Track Your AdSense Earnings On Your Desktop
There are two things that I do every morning, right after turning on the computer. First, I read the latest strip of Schlock Mercenary. Then I check my Google AdSense earnings for the previous day. It’s the perfect mix of business and pleasure, and a great way to start a new day.
But enough about my habits – lets talk convenience. Manually checking your AdSense earnings is not very convenient – you need to navigate to their site, log in, pick the time period you want to examine from the drop-down… The process is simple, but if you religiously check your stats several times per day (like I do) it can get tedious. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some kind of a widget that would let you see all of your vital AdSense stats at a glance?
Turns out there are several, but most of them don’t work (any more) and are not supported by their authors. So I took the widget that looked the most promising – AdSensor – and fixed it. You can download the widget below.
What Is AdSensor?
AdSensor is a widget that regularly queries your Google AdSense account and displays up-to-date information about earnings and clicks in the form of a compact table. Update frequency is configurable. The widget also comes with four beautiful skins, works both on Windows and Mac, and is available two different languages : English and Finnish. The widget requires the Yahoo! Widgets framework.
You can find more information about this widget on the author’s site.
Download
Download AdSensor 2.9 – the patched version
File size : 196 KB. Requires the Yahoo! Widgets framework.
If you’re having problems with the above link, try the zipped version.
Patch Notes
My version is functionally almost completely identical to the original AdSensor widget. Most of the changes were internal :
- The original login routine relied on cookie-parsing magic and a hard-coded list of form field values. I added a simple regex-based parser that dynamically extracts the actual fields from the login form. This way, there’s a good chance the widget will continue working if Google decides to add a new hidden field to the form.
- I also rewrote the regex that extracts the data on earnings and clicks from Google AdSense reports. For reasons unknown, the original regex would cause the widget to hang permanently on my system.
- Finally, I made the earnings column display the right currency symbol (it can be either dollars or euros, depending on your country of residence and account settings).
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Looks pretty good – anything like this for mixed affiliate ££? e.g. that mixes adsense with amazon or other aff accounts? is it just site scraping you think?
This one is just a scraper, yes. Basically, it logs into your account and then visits the report pages for each time period and extracts the amount of earnings from the HTML.
I’m not aware of any similar apps for Amazon affiliates.
doesn’t work for other channels.. i.e if you are only using Adsense for Domains.
I suspected it wouldn’t. The data extraction algorithm used by the widget is pretty limited.
Thank you for updating AdSensor to handle the new Google login! However I have noticed an issue. The Widget seems to log in fine, but the data displayed simply says “Adsense For Content Host” on every line instead of the numbers. Any ideas? Do you have the modified source code that I can play with?
Strange, it’s still working fine here.
The .widget file is basically just a renamed .zip archive, so you can open it with any decent archiver. Alternatively, you can use Widget Converter to convert the widget between .zip/directory/flatfile formats.
Do you have your AdSense account connected to YouTube? I do, so that I see “AdSense for content host” under my regular AdSense stuff, which shows YouTube revenue. That might be messing up parsing.
Thanks for letting me know about the .ZIP trick, I didn’t know that. Now that I can access the source I might be able to figure out why this is happening.
Oh crap, it’s RegEx. I’m boned. 🙂
My AdSense account isn’t connected to YouTube, no.
You’re welcome to rewrite the data extraction routine to use XPath or whatever 😉
You’re assuming I know JavaScript. 😉 I think the last time I actually coded something in JavaScript was in high school. Guess I’ll just need to figure out RegEx, or find some string parsing tutorials in JS. Thanks again for updating the widget!
Thanks for patching this. It’s working great here. Nicely done.
Thanks for bringing this widget back!
I do have a bug thought. When it first starts up for me everything updates fine. But if I try to manually update it or put it on automatic, the next update just shows Today’s amounts and Today’s clicks all the way down the widget. Same figures for Yesterday, 7 days, etc. I have to close it and open it again to get full stats.
Any ideas? I’m using Windows XP.
Seems to have been a temporary glitch – maybe at Google’s end, because it seems to be working now. Sorry to have possibly mis-reported this “bug” – I really like the widget!
🙂
I’ve also seen that glitch occasionally, but it usually fixes itself soon. Not sure why it happens.
Is it possible to modify the gadget so it works without “Yahoo widget framework” ? I don’t need “Yahoo widget framework” and don’t like to install it only for that purpose.
Or is it possible to share your work / research
with http://blueonionsoftware.com/blog.aspx?p=bf5a9431-7306-4ff0-80c5-6273e45c54e5 so that he can update his gadget.
Man tnk you very much.. it works now .. you are the best :X
Is this still working?
I get just get an error when it tries to download. “error, reading data failed”.
Hi, I’ve been using this widget and it worked just fine but the New Adsense Page was put into use today with no option to revert back to the old format. Since this morning the widget just tries to log in and gives me a error failed to LOG-IN notice. Is there away around this, any further updates?
Sorry, I don’t have an updated version.