Set up an effective payment flow for lifetime visits

If you already know how to pay your writers per visits, you may want to pay them for all the visits their posts record through all time, not just for the current month. This can be easily achieved through the PRO version mark as paid feature. This tutorial will guide you through how to set up the payment flow in order to achieve that.

How to pay authors per views across multiple months

1. If you use Google Analytics, make sure you have selected the desired start day for visits. This can be done through the Update Analytics Data feature in the Google Analytics Status box. For example, if you want to pay writers for views since the beginning of 2016, then you need to select 2016/01/01. You may well want to start counting visits since the day you install the plugin, in which case just select that day or don’t do anything.
   
2. At this point, stats will display revenues generated by the visits you decided to draw from Analytics. We’ll refer to Bob having earned $50 over that time, so we have a concrete example. We’ll also suppose that Bob’s revenue came from two posts: post A and post B, both published in May 2016.The usual concern is “I’m going to pay Bob 50 bucks for this time range. This will settle past visits. But what about future ones? I need to pay Bob even for the visits post A and post B generate in June and July and all time afterwards.” This can be achieved.
   Now, you pay Bob $50. The crucial step is that you mark that as paid (Tutorial) through Post Pay Counter’s interface (if you pay with PayPal through the plugin, it does also mark as paid automatically). When you mark an author as paid, which automatically marks the corresponding posts as paid, you basically reset the due payment amounts to zero. After marking an author as paid, the Total Payment field will still hold the original value (i.e. the total revenue since the beginning), while the Due Pay field will be reset to zero.
3. Once you have marked Bob as paid, new revenue will start to accumulate in the Due Pay column. When you are going to pay Bob again, visits/adsense revenues generated since the time you paid him will be included. The only thing you need to be careful about is to select a stats time range wide enough so that all posts you want to pay Bob for are included in it.In our case, since Post A and Post B were published in May 2016, we’ll need to make sure that a time range that includes May is selected.
   There’s an apt setting to tweak the default stats time range: you can find it in Post Pay Counter > Options > Miscellanea > Default stats time range. NOTE that the stats time range doesn’t have any effect on visits time range. The visits/ads figures you see are always totals, there’s no way to get visits numbers with a variable date range. The stats time picker only allows you to select what posts are displayed by tweaking the publication date range.
4. At this point, you simply need to iterate the process: every time you pay Bob, you mark him as paid, so that the Due Payment counter is reset to zero, and new revenue starts to accumulate again from scratch, getting ready to be paid on the next batch.

Calculate payment from a monthly revenue value

If you want to pay your writers depending on each month income, you can couple the method above with an apt settings change each month. Have a look at this topic and this other topic for more details.

Why isn’t there a view for all posts that had visits this month?

Because it would drain your server’s resources. Think about it: when you have to display stats for this month, how can you know what posts had unpaid visits this month? You would basically have to go and check, one by one, what posts had visits this month. Again, this would require checking each and every post, which would kill your server every time the stats page was loaded.