The Basics of Measuring Your RSS Feeds
Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik
For most marketers RSS metrics are still a gray area,
although in fact RSS is completely measurable, even more so
than e-mail.
As complexity grows with added capabilities, we’re only
taking a look at the absolute basics of measuring your RSS
feeds today. These are the basics you can implement
 immediately to see how you’re doing, and then gradually
move on to more complex analyses.
As always, the key point is just to get started and then
move on from there.
1. THE REASONS FOR MEASURING RSS
The most basic reasons for measurement are quite simple:
A] How many people are subscribing to my RSS feed? Is the
number increasing or decreasing?
 If the number of readers is decreasing, it’s a sign that
your content is not meeting the needs of the target
audiences your site attracts, consequently meaning that you
need to consider improving your content strategy.
Optimization possibilities include: --> More practical
how-to articles --> Different content topics --> More“personal voice” --> Greater publishing frequency (more
frequent posts) --> Less frequent posts --> Longer or
shorter posts --> More news coverage within your industry
--> Etc.
Also, based on your readership you’ll be able to calculate
your “readership --> purchases” conversion rate, if you’re
using your site to sell products online. The simple formula
to calcuate this is “the number of orders / number of
readers * 100”.
B] Are my subscribers actually clicking on the content
items in the RSS feed?
If you find that your subscribers are actually opening the
feed, but not clicking on individual content items it’s a
clear sign that either your content item headlines need to
be improved, made more attractive, or that the actual
content is not strong enough to entice readers to
clickthrough.
Knowing your feed-to-website clickthrough rates will also
enable you to introduce gradual changes in your content
strategy and actually see how they improve or hurt your key
success metrics.
These two questions are of course only the most basic, but
will enable you to build on them in the future and start
developing more advanced measurement & optimization
procedures.
2. THE TOOLS
Now that you know what you’ll start tracking you’ll need
appropriate tools to actually help you measure your RSS
feeds.
If you’re using any of the more advanced RSS marketing &
publishing solutions (http://www.simplefeed.com,
http://www.nooked.com, http://myst-technology.com,
http://www.rssautopublisher.com,
http://www.press-feed.com/,
http://www.market-soft.com/bypass/,
http://www.silverpop.com), the key metrics will already be
provided to you out-of-the-box.
If not, you’ll need to use a specific service just to
conduct your measurements. For small-business marketers,
the best choices are http://www.feedburner.com or
http://www.pheedo.com, which come at no charge for the
basic toolset.
Using them is quick and simple: just go to their site,
register for a free account, enter your existing RSS feed
URL, start promoting the new RSS feed URL (given to you by
the service) on your site, instead of the one you are using
right now, and start measuring.
But be careful! These two RSS measurement solutions
actually create a new RSS feed URL for you, which is hosted
on their own server, meaning that you only want to use it
to generate “real” subscribers, and not actually submit the
feed to any RSS search engines and directories. If you do
so, some of the SEO benefits of RSS will unfortunatelly be
wasted.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Learn how to take full marketing advantage of RSS and get
all the expertise, knowledge and how-to information for
implementing RSS in your marketing mix, from direct
marketing, PR, e-commerce, internal communications and
online publishing to SEO, traffic generation and customer
relationship management. Including complete interviews with
more than 40 RSS marketing experts. Click here now: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/book/
Resources
Marketing Software
ViewletBundle (ViewletBuilder Pro and ViewletCam)
Net Prospector Professional
OfficeReady Professional 3.0 - 25 User License
MULTI USER PKG-DEVELOPING A MARKETING PLAN:SCANS 2000
Dynamic MailCommunicator (Pro)
EmailUnlimited 6.0 Professional Edition
Marketing Hardware
MAGICARD AVALON 100 ID CARD PRINTER BY ULTRA ELECTRONICS
Books
Marketing Basics
Rand McNally 2006 Commercial Atlas & Marketing Guide
Consumer Atlas & Marketing Guide 2005 
International Marketing Forecasts: 2005 / 2006
European Marketing & Data Statistics 2006
International Marketing Forecasts: 2004/2005
European Marketing Information Sourcebook
Latin American Marketing Information Sourcebook
China Marketing Data and Statistics
Industry Directories
World Directory of Marketing Information Sources
World Cosmetics & Toiletries Marketing Directory 2005
World Food Marketing Directory
World Drinks Marketing Directory
Pharmaceutical Marketing: A Practical Guide 
Direct Marketing Market Place 2007: The Networking Source of the Direct Marketing Industry
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