Why Track RSS?

By Joe Lucas

Certainly, we all understand the value a solid email list provides, but did you know that your RSS feed can yield a gold mine of metrics information?

Getting good metrics from your RSS feed isn't as easy as it is when tracking email conversions. That's because many of the metrics you've come to rely on—like 'unique visitors'—can be inadvertently skewed by the RSS feed process. Think about this: many people use an RSS aggregating tool or desktop feed reader software that pushes updates to them many times a day—leading to a misleadingly high number of unique visits.

Fortunately, there's a way to segment, analyze, and employ tests to increase the performance of your RSS feed. In this article, we'll cover the basics of using web analytics to measure the number of subscribers you have, and will offer advice on how to segment subscribers so you can further exploit the magnitude and reach of your RSS readership.

Defining RSS
Before we jump in, there are some important terms to understand:

RSS Feed: the document (XML or RDF file) that is delivered to an RSS client reader, aggregator, and/or broadcaster

RSS Client: software that organizes, updates, and stores RSS feeds (RSS Captor, Snarfer, etc.)

RSS Aggregator: a script (usually web-based) that pulls RSS feeds together and posts them to the web. (NewsGator, FeedDemon, etc.)

Tracking RSS
RSS was designed to provide anonymity to its subscribers—hence it's relatively difficult to track. However, there are some metrics that will offer marketing insights:

What RSS Metrics Should You Track?

1. SUBSCRIBERS: How many unique subscribers do you have?
   In order to get a unique subscriber, you need to differentiate users based on a unique identifier.

   One of the biggest uses of RSS is to get content on multiple platforms. For example, if you use Yahoo reader to access an RSS feed, the feed URL will be the same when you login from your work computer, laptop, and/or mobile device.

   There are two options as to how you can uniquely identify your feed: using a cookie or an auto-generated unique identifier.

   • Cookie identification: While you can use cookies to help track unique subscribers, relying on cookie-based identification alone is not a good idea. This is because many people regularly delete their cookies and different browsers (like Internet Explorer and Mozilla) each record separate cookies—leading to a situation where a cookie would count unique subscribers multiple times.
     
     
   • Auto-generated unique identifier: Using a script-generated unique identifier lets you define a specific URL parameter that will give you a more accurate number of unique subscribers. The unique parameters can be parsed by your web analytics software or hosted solution, which will enable you to further segment your subscribers.
     
     
2. READERSHIP: How many unique visitors access the feed in given day, week, month? Understanding how subscribers interact differently on different days can give insights on the best and worst days to release news, update information, and more.
   
   
3. ROBOTS: Which bots are crawling your feeds? Knowing which bots are visiting your feeds and how often they're visiting can help identify areas of search engine optimization that could use improvement.
   
   
4. REVENUE: How much revenue are your feeds generating? There's nothing like a moneymaking conversion to show you the effectiveness of your feed.
   
   
5. FEED READERS: Which feed readers are visitors using most with your feeds? Understanding which feed readers are preferred means that you can set up your feed to take advantage of the nuances inherent in the most popular feed reader software.
   
   
6. FEED REFERERS: Which search engine referred the most subscribers? Similar to above, knowing which feeds refer the most subscribers can be helpful in determining future campaigns and even in identifying potential partnership opportunities.

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Joe Lucas is a Professional Services guru at ClickTracks. Our Professional Services department offers one-on-one interactive sessions to help you with search engine optimization, campaign management, and web analytics. Contact Professional Services or call us 877-773-2249 (+831-621-6380 outside the U.S.).