I mentioned a few days ago that I wanted to revisit some of my older websites and improve Adsense performance rather than just see the headline figure for all the sites and be satisfied with that and not delve too deeply in. Of course I've always checked how Adsense Channels were performing but as long as the total was OK, I was generally happy.

But to help with my new approach, I have been making a habit of printing out a "Custom Report" from Adsense advance reporting that shows me Yesterday's Adsense status for all channels, grouped by Channel. I'm someone that reads stats best from a printed page, so I save the report as a CSV and print it out. So far so good, and then I noticed that using the Report Manager, you can have the custom report emailed to you on a daily basis. This couldn't get any better I thought, so I set it up and received my first email report today from Google.

I was happy with that except for one thing - they sent the report as a .zip file. This means that to access the info how I like it, I need to save the attachment, open the Zip file, file the CSV file within, and then print it. It's OK, but it's click intensive. There must be a better way, I thought...

Step forward EZDetach...

I googled around and found EZDetach from a company called TechHit. This dreamy little add in for Microsoft Outlook automatically detaches attachments from email messages. It works as a toolbar button, or more importantly, as a custom action, meaning you can set it up to work as a rule applied to incoming messages. But it doesn't stop there - after it detaches the file, it gives you the option to unzip the file and then another option to execute a script of your own - from where you can then print the file automatically too.

The end result is that I receive the email from Google, the attachment is automatically saved, unzipped and printed. The report comes shooting out of my printer with no interaction or work from me at all. I just pick it up and start analysing.

This solution is so sweet, I thought others might be interested, so here's exactly how I've set it up:

1) Install EZDetach (http://www.techhit.com/ezdetach/) - Free trial is available, and the actual price is only $29.97

2) Open Outlook - I'm using Outlook 2003

3) Find an existing Adsense Report received, and right click on it, then select "Create Rule"

4) Select "Subject Contains - Adsense Report Request..."

5) Click Advanced Options, and then click Next to proceed to the "What do you want to do with the message?" screen. Scroll down and tick "perform a custom action"

6) Click the underlined words "a custom action" to choose the action, and then select EZDetach in the drop down list. Click Change to configure it...

7) Set an Output path, tick Execute and enter "c:\printfile.vbs" and also click Unzip File. So you have told it where to save the file, that it needs unzip to the file and that it needs to run a script called printfile.vbs which is on the c:\ - now we need to make that script! Just click Ok, and Finish first.



8) Open Notepad.exe and enter this text, than click File->Save as-> enter "c:\printfile.vbs" for the file name and be sure to select "All Files" for Save as Type.

Option Explicit
Dim objShellApp
Dim strFilename
strFilename = "c:\my documents\mailattachments\Adsense-Report.csv"
Set objShellApp = WScript.CreateObject("Shell.Application")
objShellApp.ShellExecute strFilename, "", "", "print", 0
Wscript.Sleep(5000)
Set objShellApp = Nothing

I should add - the company behind EZDetach is so cool that they made a print file script available on their website which I hacked about to make this. this script relies on there being the same output path as I had, but you can easily change accordingly.

9. That's it! Next time you get a report from Adsense, it will just print straight out ready to be collected from the paper tray.

Of course, not everyone will want to receive and consume their stats like this, but for the way I like to do it, this method works so well.

Labels: adsense, affiliate tools, review