8 easy steps to losing Adsense revenue

in days, you too can be an expert

[esllou]

1. update whole swathes of your site

2. upload renewed adsense.txt include that gets put on every page of your site

3. remember with a sharp blade of realisation, three days later whilst eating grapefruit, that when you copied and pasted the channel number for that site onto a google text box just to make sure (hey, you know how it is!) it was the right one you are dealing with, you did a CUT and paste by accident

4. Not know this three days before and upload useless include file to site

5. Think to yourself, "ah, an empty channel number line won't stop you earning"

6. Check the online include file and see that, for some reason, the channel number line actually has a solitary "x" sitting there burning all your money for you.

7. sit back and wait for the dollars to roll out the door

8. Come and get some empathy or at least some sympathy from other webmasters who MUST have done something equally stupid in their time.
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well, it was a small site and I never noticed any slump in revenue....do you think I got credited for the three days or not? What happens if you use an inexistant channel number? Or letter? I see the drop off in the channel numbers obviously...down to single figures in impressions per day: cache copies I think.

wail!

[buckworks]

Would a hug help?

((()))

[valeyard]

You definitely have my sympathy - but hopefully you won't need it.

I've never tried it (and don't intend to!) but I always thought that revenue was allocated according to your google_ad_client id. Channels are simply for your convenience in reporting. After all, channels were only added to Adsense after it had been going a fair while.

With any luck the worst you might be in for is a slapped wrist for an unauthorised mod to the script!

Fingers crossed for you.

[jenkers]

happened to me - I was generating pages on my laptop using asp and access - without realising that access was removing the leading zeros from the channel ids.

Didn't make any difference to my earnings (that I could ever tell) but did make me a lot more careful.

[MikeNoLastName]

You SHOULD be able to leave the channel variable out altogether and still get credit to your publisher id variable. When you fail to select one on the Adsense ad setup screen it puts the variable in with a ="" which is interpreted as a null. You should still see the income in your daily totals, just not in your channels. Same as if you tracked by URL channel rather than selected channel. When doing the former you don't need to select a channel at all.