Atom/RSS Feeds Statistics Tracking

Use of content syndication feeds, like Atom or RSS, by site visitors and online businesses is increasingly popular in new Web 2.0 era. Just facts: all modern browsers natively support feeds subscription; feed readers are among the most popular Firefox plug-ins; many large online service providers, like Google, offer popular feeds aggregator services. For online businesses feeds play an important role of keeping their subscribers (visitors and customers) up to date about news, new content, product announcements, etc., retaining their attention, even if they do not revisit site very often and, thus, remain invisible to traditional web analytics tools, but returning them back to the site immediately when they become interested about anything communicated via feed.

But... is there any sense in spending time, efforts and money on implementing and updating feeds in our case? Is there any one reading updates on the other end of the feed? If yes, how many of them keep reading our feeds? Have feed subscribers ever returned to the site induced by the feed? Do feed subscribers ever convert? Does it pays off to invest more to make feeds more attractive to subscribers? TrackSite comes fully equipped to provide answers to these new questions...

TrackSite includes built-in capability of Atom/RSS statistics tracking that provides webmasters, marketers and content editors with the number of active subscribers, number of feed reads, dynamics, geo-segmentation, etc. TrackSite provides statistics of individual Atom/RSS feeds, groups of feeds (e.g. grouped by theme, etc.) as well as aggregate statistics of all feeds.

TrackSite integrates feeds tracking with web analytics of entire site. Such "integrated" tracking dramatically increases information value compared to pure Atom/RSS trackers. TrackSite's feeds analytics allow webmasters, marketers and content editors to analyze complete web analytics for visitors who click links broadcasted via RSS feeds, measure visitors conversion rates (as well as funnels) for purchase/order (or any other on-site conversion targets), etc. This provides unique opportunities to measure effectiveness of content syndication feeds for customer acquisition and retention.

See also:

Web 2.0 Analytics