Interesting lessons from RSS feed stats using Feedburner

I recently moved The Standard's news feed over to Feedburner for RSS delivery to get a better understanding of how people are using the feed, what they are reading, what they are not reading, and what tools they are using to read it.  The process was very easy, and there seemed to be no downtime.  Here's one way to do it:

1. Create a duplicate version of your current feed.  Test it.  Make sure it works.
2. Setup an account in Feedburner.  It's currently free.
3. Fill out the details, pointing to your new duplicate feed.
4. Feedburner will create the URL of your new feed.  This is the URL you will promote from now on.
5. Lastly, create a redirect from your old feed to your new feed.  I updated my Apache config file with a simple additional redirect command.  You can read more about this on the Feedburner forum.

Done!  The whole setup took me about 20 minutes.  And you can see the results from the first 2 weeks in this chart.

The stats are pretty interesting.  One thing that surprised me was that I had made some subscription level estimates based on what I was seeing in the traffic logs and then comparing that to the logo image deliveries which were being served via my ad server.  I thought this feed had about 2,000 subscribers, but it turns out to be about half that, according to Feedburner.  I don't necessarily trust the stats 100%, but it has to be more accurate than my previous guestimates.

I also found it interesting to see which stories were being clicked on most.  I'm using Urchin for my traffic stats internally which doesn't give me much intelligence...a lot of data does not equal intelligence.  Of course, the URLs from the feed get out there on the web and into the blogosphere, and you can't be sure that your intended audience is clicking on the same articles that the wider audience is finding valuable.  But the trends are clear:

• Sony PSP is very exciting and creating a lot of buzz
• The Yahoo/Google wars are fascinating...the recent email service tennis match draws a lot of attention
• Articles about Skype and VOIP are sure to capture clicks with this audience
• Bloglines and My Yahoo are the reader/browser of choice with Firefox close behind, so far.

I would like to see some geotargeting in these numbers, and I'd also like to know how a particular link performs over time.  But this is a giant step in the right direction toward understanding how to improve the quality of what we offer and how to understand the metrics for the advertising business in RSS.


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