Reading your statistics without fooling yourself

The first thing most people look at is total views, and it is the least useful figure on the page. It only ever goes up, so it always looks like progress even when nothing is happening.

Views today is more honest. It tells you whether what you did yesterday worked. Compared across a week it shows a trend rather than a total.

Earnings per link is where the real information is. Two links with similar view counts and very different earnings are telling you something about where their audiences are, and that is worth more than either number alone.

Watch the links that underperform, not just the winners. A link that gets opened but never completes is usually a sign that something in the path is broken or too slow, and that is fixable.