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A simple solution to RSS statistics

Hanan Cohen [PersonRank 7]

Thursday, March 8, 2007
17 years ago3,151 views

Shalom,

Statistics for usage of RSS feeds is a problem for site owners.

We don't know how many subscribers we have and how many subscribers join and leave.

Services like Google Reader return the number of subscribers in the information the return as referrer.

Some people use services like feedburner to get statistics.

I have another idea.

When subscribing to a feed URL, the process is more like bookmarking.

What we can do is display the URL of the feed with a random string that will be the signature of the specific bookmark. Something like mysite.co.il/feed/73yT534O

Then, we can track the behavior of the feed in the normal way, using the normal information in the server log file.

This way we can answer questions like:

How many have been subscribed?
How many have been unsubscribed?
How many, and what, pages have been accessed from the feed?
What is the frequency of refresh request for each subscriber?

etc. etc.

What do you think of this idea?

Hanan Cohen

Tomer Cohen [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Don't forget that this will lead to more requests from your server since every web-feed aggregator will request the feed few times with a different names, and services like Google will see your feed with a different URL each visit, which will lead it to suspect your site as a spammer/PR cheater.

Tomer.

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