subscribers

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.

Tracking can be found on the left hand rail of your analytics package. It’s under Content > Event Tracking. For Google Analytics to track your events, it has to be served using the newer ga.js tracking code. If you use a plugin that has been recently updated, you should be fine. If you are not sure, look at your blog’s source code and check that you have the following Javascript before the end of the </body> tag:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

Now what you want to do is attach event trackers on the places where you have the RSS links in your theme.

In my case, I only have one link on the top left corner. What I do now is add an “onclick” snippet to the link code so that Google tracks when people click on it:

As you can see from this snippet of code, I’ve added a pageTracker._trackEvent code with two variables. The first one, ‘Subscribe’ is the category that all these events will appear under. The second one is the action, which I’ve named ‘RSS’ which means people are subscribing via the RSS feed link.

I also allow people to subscribe using FeedBurner’s Email system, and I want to also track when people submit on this form (after entering their emails), so I add a _trackEvent on the onsubmit part of the form:

As you can see, I use the same category ‘Subscribe’, but in this case the action is ‘Email’, which of course, means they’re subscribing to my blog via email.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll have to wait until the next day to start seeing data (of course you won’t see any data if nobody actually clicked on these). To test, make sure your IP is not filtered out, and click on the tracking event links or have a friend do it for you.

In my case, the next day I saw two people had subscribed:

On the details tab I can see that both subscribed via the ‘RSS’ link:

Analytics even tracks where these people come from, so that I can measure which websites are sending me the best type of traffic that wants to subscribe to me. In this case Google.com (search) sent one and the other was sent from socialmedian:

Of course this method doesn’t take into consideration people who type jungleg.com directly on their readers and other subscription methods, but at least I get a sense of how effective my subscription links are working. I could potentially see what blog posts made people subscribe to me by looking at the ‘Landing Page’ on that ‘Dimension’ pulldown (in my case, one of the subscribers did so after reading my feedly article).

You can also potentially track other outgoing links. For example, I’m thinking of putting some links to my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts, and I might also Event Track those links to get a sense of how they are working.

Hope you find the Event Tracking tool useful. If you have any questions, shoot me a message via email or on my social networks.

Photo by krazydad / jbum

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