Can I get Google AdSense reports via email?

Glad to hear things are going well for you. I too remember the milestone of earning more than your hosting costs and suddenly looking at my web site in a different light entirely... it'd be a good bumper sticker: Visualize Internet Revenue!

In terms of your specific question, it turns out that Google has just upgraded its custom reporting mechanism to allow just what you want. Darn convenient of them!

First, log in to your account, and click on Reports and the subcategory Report Manager:

If you don't yet have a custom report, then you need to flip to a different sub-category, Advanced Reports, either "Ad Performance" or "Search Performance". I never see any income through search, so I'll look at Ad Performance.

To create a custom report, just specify the date range, the data organizational method (page or ad unit), and whether you want to see aggregate data or channel data. Here's how I set up my test report:

Now the key step: once you click the "Display Report" button, you'll see the report, but you'll also see:

Give your custom report a mnemonic name - I choose "Weekly Ad Report" - and save it.

Now, flip back to the "Report Manager" and it'll look a bit more interesting:

To make this report something that'll be sent to me via email every week, I'd need to change the frequency from "never" to "weekly", at which point I suddenly have the option of indicating what address to use and what format to send the report in (CSV, comma-separated values, or CSV specifically for Microsoft Excel). I wish I could get it as tabular ASCII information so it was readable in my email program directly, but that's not an option currently (and surprisingly!)

That's all you need to do. Specify the frequency, address and format, save your changes, and you'll start getting this data via email.

Not too bad.

Two additional thoughts on this, though:

First off, email is notoriously less secure than an SSL-based Internet connection. Before you start getting AdSense reports, make sure that you really, really want to have this data winding through the Internet and sitting in your inbox.

Secondly, there's a lot of potential for this feature, but I think Google needs to put a bit more effort into it. For example, I can produce a report that's just for a specific channel or set of channels, but I'd like to be able to have the report format be easily readable in a mail program so I could, for example, assign a unique channel to content I am displaying from a specific partner, and automatically email them a copy of the AdSense results each week. Being able to have custom report headers and footers would be even nicer, wouldn't it?

Hope this helps you get going with this feature. It's a bit tricky, but darn cool that you can do it!