Warning its addictive

I got the cold shivers yesterday when I tried to log into my AdSense account and discovered that AdSense was down and not accessible. Many AdSense users get quite obsessive about checking their accounts regularly but the down time yesterday got me thinking about how much of a distraction this can be.
Now when you are an early AdSense user ( or indeed a user of any of the other such programs) I do think that there is much that can be learned from checking your account regularly. Or to be more specific, from checking your access logs and checking your AdSense account.

Checking your AdSense account on its own just tells you how many clicks you have had for a given number of page impressions from a site and what you earned from them. All very interesting but ... the information that you really need is the association between the characteristics of the people coming to your site and the out-turn of this in terms of consequent ad click through. If you can start to make associations between how people found you, how they travelled ( or didn't ) through your site and what the outcome was in terms of your goals (ad clicks, affiliate links followed) then this is much more useful information.

There is of course another problem with getting too caught up in checking your account. The time you are spending checking your account could often better be used working on your site, adding to content etc.

So I have decided to make myself a resolution and stick to it. I am only going to check my account once a day. Well maybe twice a day and then I'll cut down. I'll just need to check it now though before I start ...