One of the most annoying things about RSS is the lack of information we get about subscribers (something I’ve talked about in the past):
RSS is, in internet years, an old technology that was never meant to be measured. Feedburner and all other RSS measuring tools, compile data from the HTTP hits to your feed URL, and then manipulate this data to come up with an approximation of an audicence.
I’m always thinking how I could implement something that allows me to measure if new people are subscribing to my blog. Aside from fancy PHP programming to parse HTTP requests (if you don’t understand that, don’t worry) I thought if there was an easy way to use a mainstream tool to track this.
Google Analytics is one of those tools that are used by many blogs. There are easy to use plugins for all blogging platforms and if not, it’s pretty easy to setup on your own.
Analytics has a subset of very useful tools to track what users do on your site. Event tracking is one of those.
Basically event tracking allows you to send a “ping” to Analytics when users interact with a piece of your page. In this article I’ll show how to implement it.
