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I recently wrote about RSS, outlining what is was and how it is used. Now I want to delve into some of the more advanced ways that allow you to track RSS usage from your website.
Traffic from your RSS feed does not get reported in your website statistics. Instead, the traffic shows is reported as a direct link – the equivalent of someone typing your website into the browser bar. This makes it rather difficult to distinguish between those visiting your site directly and those who are coming from your feeds.
Simple Tracking
The easiest way to track RSS usage is, for lack of a better phrase, really simple (get it?).
Most RSS feeds link directly to the article hosted on the website. The easy way to monitor this traffic is to add an identifiable piece of text to the end of the link.
The above is a link to a screensaver developed by Adamant Solutions and recently posted on the blog.
I have seen this technique used by many websites, including Slashdot and BBC News.
So now when I view the statistics for my website the above two links will be handled differently, allowing me to effectively see who came from my feeds.
Advanced Tracking
There is a much more powerful way to track usage. It works the same way as the Simple Tracking method described above, but delivers a unique link for each subscriber - allowing you to track each individual user of your RSS feeds. Obviously this method isn’t for everyone.
To put it simply, a subscriber is given a unique subscription link. This may look something like this:
http://www.domain.com/feed.php?id=32147784
This is the link used by RSS aggregators to download the latest news feeds.
When an RSS aggregator requests a list of feeds the script (in this case feed.php) will automatically parse through each of the links and add the identifiable information to the end of it (much like we did with the simple tracking but this is done dynamically).
Now individual visitors from the RSS feed will be tracked accordingly – allowing you to browse through the statistics on your web server to see individual trends. You may find some interesting results which may help to keep the content on your website focused to particular audiences.
Advanced RSS Functionality
With a few modifications the above techniques can be used to do some pretty impressive things. I will delve into this a little further down the track, but for the time being I will leave you with a few examples off the top of my head:
Stop RSS abuse
You may find that an individual is excessively downloading the RSS feed from your website. With a few lines of code you can add abuse limiters to the above methods.
Deliver individual content
It may be useful to send special content to your most active subscribers or subscribers.
Targeted Content
You can modify your RSS feed to deliver content to visitors who have previously clicked on related links. So if you have a blog about cars and someone regularly clicks on the Porsche links but rarely open the Ferrari links, you can make sure the visitor is not interrupted with Ferrari news feeds.
Plus more
Sometime in the near future I will delve into some of the more advanced ways you can use RSS with your website. Not only for tracking visitors but for offering a more complete service for your subscribers.
Adamant Solutions is a web design & software development business. If you are interested in having advanced functionality added to your website please call us on 1800 426 893 or our contact us.
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