Tracking RSS Feed Subscribers Using Feedburner

If you publish regular posts to a blog or news site, you're probably interested in tracking whether anyone's reading it, right? You've probably added a stats program to your site so you can find out how many visitors your site is receiving and what they're looking at. But how do you track subscribers to your site's RSS feed? This is a bit trickier than copy/pasting a couple lines of code into your site, but it's not rocket science either.

The big challenge here is figuring out how many people are accessing and reading the XML file your blog publishes. If you're running a Movable Type blog, your RSS file is likely at yourdomainname.com/index.xml and atom.xml, blogspot.com sites publish feeds to /atom.xml. If readers subscribe directly to your index.xml or atom.xml file, it's almost impossible to accurately track how many regular readers you're reaching through your feed.

Enter Feedburner

Feedburner has created a solution to this problem. By "burning" your feed through Feedburner then allowing readers to subscriber to your site through a unique Feedburner URL, you can track how many subscribers your feed receives, what they're looking at and what they click on. This is clearly valuable information and well worth doing for anyone serious about blogging (or publishing other web feeds from news and retail sites).

"Burning" a feed on Feedburner is a very simply process. Simply paste the URL of your site's feed into Feedburner, then swap the feed URL links on your site with the one provided by Feedburner (usually feeds.feedburner.com/yoursitemane).

Once you have a Feedburner feed in place, promoting your feed should help ramp up your subscribe rate. We do this on Technology Evangelist through a link on the header of every page of our site to our subscription options page. That page includes one-click subscription options for many popular RSS readers, including Bloglines, My.Yahoo, Pluck and NewsGator. Each directs users to the appropriate feed reader with our Feedburner URL attached. Quick clarification: directing readers through the custom subscribe buttons allows us to track how many and how our subscribers are consuming our content, but not who those subscribers are.

Catching Missed RSS Subscribers

Unfortunately, some readers of your site may still be able to slip past your Feedburner subscriptions. This is especially common when readers subscribe to your site using a client RSS reader, such as Firefox Live Bookmarks, Internet Explorer 7's RSS reader (currently in beta) or Firefox's Sage RSS reader extension. Programs like this detect whether your site has a feed and subscribes users to the feed the programs find. By default, this will likely be your /index.xml or /atom.xml file rather than the Feedburner version of your feed. This results in under reporting of your true subscriber numbers in Feedburner. Luckily, there is a way to prevent this.

Client feed readers look to a site's meta content to determine your site's feed location. Changing this value to your Feedburner URL will route the client RSS readers to your preferred feed URL. But how is this done? Here are the easy steps for Movable Type blogs. If you know how to do this for other blogging platforms, or have found a resource that does, please add it to the comments below.

1. Open Main Index Template

2. Find the following two lines of code (withing <head> tag):

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"
 title="Atom" href="<$MTBlogURL$>atom.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" 
title="RSS 2.0" href="<$MTBlogURL$>index.xml" />

3. Replace <$MTBlogURL$>atom.xml and <$MTBlogURL$>index.xml with your Feedburner URL.

4. Save and Rebuild

5. Repeat in every Indexes, Archives, and System template containing the above code.

You're almost done.

6. Log in to your Feedburner account and activate SmartFeed under the Optimize tab:

Feedburner Smartfeedf

This will allow your one Feedburner feed to publish in both RSS and Atom formats when appropriate.

7. You're done.

There are more advanced solutions to this problem worth exploring for people interested in modifying their .htaccess files. Feedburner's support forum has a lengthy thread on this topic, including tips for other blogging platforms.

Thanks to Frank Gruber of SomewhatFrank.com for bringing this to our attention. It's an elegant solution to a nagging problem.

I like to see bloggers succeed based on the quality of their content rather than their ability to understand each and every blogging related service on the web.

Comments

1. Posted by: Frank Gruber on February 14, 2006 10:14 AM:

Great post! I like to see people helping people and this post should people get their feeds set up with FeedBurner. Nice job.

Cheers,
Frank

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