Comments on: Tracking New RSS Subscribers With Google Analytics (To Understand Them Better)

By: Lee Hughes

Lee Hughes — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:01:05 +0000

Hi,

Me again.. you mentioned that you can sort out which RSS is which like mainRSSButton, footerRSSLink.. How would you do this?

Thanks

By: Lee Hughes

Lee Hughes — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:10:18 +0000

Nice article..

I understood some tech stuff for once haha

Could you apply the same method for email subscribers?

Would there be a code change?

By: Monitorare i nuovi abbonati RSS con Googe Analytics e jQuery! | sastgroup.com

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:01:11 +0000

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By: Is your Google Analytics missing page views? Introducing Asynchronous Tracking

Is your Google Analytics missing page views? Introducing Asynchronous Tracking — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:20:05 +0000

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By: Brian Clifton

Brian Clifton — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:34:44 +0000

Johan makes a good point – what happens with your RSS feed away from your site is not tracked.

The recent Feedburner integration has gone a long way to fix this – for further background, see my related post:
http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2009/03/09/creating-the-prefect-trackable-blog-article/

Best regards, Brian

By: Johan de Jong

Johan de Jong — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:46:24 +0000

@Umut:

You are right, since it’s impossible to gain extra information from users who use a offline RSS reader (like Outlook).

Although I don’t have an RSS feed myself, nor potential readers, I’m unable to test any real statistics, but grouping by IP is basicly the only “accurate” method.

It might be possible to create unique url’s for each user (by adding an UUID) and send it as a custom tag to Analytics, but never tested it.

By: Abhisek

Abhisek — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:04:29 +0000

Nice thoughts. Thanks

By: Rastreando subscriptores RSS con Google Analytics

Rastreando subscriptores RSS con Google Analytics — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:08:50 +0000

[...] webresourcesdepot.com muestran el paso a paso que tiene que ser realizado para incluir el código correspondiente en los [...]

By: Umut M.

Umut M. — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:36:16 +0000

@Johan,

You’re right that it can only track users who clicked the RSS link. Although it doesn’t result in a 100% accurate data, it is still a very valuable info.

Your method of tracking RSS readers is very cool. Just a question which always bugs me in RSS counts: how do you analyze the uniqueness of the requests and count the number of subscribers? By grouping them via IP, requesting URLs..?

By: Johan de Jong

Johan de Jong — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:50:33 +0000

Hmmm… nice tutorial, although it doesn’t track you RSS feed itself. It only tracks the users who clicked on the “Subscribe” link (which doesn’t make them subscribers).

You could use FeedBurner to do this, although you should be able to do this by yourself.
I’m doing it replacing the logo (which can be send with the RSS) with a PHP generated image which also has the analytics tracker image inside. This way you can see who is downloading your RSS feed. It can even be adjusted to see who is reading which article in the RSS by inserting a small image inside the article itself.