I too use excel - gives my some wonderful graphics (on the good days) but does take a lot of my time to feed every day.

Use of csv files would save me a lot of time, but, OTOH I believe that systematically entering my channel data into my spreadsheet each day ensures that I'm aware of any changes at the detailed level.

At a much simple level, I find just recording total impressions, clicks and earnings for each day into excel is good enough to see overall patterns, trends and anything unusual. I keep promising myself to set something up to track standard deviations and such like, but really the mark 1 eyeball is generally good enough to see what's happening.

I just carve another notch in my checkbook each time I make a deposit.

No channels, no tracking, just look at the big number.

If I like it I smile and keep working.

If I don't I go investigate the players.

Every page on my site that has AdSense ads has its own URL channel. (I do this with my pages that have YPN ads as well.) Then I create Custom reports for (all) Channels today, (all) Channels yesterday, and (all) Channels this month.

Checking these reports shows which URL channels (pages' ads) are performing well and which are hurting the overall performance. I pay close attention to this, and always change the lowest-performing AdSense pages over to YPN ads (or just remove the advertising altogether).

As a result of the monitoring and fine-tuning (and keeping the low-quality ads from appearing), my earnings are up substantially, with the CTR and eCPM both higher than I ever anticipated them being.

You can't fix problems without knowing where they are.

I have a channel for each set of ads on the page and a channel for each set of linkads.

I can keep track of what each ad block is doing and what each set of linkads are doing.

Mike

I integrated in my CMS something to import the CVS files and make statistics out of it.

Type overall totals at various points of the day into Excel and get some good graphics out of it. I look at past performance over the last 6 months, and since starting with adsense. I get a projection for the current month based on data available for the month elapsed to date.

What I'm looking at on a day to day basis may change. IE I'm doing some a/b testing on a couple of pages at the moment, and I'll look at the channels data for them in detail, but other channels just take an overview of.

Day to day changes I'm not too concerned with, as I look for longer term trends.

I integrated in my CMS something to import the CVS files and make statistics out of it.

way cool. can it make salad too? ;)

I import the ol fashioned way but only monthly, so I can generally see an upward thrend. More than that is too much of a hassle.

I'm with ken_b and Khensu: The online AdSense reports are good enough for me.

I couldn't exist without the data, the more the better. When I create new content, it's always follows a model of previous pages that are performing to my goals. There's no way I could build a successful model without the data to justify it.

I use Excel sheets, lots of them. Update once a week.

As long as it's giving you meaningful information that supports your crucial decision-making, then Excel seems like a good choice.

Personally I've made all the important decisions about AdSense that I need to for the time being, so for me this would be an expensive distraction. It would be about as useful as graphing daily weather patterns.

I have written my own AdSense monitoring (loggin) desktop software, and obviously I'm using it myself.

It saves me a lot of time - with the graphs and channel tracking and reports.

Graphs can be really useful, especially moving averages over 7 and 30 days, to see what is happening on our sites, make suitable improvements, etc. We can obtain graphical charts from the CSV files for example with Excel, the freeware csv adstats, and many other programs.