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?

We do also own the image generating site, so we could add it to our central Webmaster Tools account.

It's used by a large number of other client sites.

My usual preference is to verify by uploading a file.

Do you know if we would have to reverify the imagesite for every other client site that uses it?

The main issue is that we want the images to be indexed, and for the resulting traffic to be sent to the client site - not to the image site.

Has anyone got experience in using image indexing this way with xml files, and proved that traffic does come through?

cheers

We often use images from a dynamic image server, to cater for image asset management, multiple sizes etc.  Similar to Adobe's Scene7, although that came out after we chose our product.

So widgets.com may have all its images with a URL like  myimageserver.com?src=widgets/catalogue/productname.jpg;width=100;height=100;angle=90,  instead of widgets.com/images/productname.jpg.

A potential client wants to capitalise on traffic from Google image search.

We could build an image sitemap, listing the images on each page.

What should we place in the image:loc field? The code: myimageserver.com?src=widgets/catalogue/productname.jpg;width=100;height=100;angle=90

Apparently we have to verify the hosting site in Webmaster Tools, but I can't see where.

I have a single Webmaster Tools account, where most of our sites are defined. Would I have to verify it for each site using the dynamic imaging program?

Love to hear from anyone with solutions for getting images indexed when they are hosted at third-party dynamic imaging programs.