I've got some torrented Wordpress books on both of those topics. Haven't been through them myself but I can upload them to the B&B Dropbox thing in a few hours if you want to take a look.

Surely your normal webstats will tell you how many hits your RSS url is getting?

But Google Analytics are easy to access...

...and aside from the somewhat unreliable nature I'm not sure what else you need though?

If someone hits the url that's a subscriber. If they don't hit it they're not subscribing any more. I know I'm probably being simplistic but I'm missing what it is about that that needs managing?

What platform are you using? Drupal lets you see stats and/or Googe Analytics from within the interface.

I'm definitely confused. Don't you subscribe using whatever RSS reader you favour. What do we mean by subscribed in this context? I know someone loading the feed doesn't mean they're subscribed, but I'd have thought very broadly the numbers of loads would be a near enough approximation of subscribers. Assuming you've added them URL to the robots.txt


Also, https://bufferapp.com is a similar way to post to many at once.

Ahh right, I thought every load was recorded regardless of whether it was from a user in a browser or not. But if you say not then OK.

Robots.txt would (should) stop crawlers hitting the feed url and being recorded. But if you say they're not recorded anyway then OK.

Hits from a package like AW Stats, which is common on most servers are server side statistics and are quite basic.

Modern analytics like google analytics use JavaScript to detect when a page is loaded and can pull a lot more info and they filter out spider hits, so yeah I understand now what you mean by robots.txt as you could block spiders from hitting your rss page. Only issue there is some spiders, like googles spider also pretend to be normal browsers to see if people are serving different info to spiders for SEO than they do to users. I'm gonna stop cos I'm even boring myself now.

Oh god!!

I'm guessing your clients aren't paying for metrics so set them up with Google Analytics, ensure you setup goals for things like thank you pages for contact/enquiry forms.

If you have on page interactions like downloads of PDFs jquery tabs etc then you can also add Event tracking to monitor those interactions, you could for example event track every time someone clicked a share icon, doesn't mean they completed the share action but is a good indication. Check Googles help files on how to setup.

For things like social engagement you will need to use a third party solution as Googles stats aren't that great yet at tracking social interaction. I think the pro version of Hootsuite has social metrics or something like Hubspot have social tracking, not sure on the free side as I don't do thy much social work. These tools can also be used to see how your site/brand is being discussed online. Have a look around for buzz monitoring.

Okay, been out for a curry and beers with my dad, so you might have to bear with me while I blather on a bit.

Google Analytics, while fucking awesome, won't work for RSS (outside displaying it in a browser that supports XSLT templates for XML) since it's JavaScript based so requires a web page to operate from and, as Boris says, RSS is just XML pulled into readers. I guess I could generate a redirect URL, but then you have to deal with negating the campaign settings. I'm surprised you didn't know how GA works, Mod; do you not use it?

I'm using a custom thing, built on Symfony, for this; Drupal is a bit overkill right now. While I've not used Drupal properly, I do like the look of it. Waiting for version 8 to launch before I start on it in ernest, though, mainly because it's based on Symfony and I fucking love Symfony.

These days, counting subscribers is going to be difficult with any accuracy, since services like Feedly will be reading the feed once for any number of users. This isn't overly important, though, because of the other thing FeedBurner and ilk do, which is changing all your URLs to tracking proxies, so you can see how many people have clicked on them.

I realise that RSS isn't used by many people any more, but it's so easy to set up a feed there's no reason not to and I'm still curious how many people access it and what CTR it's getting. I've already got my system posting automatically to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Tumblr using a combination of HootSuite, IFTTT and Tumblr's built-in scheduler. There's even an email subscription option. I'm still evaluating it all, but I'm very impressed with HootSuite. For what it's worth, I found Buffer to be pretty useless.

Edit: Damn you pesky fast people... now I've got to go back, read and maybe respond to more...

Phew, nothing other than to say how awesome I find GA. I'd share some pics of the amazing dashboards I have, but I don't have any with data I can show publicly.

What seems a bit dodgy about Webmaster Tools to you, Boris?

AJ_ wrote:

I'm surprised you didn't know how GA works, Mod; do you not use it?

I don't use it a great deal no, other than trying to fettle SEO. I'm not really running a website as such.

In any case I was conflating server stats with analytics, my bad.

You should stick GA on some sites, Mod, just to play with it; it's awesome fun if you're anything like as nerdy as me.

I think I get what you mean, Boris; are you talking about the links it doesn't count for Pagerank? Do you see a lot of difference between what Google's and other services report?

Mod the link command hasn't worked properly for years. I can't remember the last time I used it. What my link report will show you is the relative quality of the sites linking to your site. If they are all low then Google will probably be if ignoring them.

AJ PageRank is a tricky one. Google still uses PR, but it is an internal metric it uses within its own algorithm and it is constantly updating based on the continually shifting factors. However the public PR updates much more slowly, maybe once or twice a year if you are lucky, so you can't make changes to your strategy then rely on PR to tell you if you are on the right track.

For example, lets say you are after a link from a site that has PR 4, during this time Google has downgraded the PR of the site to 3, but you won't see the PR change for some time.

The only other service I use is Moz.com and their service updates much more quickly. But you have to pay for it. In general Moz.com is pretty close to the PR of the site in question.

Aye, I get how PageRank works, what I was wondering is if the links you see missing from Google reports, compared to Moz, are the ones from locations which'll have low PR scores.

AJ_ wrote:

Mod, what are the links you don't see on Google like? Could it be Google's decided they're spam links and so ignores them?

They're just footer links

<a href="http://www.CompanySite.co.uk/"; title="Web Design Newcastle" target="_blank">Web design Newcastle</a> by CompanyName

Plus whatever has been posted to social media. Though I'm presuming Google mostly ignore them?

Well, maybe it doesn't like the random semicolon you throw in them. 

Do you know the stats for those sites linking to yours, Mod? If they're low traffic, Google could well be ignoring them for some things.