RSS and Google Analytics Integration

FeedBlitz's new RSS service now enables bloggers, social media marketers and publishers to track RSS-driven click-throughs in Google Analytics (and also Omniture's Visual Sciences enterprise web site analytics solution). Further, FeedBlitz has made this feature available to our email marketing newsletter service as well.

FeedBlitz is now the only RSS service to enable publishers to view their RSS-driven activity in these two popular web analytics packages.

It's trivial to set up. For RSS feeds, go to RSS - Settings, and choose the click tracking service you want and save. For email newsletters, go to Newsletters - Settings - Content Settings - Tracking and More and pick the tracking option you want, and save. That's all you have to do. Well, ok, that and wait for the metrics to appear in your web analytics results.

For the FeedBlitz RSS service, changes are immediate. Email service click-through changes are reflected in the next mailing. It's OK to specify the click through settings in both locations if you use both services; a click-through from an email based on a FeedBlitz feed will properly identify itself as being email, not RSS, driven.

Looking at the results in Google Analytics

All the results are visible in Traffic Sources - Campaigns in your Google Analytics dashboard.

For clicks that originate from your RSS feed, Google will record "FeedBlitz" as the source, "FeedBlitzRss" as the medium, and the feed path (the part of your url after "feeds.feedblitz.com") as the campaign. Pick these options from the "Dimension" drop down on that page the campaigns page.

For clicks that originate from an email newsletter, "FeedBlitz" is still the source, but the medium will be "FeedBlitzEmail", the campaign will identify when the mailing went out (e.g. "Nightly 2009-04-04") and the content will identify the feedblitz list ID.

Now you can easily review the effectiveness of your email newsletters and RSS feeds and determine what changing settings will do (such as switching between full and partial content, for example).

Omniture Visual Sciences

FeedBlitz adds the "From" parameter, enabling you to differentiate between RSS and email clicks, and similarly varies the parameters on the email side to enable you to tell which mailing led to which click through.

RSS Service Recap

With this feature announcement, I want to briefly revisit our original posting announcing the service. In it I said "You'll see that the FeedBlitz RSS feed service will rapidly evolve over the coming weeks." A bold claim. How are we doing? Since that launch, about 10 days ago, this is what we've added:

• Multi-feed merging;
• Tag filtering;
• and now Google Analytics integration.

Commitment fulfilled. FeedBlitz is keeping its promises and not letting our RSS publishers down. If you can't say the same about your RSS service, then please register for a 30-day free trial. Tune the Blitzed version of your RSS feed and then, once you're happy, make the switch.