The Overview

Google makes it easy for you to automatically know how much you’re earning
on any given day, just by signing in to your AdSense account — you know,
that little gold mine you keep at www.adsense.com. When you log in to the
account, the first page you see is the Overview report, which provides you
with a quick look at your daily earnings. In fact, right there in bold print (and
it’s probably the very first thing you see) is the Today’s Earnings heading. In
green, next to the heading, you see the amount of money that you’ve earned
that day.
A little farther down the page, you see a table with details about how you’ve
earned that money. The table lists the different types of AdSense ads you’re
showing as well as the following statistics, all designed to help you understand
quickly what’s working and what’s not:
1. Page Impressions: This is the number of people who have viewed your
ads on a given day. This number represents all the visitors to your site,
whether they stayed on the site or bounced right back off.
2. Clicks: This column adds the number of times folks have clicked one of
your ads.
3. Page CTR: Short for Page Click-Thru-Rate, Page CTR shows the percentage
of people who came to your site and then clicked through your
AdSense ads to the advertiser’s page. The higher your percentage, the
better your ads are performing.
4. Page eCPM: Don’t ask me how they get Effect Clicks Per Thousand out
of eCPM. (The acronym has something to do with the metric version of
measurement, which really doesn’t matter to you one bit.) What you do
need to know is that this figure is arrived at by dividing your total earnings
by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if your
site earns $100 from 10,000 impressions, your eCPM is $100/10 or $10.
This represents the amount that you’re making per thousand impressions,
however, and doesn’t represent exactly how much you’re making.
Instead, it’s a measurement that you can use to compare results across
channels or advertising programs.
5. Earnings: The actual amount that you’ve earned over a given timeframe
is shown in this column. Specify the timeframe you want to examine with
the View drop-down menu, . You can view results
by Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, This Month, Last Month, and All Time.
The Overview page shows more than just how much money you’re making.
This page also contains notes from the AdSense team, messages that you
can view — stuff like the monthly optimization report that’s sent to AdSense
advertisers — as well as links to quick reports. “What are they?” you ask. Read
on and become enlightened.