would be significantly lower than the estimated earnings. It also meant that I wouldn’t moving any more of my sites over to Clickio until I had experienced their payment processing.

However, Lindsay very kindly offered to change my settings to NET30, which will bring it in line with Google’s payment timescale – my November earnings will now be paid at the end of December.

Verdict

I’ve used Clickio for nearly a month and from what I have seen so far, I am clearly very impressed with it and am considering moving more of my sites over to their platform. However, before I do that I need to be sure that:

• earnings will remain better than what they would have been through Adsense
• there are no issues during payment processing

Therefore, I will update this article in the New Year to reflect what has happened during this.

Update: Jan 2022

So, I’ve just finished my review of Clickio’s performance over the last couple of months and, as promised, will share my experience.

The table below shows the Session RPM (Revenue per 1000 sessions) that this particular website has earned over the previous six months:

Month	Session RPM	Ad Partner
Jan 22	£10	Clickio
Dec 21	£18	Clickio
Nov 21	£14	Clickio + Adsense
Oct 21	£13	Adsense
Sept 21	£13	Adsense
Aug 21	£15	Adsense

Note: January data only covers the dates between the 1st and yesterday (18th Jan).

I switched to Clickio at the beginning of November and you can see that revenues were on par with what I earned with Adsense – this is despite the slow start as Clickio’s AI kicked in and waiting for header bidding to be activated.

December’s revenue was much higher than expected (around a 25% increase compared to Adsense earnings).

Unfortunately, January earnings showed a decrease, however, this could well be a seasonal variation because earnings from display advertising often fall across the board this time of year as advertisers adjust their strategies and budgets following a busy holiday period.

In addition to performance in terms of revenue, I have also noticed a change in the performance of the website in terms of speed and user experience. The introduction of Clickio advertising seems to have improved the performance for mobile users but the experience for desktop users has been poorer. As well as this being noticed by the website owners, it is also indicated in Core Web Vitals reports as shown below:

These changes coincide with the time that I started using Clickio (the beginning of November) – no other changes have been to the website during this time.

With regards to payment, my earnings went straight into my account on the 29th December without a hitch.

So, where do I stand with Clickio now?

November and December showed improvements over Adsense but this month seems to have slowed down a little. So, I have decided to hold off on moving any more of my websites over to Clickio until I have gathered more data (January session RPM is already showing signs of picking up). In addition, I want to address the website speed issues before moving forward.

Want to maximise your website’s revenue with Clickio?