I'm addicted to checking my Google Adsense Clicks

[blogabit2]

Good 4 you...I am addicted and do not often have anyone on...lol still trying to get customers. Those live stats r great, now if I would only get someone!

[chrisinbc]

Hello,

I can relate to being addicted to looking at Google Analytics and Google Adsense. I find myself checking the web stats for my blog several times a day.

Christopher

[Darren]

I don't see the point in checking Adsense regularly. I do not want to become emotionally attached to the money I've made so far in case Google decides to ban my account. Also, close scrutiny may lead me to see patterns that don't really exist. I haven't checked in over a month although I do know I got paid recently because I received an email telling me so. I'm glad to say, I don't really care!

[lee810]

I find that it can be addictive to make tweaks and see the effects on earnings. I also noticed that in order to find which pages produce the most income, I need to visit my Adsense page in Google Analytics. But all the other information is show on the Adsense Reports page. It would be nice if it was all in one place.

My income increased recently when I realized that my WP Adsense plug-in was stealing income from me. The author was devious and if a box wasn't filled in with a number (in this case 0), he ran his own ad id on one in every 8 impressions, taking 12.5% of the potential income from everyone who downloads and uses his plug in.

-Lee

[Web4Food]

I don't see the point in checking Adsense regularly. I do not want to become emotionally attached to the money I've made so far in case Google decides to ban my account. Also, close scrutiny may lead me to see patterns that don't really exist. I haven't checked in over a month although I do know I got paid recently because I received an email telling me so. I'm glad to say, I don't really care!

I understand your point. However, when I drop from $50 to $75 a month in Google Adsense revenue to $6 to $8 a month in GA revenue because of what Google has done with the EMD update, I start to take notice. I'm not emotionally attached to money except I need it to eat. Like when an employer says they will give you comp time for when you work overtime. One worker I know told his employer "I can't put ketchup on comp time".

At first I was addicted to looking at the AdSense earnings because it was exciting. After that I looked at it because I wanted to see progress. This let me know if what I was doing was working or if I needed to change what I had.

I would like to sit around the campfire and sing kumbaya but in reality, we all need money to survive. i get your point but I have high goals. Every day I see progress, I am motivated to work hard. Even if it is an increase of less than a dollar a month.

[Web4Food]

I find that it can be addictive to make tweaks and see the effects on earnings. I also noticed that in order to find which pages produce the most income, I need to visit my Adsense page in Google Analytics. But all the other information is show on the Adsense Reports page. It would be nice if it was all in one place.

My income increased recently when I realized that my WP Adsense plug-in was stealing income from me. The author was devious and if a box wasn't filled in with a number (in this case 0), he ran his own ad id on one in every 8 impressions, taking 12.5% of the potential income from everyone who downloads and uses his plug in.

-Lee

Wow that is scary Lee. I bought a plugin from someone that I thought may be taking income away from my earnings on Amazon. The plugin was great but shortly after installing the plugin, my earnings dropped. I may need to really look into this more.

[lee810]

Wow that is scary Lee. I bought a plugin from someone that I thought may be taking income away from my earnings on Amazon. The plugin was great but shortly after installing the plugin, my earnings dropped. I may need to really look into this more.

Yes, it's scary and I don't know how many of the WP Adsense plugins are doing it, but in some ways it's brilliant (in a greasy way) to take advantage of people who don't read the fine print. To let you know what to look for, the plugin was by a contributor called 'linuxnewbie' which is ironic, because he's a very skilled programmer. I teach PHP at the local college and so I have no one to blame but myself. Way down at the bottom of the config page for this plugin, there was a little box that was empty about the amount that you want to contribute to the developer. I never filled it in (figuring all my other plugins + WP itself is free so how could I justify a percentage for such a trivial plug-in?). But then one day I looked at the code and saw a random number generator that was 1 in 8, substituting a different Adsense ID for mine. That meant that for more than a year, 12.5% of my Adsense income went to this guy.

I looked as his follow-on Adsense product and found that in addition to comments (that were in Chinese), it contained a section of code to determine the 'split' of the revenue that was written in PHP, but it was encrypted. That was a big red flag. This guy is pretty much evil as far as open source goes. So if you have a plugin from a guy named 'linuxnewbie' that's running your Adsense code, beware, it is stealing income from you unless you fill in that empty box with a '0'. And if its running encrypted PHP code, there's no way to tell how much of your income he's taking.

-Lee