How to track RSS feeds
May 29th, 2008 by DavezillaMany bloggers have RSS subscriptions available on their sites, but are frustrated that they cannot easily track them. Good news: you can track your subscribers! Wikipedia lists four methods of tracking RSS feeds:
- Transparent 1×1 pixel images: These images can be embedded within the content of the RSS feed by linking to the image which should be held on the web server. The number of requests made can be measured by using the web server log files. This will give a rough estimate as to how many times the RSS feed has been viewed.
The problem with this method is that not all RSS feed aggregators will display images and parse HTML.
- 3rd Party services: There are services available on the internet that will syndicate your RSS feed and then track all requests made to their syndication of your RSS feed. These services come free and paid forms. The problem with this method is that all analytical data about the feeds are controlled by the service provider and so not easily accessible or transferable.
- Unique URL per feed: This method requires heavy web server programming to auto generate a different RSS feed URL for each visitor to the website. The visitor’s RSS feed activity can then be tracked accurately using standard web analytics applications. The problem with this method is that if the feed is syndicated by a search engine for instance then this will defeat the purpose of the unique URLs as many people could potentially view the RSS feed via a single URL.
- Estimating number of subscribers from the log files: Some aggregators (for example, Bloglines and Google Reader) include a number of unique users on whose behalf the feed is being downloaded in the HTTP request. Other readers—such as web browsers—can be counted by noting the number of unique IP addresses that retrieve the file in a given period. This provides an estimate of actual readership, although it is probably higher than the real number because people may sign up for accounts with multiple aggregators and never delete their subscriptions and because they may read the same feeds at different computers, or the same computer may have a different IP address at different times.
These are all good methods. What if you want to track using an existing analytics tool such as Google Analytics? It can be done and Hamlet Batista came up with a simple method. You need to add a bit of javascript to the feed link to nudge Google Analytics. Using the Next Engine feed link as an example, here’s how you can do it:
<a xhref="http://thenextengine.com/feed/" title="Subscribe to the Next Engine" rel="alternate" onClick=”javascript:urchinTracker(’/feed’);“>RSS Posts</a>
That bit of “onClick” javascript does it. But you’re not done yet. The second thing you need to do is move the Google Analytics code from the footer to right after the opening <body> tag.
Lastly, you need to set up a conversion goal in Google Analytics. Name it RSS or whatever you want. Set the URL to be the feed URL (in this case, it is http://thenextengine.com/feed/). Now you can see where your visitors are coming from!
May 30th, 2008 at 8:56 am
One of the best third-party solutions is Feedburner - allowing for stats, customization, inline graphics/ads, Itunes optimization etc and it also solves the ‘IE6 is dumb about RSS’ problem.
May 31st, 2008 at 4:09 pm
True. Now that Google owns them, they give away much better analytics than they used to.