Help, I'm Losing Unique Visitors to RSS!

[Lou Ordorica]

I've met with Web publishers who are new to content syndication and worry about what RSS will do to their website traffic. Old habits are hard to break. Corporate web teams rely heavily on Web metrics and analysis to measure success and perhaps more importantly, convince sponsors and stakeholders that their investments are paying off.

I, for one, have seen enough conversion funnel charts to last me a lifetime.

Enter content syndication, crashing the black tie party with case of beer under one arm and a bucket of fried chicken in the other.

Who wouldn't want to syndicate their content? As the folks at Yahoo have stated, it's a no-brainer. "[RSS is a] simple and inexpensive way to build awareness of your content and your brand and it's also a great way to drive traffic to your site and content."

They go on to say, "syndication can help you attract new users, especially if your RSS feeds are submitted to search engines. In addition, it can also help you build stronger relationships with your existing users who want to know as soon as new content gets created and published."

Lovely. So why all the concern? Because in some cases, the tools used to measure web activity haven't caught up. Now, it's easier for some organizations to throw their weight behind progressive analytics services like Google Analytics and Feedburner, but for others this isn't an option.

If you're stuck with a vendor that hasn't caught up with the "Come to Me Web" and need to embrace content syndication while placating your bosses, you're in a tough spot.

Here are a couple suggestions to get you started:

Talk to your vendor. Don't be tricked by the sleight of hand some like to pull. RSS measurement? Sure -- check out this whitepaper on blah blah blah API ... They're just stalling. Demand that they address your need to measure subscribers, click-thrus, impressions, and build these capabilities into your web analytics app.

Use a hosting service. Companies like Feedburner got their start helping bloggers and podcasters track feed subscribers, and now offer services to corporations, too. Be aware that your feed is typically syndicated many times over, and that it may be impossible to accurately capture usage using techniques such as embedding calls to invisible images within a feed, especially with some Web-based aggregators.

Roll your own. Not the easiest approach, but sometimes the fastest. If you belong to the camp that believes in only syndicating teasers (headlines, summaries) and requiring a click-thru to view the entire content, you may be able to embed tracking code into the feed for your web analytics tool to capture. This doesn't help if you are generous with your feeds, and provide all the content to your subscribers (no reason to click-thru). Consider the server log analysis method, that Alec Muffet describes in On Retrieving Readership Statistics from RSS Feed Data.

What ever approach you take, start talking with the people who are invested in your Web presence now about content syndication, and how this will change the way your customers access your content, and the way you measure your effectiveness and success.

[Lou Ordorica]

Exactly -- the world's perception of your brand / company is hard to nail down in quantitative terms, but you can't risk not sharing your point of view (and giving up control) in this day and age.

[Stanislaus]

Great points and links, Lou. The numbers game has always been part of the challenge (and spin) of the web, and RSS feeds may add another element of complexity to those trying to boil everything down to a solid metric. But building the "brand" is inherently non-linear and in theory the content from a feed will still be helping build the brand even if it's hard to count, it seems to me.