Friday, January 16, 2009

Los colores bonitos, or how I learned to stop worrying and compare multiple feed metrics.

If you've been knocking about within FeedBurner using your Google Account, you may have noticed that the original "french fry" chart from the Analyze tab of the original feedburner.com is no more. This venerable bar chart, with its green picket fence of subscriber trend results, has been the first stop for many publishers when checking their feed analytics for years. In its place is new green-ness (and blue-ness) that communicates three times as much information in the same space, and sets the stage for more interesting reporting in the future. Here's a snapshot:



This 30-day view now offers the following information:
  • Daily subscriber totals (in green)

  • Daily reach totals (in blue)

  • The relationship between these two numbers over time
You can move the mouse over any day in the chart and see that day's specific totals for subscribers and reach, too. (Note that reach and subscribers are plotted with different y-axes: subscribers on left, reach on right).

The relationship between these numbers is the kicker:
  • Understanding that reach means people taking action by viewing or clicking on items in your feed helps you understand how engaged your audience is.

  • The more often you post (especially with full text), the more often people are likely to view your current (and previous) updates, and even click-through to your site for related information.

  • Note the blue spikes in reach above; these are centered around new posts. Steady subscriber growth occurred as this site promoted and redirected 100% of its original feed traffic to its feed.
Don't forget to click the "See more about your subscribers" link below the main chart to view a detailed breakdown of your subscriber traffic:



Comparing this chart, day by day, can help you spot where subscribers are coming from (and from what source they have gone missing, should there be a sudden drop).

While we're on the topic: make sure you can actually get the reach statistic — meaning, make sure you turn on item-level stats for your feed! They're used to help calculate reach. Visit the Analyze tab, look for the "Configure Stats" option, and make sure the boxes shown below are checked:



(You can, of course, check "downloads," too, if you're a podcaster). As a reminder: to view all feed stats' reports and options, either click the "View Feed Stats" next to your feed's ad unit listing in the AdSense Manage Ads section, or sign into feedburner.google.com and click on your feed's title on My Feeds.

— Jessie Chavez, Software Engineer, and Matt Shobe, User Experience Designer, AdSense for feeds
at

6 comments:

  1. David Grizzly SmithJanuary 21, 2009 at 12:00 PM

    Lovely new graphics. Since the move, however, my stats have been consistently wrong, and today, the graphics stopped working.

    Thanks, Google.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BansheeJanuary 23, 2009 at 5:51 AM

    I don't know how you're seeing what you're seeing, but I see a "green picket fence".

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hysteria MillerJanuary 23, 2009 at 12:09 PM

    Where are the Pro stats? Our magazines use the visitor count and other items that were part of the pro stats for reporting. How do we get those numbers now?

    ReplyDelete
  4. pechesscastJanuary 24, 2009 at 1:56 AM

    What happened to the "hits" for the hourly count? It's nice to see what countries people are visiting one's blog. Is this gone forever? Planned to be added in the future? Thanks for your attention.

    ReplyDelete
  5. ExpertJanuary 24, 2009 at 11:55 PM

    The graphics are nice but by enabling item click stats you harm the seo value of your feed. When you enable that feature Feedburner wraps links in a redirect so that the links are redirected through feedburners url meaning that the pr goes to that url rather then the link to your article or blog post.

    It's really a measure of whether you're concerned with PR or with stats - if you care about tracking the minutia of visitors stats then definitely enable this, otherwise make sure it's not checked - so that you can maintain PR.

    Anyways it's a cool feature I like the reach graphs, now I think I know why my reach is so low (if it's depending heavily on me enabling the stats, then it's obvious why it's not showing higher rates as I predicted).

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousJanuary 27, 2009 at 2:12 PM

    @grizzlygrowls
    We did have an issue on the 20th that has since been corrected. We're
    hoping to keep more up to date status at our appropriately named
    FeedBurner Status Blog

    @Maureen
    You'll see the nice charts after moving your feeds over to your Google account.

    @Hillary - Pro stats are still there, they are just now all free for everyone, so are not marked as "Pro"
    anymore. As far as the site/visitor stats, here are more details:
    More details in the FAQ here:
    Migration FAQ

    @Jan
    We have a great post on how to redirect the clickthroughs using 301s
    and other SEO tips
    here

    ReplyDelete

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