What analytics do you use?

to study Adsense stats

[oddsod]

I'm sure this has been covered before but I'm curious as to what analytics everyone uses. No, not for notifying you when the stats update but to actually make sense of your stats.

If the old "there's gold in dem thar logs" is true for server logs surely there must be a lot of value in analysing the Adsense figures. Is there anybody earning $1,000+ per month who doesn't analyse?

I've tried programs like ***enselog but it doesn't give you any channel-by-channel breakdown. Doing stuff in Excel is time consuming and not that convenient. What do you use to analyse your figures, discover trends, see what needs attention? There doesn't seem to be any really good programs around. (Even if you are willing to type your login and password into their supposedly safe program)

[oddsod]

<bump>

[Rodney]

I thought we couldn't discuss adsense tools in this forum?

[DamonHD]

Hi oddsod,

I roll my own analytics, and now use GA too.

Rgds

Damon

[bnhall]

I use ryo + excel + staring at the screen for long periods of time

[gendude]

Staring at the screen for too long, I tend to go into sleep mode.

I have found Google's Analytics to be very valuable. It may not tell me directly about how well Adsense is doing, but it gives me a lot of information on how people use my site - that combined with tracking channels is pretty much all I need to know.

Beyond that, I'm better off using the time to work on adding more content (which is much more fun/interesting than looking at stats anyways).

I've got a friend who spends an hour+ a day trying to come up with the golden egg by sifting through all of their stats and logs.

Pointing out that an hour to two hours more a day of adding actual content would serve him better in the long run as far as the search engines and backlinking goes, doesn't seem to register.

Must not seem like much to him, but it's almost a full day's work (well 8 hours) a week, and if one would take that 8 hours a week and write one or two good articles/guides/whatever, over the long run they will find everything going up as a result.

Those one or two really good articles a week using that time he spends on stats would add up to 50-100 good articles over the span of a year.

[jetteroheller]

I porgrammed a stats tool into my own written CMS.

The tool uses the by day and channel CSV file download.

It has an RPN reverse polnish notation calculator
where I can ad and subtract ad channels.

For example, this is important to ad several channels together. My journey to, there are 5 German URL channels, and 3 URL channels for the English translations up to now.

The results are shown in 2x2 pixel color points for each day Impressions, Clicks, Earnings, CTR, EPC, CPM

For each month, a column with all the above as numbers. A color line for the monthly average of the above 6 data

[7_Driver]

I don't analyse as much as I should.

I have an AdSense tracker program - but the volume of data coming out of our main site caused problems. It would have needed a dedicated server to itself - so I now only use it on one of our small sites.

So all I really do now is record the daily stats in Excel, calculate the ePC, and compare monthly totals to the same month last year.

I do use channels quite a bit to see which sites and which parts of my main site are earning the money, so I know what content to produce more of. But that's about it.

AdSense is a great thing - but the reporting is the weakest part of it. With better reporting and facilities, we could all make (and make Google!) a LOT more money.