I’ve got a dirty little RSS secret
I’m always harping on about the importance of having a tight grip on stats to know what’s happening on your blog but… I have a secret: I’ve never tracked my own RSS feed stats.
I launched That Canadian Girl back when RSS wasn’t very popular and, while WordPress automatically produced a feed, I never bothered tracking stats around it.
Now, many years later, I’ve decided to add Feedburner to it. If you’re already reading this via RSS, it should – in theory – be business as usual, but should you spot any funny business, please let me know via the comments.
New reader? Why not subscribe to the feed now?
I’ve found Feedburner to be mostly reliable except with my current main blog. The subscriber numbers seem to be lower than the number of unique clickthroughs I get from Google Reader etc in my stats. Still, it’s a really useful tool!
Thanks for the comment, Martin. The figures Google reports should be fairly accurate, according to FeedBurner’s post from Feb 07.
It’s best to use these stats as a guide to your traffic figures, rather than an exact science, but it’s still a very useful measure for reader loyalty.
Feedburner should be able to tell how many people are subscribed to a feed via google reader as Google reader sends the number of subscribers to your feed in the user agent string (or at least did last time I checked). Whether or not Feedburner use that information or not, I’m not sure.
Welcome to Feedburner!! I signed up with up a while ago and I’m kind of in love with it. Would love to hear what you think about it!
Pssst! I subscribe to your feed & lurk your blog all the time.