20 Jul 08
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?
July 20th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
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!
July 20th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
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.
July 20th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
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.
July 29th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
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.