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What is best practice for tracking RSS feed subscribers

Reporting & Analytics

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ozgeekmum last edited by

What is the most accurate/achievable way of tracking data about subscribers to your RSS feed through Google Analytics?

With standard WordPress sites, we place the RSS link to Feedburner so we could track statistics.

However it wouldn't track the way that I use it.

I use Pulse on an Android Tablet to read my feeds offline on the bus each morning. At home, Pulse automatically downloads the latest feeds wirelessly overnight. So then I can read them without a connection.

The obvious downside for my reading experience is that I only get what is contained in the feeds. If the company only includes an excerpt, it's too annoying to read the teaser and be unable to connect and follow a link. So I only subscribe to feeds that contain the full post. Yeah to seomoz, aimclear, SEL, adwordsblog. I dont subscribe to bruceclays blog, much as i'd like to, because it doesn't contain the full feed. That's probably deliberate on their part, because I have to consciously visit their blog on my desktop at work, to see the whole post.

The other problem with say Pulse, is how it locates the feed. I typed in the URL, and Pulse subscribed me. I assume that Pulse simply looked for the domain.com/feed URL and added that, rather than look for feeds2.feedburner.com/domain.

I looked at Feedburner stats and they didn't go up for 2 days, so basically it didn't track me.

Would it be as simple as using the Google URL builder to add parameters to each post in the RSS feed? Eg utm_source=feedreader, utm_medium=rss, utm_campaign=tracking.

But that still wouldn't track offline users.

I assume that most people are also not going to paste the Feedburner URL into their FeedReader, but would let the platform auto-detect the feed.

Any suggestions?
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