Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Feedburner Stats A Stroke of Genuis

Recently, Feedburner rolled out a feature they call 'item stats'. It allows you to view the amount of traffic coming in to each one of your rss items (aka blog posts). It's great because you don't really have to do anything other than flip the switch inside feedburner and you're rss feed is automatically changed to use feedburner tracking urls instead of your own urls. It's a great little app, especially since it's free, that allows you to really see which posts are popular and how much traffic each is receiving as well as what kind of software made the request. Whether it be bot, aggregator or browser.

The genius comes in the for of linking. In doing this, feedburner is able to increase the number of links pointing to it's site for each post on your blog. How so? Many sites syndicate your rss feed, usually without your permission, and post it as content on their own site. Then all of the links to the source posts are still in tact but instead of them pointing to your site they will point to FeedBurner, thus increasing their relevance in the eyes of the search engines. I must note that it doesn't convert the links found within the blog post itself, only the links to the actual blog post are changed. Also, a feedburner statistic url looks something like this...

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarketingShiftJasonDowdell?m=29

I'm sure that wasn't the intention of Feedburner but it's definitely a side effect. I've found that when you have an incredibly controversial post there are numerous ways for you to get screwed in the "giving credit where credit's due" department. Feedburner is a great company and I'm extremely grateful for their free service. That being said, it's still important to be made fully aware of the effects a decision will have before you make it. Isn't that what expert blog commentary is about anyway? :)

Here's feedburner's explanation of how the stats work.
"Captures detailed traffic stats about individual feed content items.

Purpose: Get closer to your readers on a content item-by-content item basis. Use Item Stats if you'd like to get detailed item-level statistics as well, such as which links in your feed subscribers are clicking through. (FeedBurner tracks hits and new subscribers to your feed automatically.)
Feed EffectRewrites
link
item URLs to track and maintain your item popularity statistics."

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 01:47 PM
Permanent Link: Feedburner Stats A Stroke of Genuis | Comments (0)

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