Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Tracking RSS a Work in Progress

RSS and blog marketing company Pheedo says the optimal method of producing click-throughs on RSS ads is to intersperse one ad per two pieces of content. Pheedo's research also says that embedding ads within content is bad idea performance-wise (as well as in keeping readers happy).

Pheedo also released an analytics tool that makes it easier for customers using its advertising solution to track RSS feed performance. This is a positive step, but the real problem for bloggers is figuring out how many people have signed up for RSS feeds and how much the subscriptions contribute to the overall traffic.

For those who own their own domains and blogging system and have access to the log files, tracking RSS feeds can be done, but for the majority of folks whose blogs are hosted by sites like Blogger don't provide the stats. You could use a third-party feed site such as Pheedo or FeedBurner, but that gives them the page ranking benefit.

Also, people sign up for feeds through an amalgam of web-based or software-based RSS readers, which further confounds finding out where people signed up. A single method of registering and tracking RSS feeds that is accessible to all bloggers and readers would help us learn about and profit from RSS feed subscriptions.

Posted By John Gartner at 02:41 PM
Permanent Link: Tracking RSS a Work in Progress | Comments (0)

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