Tracking RSS feed

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Colleen MacDonald
Colleen MacDonald
Ancient Membership Inquirer Level 2
in Blackbaud Luminate Online® & Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Discussions

Hi,

I am frequently asked how many people subscribe to our RSS feed. Does anyone know of an easy way to figure this out? Can it be tracked in Google Analytics or is there and easy way in Convio to do this?

Thanks,

Colleen

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  • Eric Helmuth
    Eric Helmuth
    Ancient Membership 10 Comments Facilitator Level 2

    A lot of feed publishers run their feeds through Feedburner (www.feedburner.com) for this purpose, and then only distribute the Feedburner URLs to consumers. Convio CMS can pass RSS feed click throughs to WebTrends but I dont know about Google Analytics -- at any rate, that's just clicks and not feed subscriptions.

    ::waves hi to Colleen::

  • JordanViator
    JordanViator
    Ancient Membership First Comment Facilitator Level 1 Inquirer Level 2

    We use Feedburner for the Connection Cafe blog and it's very easy to use. We can track both RSS feed subscriptions, as well as email subscriptions through our Feedburner account. It's very easy and intuitive to use, and though we do not use them for anything, we also have records of the email addresses of those subscribed via email. I don't think there is any way to track RSS subscriptions through Google Analytics at this time (though Google did just acquire Feedburner, so they are technically the same company now). Hope that helps!

  • Eric Helmuth
    Eric Helmuth
    Ancient Membership 10 Comments Facilitator Level 2
    JordanViator :

    We use Feedburner for the Connection Cafe blog and it's very easy to use. We can track both RSS feed subscriptions, as well as email subscriptions through our Feedburner account. It's very easy and intuitive to use, and though we do not use them for anything, we also have records of the email addresses of those subscribed via email. I don't think there is any way to track RSS subscriptions through Google Analytics at this time (though Google did just acquire Feedburner, so they are technically the same company now). Hope that helps!

    Update: Google now provides instructions for tracking Feedburner clicks in Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165769

  • Alex Bernardin
    Alex Bernardin
    Ancient Membership 100 Comments Photogenic Facilitator Level 3

    Google Analytics requires Javascript in order to record anything - programs that reas RSS feeds would not execute javascript (I haven't actually tested this, but it seems *dramatically* unlikely - does anyone know differently?), so forcing your subscribers to go through another system like Feedburner is probably necessary. And the more precise metrics that something like feedburner would give you probably make it desirable over the simple click tracking that GA would give you anyway...

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