Yesterday I noticed the new headline on my Blogger dashboard "Attention FeedBurner Fans". Simply put, we can now indicate to Blogger that our RSS feed is really served by Feedburner, thus, leading to a more accurate account of the number of subscribers.
The result
A picture is worth a thousand words!I provide two feeds on my blog:
- immeria.net subscription only
- Web Analytics conversations subscription, over 50 web analytics blogs & feeds agregated into one handy master feed
Suddenly, the total number of my own blog subscribers jumped from about 12 to 84 subscribers (I've got more subscribers to the agregated feed...). That's quite an increase overnight!
Some explanation
I can't be sure about it, but maybe there's some explanation to this sudden increase. I started blogging in October of 2002, before RSS and Feedburner where really popular, and there was no ways of measuring subscriptions. Overtime, I changed to Feedburner but a number of subscribers stayed on the older feed.
The other possibility is I'm suddenly getting much more popular :)
The consequence
Again, it highlights how important it is to look at the trends, patterns and correlations rather than specific numbers. And to be cautious when comparing numbers even between similar blogs, sites, companies or industries.More info at: "FeedBurner Integration for Blogspot Blogs"
Named one of the most influential industry contributors by the Digital Analytics Association. With over twenty years’ experience empowering organizations to analyze and optimize their online channels, Stéphane has cemented his position as a leading voice for online analytics and optimization.
2 comments:
Subscriber numbers truly are relative. I have just launched a Feedburner competition on Sciencetext.com. Double your count before Labor Day and you could win a free text link on the site.
Visit the site for for tips on how to boost your feed readers
>>Again, it highlights how important it is to look at the trends, patterns and correlations rather than specific numbers.
I could not agree more; I worked on a RSS subscriber metric “hack” last week and did a post on it as well: Tracking RSS subscribers via the IMG tag - where I had the exact same conclusion! :-)
Cheers
dennis
Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools
My Web Analytics Blog
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