I have a blog site up on Blogger (owned by Google) which is tracked via Google Analytics to count visits to the site.
My blog also has an RSS feed available. If someone avails themself of the RSS feed will Analytics count it as a “visit” when it sends the news out via that method? Or are those people not counted as having read what I wrote?
Surely the RSS feed only sends out a link, not the entire content (or have I been left behind, technologically?). So when people follow the link to read the content, they arrive on your site and get picked up by Analytics.
Or do you mean tracking the number of subscribers? If so, this article tells you how to set up an RSS subscription link as a Goal in Analytics, so you can track instances of subscription (but not unsubscription, obviously) this way.
Sends out the content for me. The ancillary stuff (sponsor logos and Twitter feeds and such get left behind…just the text ends up in my reader).
I will check out the goals thing. Thanks.
There’s no Javascript in RSS feeds, hence no Google Analytics. You also can’t count on raw hits to your feed, as many people use feed aggregators like Google Reader, which hit the feed once and then syndicate it to their users.
So for metrics purposes RSS feeds are pretty useless. You can still get data once they’re actually on your site, though.
You can embed a tracking pixel in your RSS feeds and then use log based analytics tools to track your RSS but no, Google Analytics can’t do it because there’s no Javascript in RSS feeds.