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An Integration With Feedburner

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 | 4:51 PM

Labels: Announcements

The FeedBurner team has just announced an integration with Google Analytics. We know what many of you are saying. "About time!" We'll take it.

If you are using both Google Analytics and FeedBurner, you will automatically see campaign attribution for item clicks tracked by your AdSense For Feeds or your Google FeedBurner account. To read more and get details, please see the blog post here and take a look at the below image:

It works in the same way as URL tagging. You can see how many people click through to your site from the content sent by you in your feeds. FeedBurner is now automatically inserting Google Analytics tracking codes into the URLs of your items, or content. For instance, if you publish a blog and a subscriber reads it and then clicks through to your site, you will see that the source of that visit is Feedburner. And as you can see, it gives even more granular information, such as the type of feed reading software or email.

Taking a step back. What is a feed? From the help article, feeds "are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into "widgets," "gadgets," mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere." The most popular types of feed formats are RSS and Atom feeds.

If you're publishing content like this blog, then feeds are probably half the story. Feed subscribers are a very important audience to be aware of. If people are really interested in what you have to say, they'll subscribe to your feed or RSS so they can be automatically updated every time you publish new content. They don't want to miss it, and don't want to have to keep visiting your page to check if you've published new content. FeedBurner is the way you can measure how many people are using your feed and who they are. It's could be called Google Analytics for feeds Or Google Analytics could be called web...analytics...burner?

Anyway, FeedBurner shows you not only how many subscribers your feed has, but also metrics like geography and reach, with a breakdown by each piece of content (or "item") you publish. It also tells whether they clicked on a link in that content or went to the actual piece of content on your site. You can also see where the subscriber is reading your feed; whether in email or some kind of feed reader, such as Google Reader.

Another thing to be aware of is AdSense For Feeds, which allows you to monetize your feeds by placing AdSense ads in them.

This integration is the first step towards using these two very similar tools together. You still need to log in to FeedBurner to actually see how many subscribers you have and the rich detail around your feed usage FeedBurner provides.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Email Post

RSS is fast becoming the choice of subscribing to websites updates as opposed to opt-in email due to the ongoing and frustrating spam issues. Now, finally you can track your RSS subscribers from within Google Analytics. It just keeps getting better.

Dave

The beast is growing...and GROWING! If you think Facebook is just a Y-Gen waste of time then think again. Ever wondered where you could find your online market? Mmmmm let me thinks...

Dave

While Facebook has already released their Facebook for Adobe Air application, Adobe recently released their own desktop Facebook application called “Photo Uploader”. The new desktop application lets you perform a large number of Facebook activities including reading your stream, posting comments and updates, viewing your friends, and more. While there are a number of desktop tools for managing your Facebook account, this is probably the best one I’ve seen so far. While there are some minor bugs to hash out, this application definitely has a lot of potential.

One additional feature is the ability to upload photos simply by dragging them over a running version of the application. While I still prefer to load up Facebook within the browser, there are many people that have a preference for running desktop applications. As Erick Schonfeld wrote the other day though, none of these applications do anything to resolve the noise issue. It’s great that I can follow and friend people around the web, however finding the most relevant information to me still isn’t possible.

There are a few people attempting to resolve the problem through new forms of search algorithms. While I think search is a legitimate approach, I want a system that does automated filtering for me. Yes, it’s easy to theorize about a solution, but developing one is much more complex. That’s not to say nobody is working on a solution. Philtro, a D.C. metro based startup, is working on their own solution to the problem. By letting users take advantage of the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” rating system previously used by Facebook, the company hopes to develop an increasingly relevant stream for users.

We’re still at the early phases of developing new discovery mechanisms to easily sift through the overwhelming amount of content being produced by our friends and other contacts. For now, users have a diverse set of tools to choose from to interact with their personal streams, including the Facebook stream. As of a week ago, you can add the Photo Uploader for Facebook application to that mix. Do you prefer to interact with Facebook from the website or from desktop applications? Do you think the Photo Uploader application is better than other desktop applications you’ve used in the past?

This looks like a great application I have not tried it out yet but if it is as good as they say it is this will save me heaps of time when adding photos to my Facebook account.
Luv to hear anyone's feedback about this app.

Dave