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A few days ago I mentioned in my Three Cool Things to do with Feedburner a way to track where new subscribers come from. It’s quite a cool trick using Google Analytics I read on Shoemoney. However, I don’t think he explained it well, so in true pillar article fashion, here it is in all it’s glory.
What You Want To Achieve
This is for people who are big fat stats whores like me. I love them, and can spend eons browsing on Google Analytics looking at all sorts of pretty graphs. But more importantly it’s for people who – like me – believe that RSS Subscribers are the most important
Step 1 – Create The Page that Sits Between The Link and The Feed
Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn’t really track links, so what you need to do is create a page that sits between your feed link and a feed. You also need to create what they call a “Meta Refresh” that automatically forwards you from the created page to your feed. Meta Refreshes have built into the header a command that tells the browser to refresh the page after a certain number of seconds, and optionally forwards you onto somewhere else. This page will appear blank (some people like writing “Forwarding Now:” but I find this creates confusion as I get nosey to see what the flashed up text says), but will contain your google analytics code in the usual place. So, in notepad create the following file.
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1;url=[PUT YOUR FEED URL HERE}" />
</head>
<body>[PUT YOUR GOOGLE ANALYTICS CODE HERE]
</body>
</html>
So, for example, mine would be:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1;url=http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/feed” />
</head>
<body>
<script src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
_uacct = “UA-1943992-1″;
urchinTracker();
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://cetrk.com/pages/scripts/0006/1805.js”> </script>
</body>
</html>
Save this as something like “subscribe.htm” (or do what I do, save it as “index.htm” under the subdirectory “subscribe”). Upload this to your server (for the remainder of the tutorial, I am assuming you’ve created a file called “subscribe.htm”).
Step 2. Create Your “Goal” in Google Analytics
A “Goal” is what you want to achieve with your website. If you’re a e-business, a “goal” will be a sale. We, as bloggers, probably consider a “goal” as an RSS feed subscription. But how do you create one?
When you login into your Analytics account, click on “Edit” next to your account.
On the next page, click on edit next to one of the uncreated goals.
You then have a screen with a lot of empty text boxes, don’t worry, you don’t have to fill them all in, just the two under “Goal Information”. Enter the url of the page you created, along with a name for a goal, then make sure it’s activated.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes”.
Step 3 – Point All Your Feed URL’s to The Page You Created
Before you are able to use the new page, you need to link to it, so whenever you have linked to your feed (usually in the template), change the feed link to the new URL (in my case http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/subscribe.htm) .
Now What?
Now you play the waiting game. If you’re a half decent blog, you’ll probably get somebody subscribing to it within about a few days. When this happens, click “All Traffic Sources” (under “Traffic Sources”) in your website analytical report, then click “Goal Conversion”. You should get something that looks similar to this:
The percentage value indicates how many visitors from that website have subscribed to your feed. Obviously, the higher the better, so you will do well focussing on advertising campaigns/comments on the bigger percentages, rather than the smaller percentages.
The Possibilities Are Endless!
Okay, this is just for RSS feeds, but what else? Well the next obvious one is your Advertising Page, or any pillar content. But can you make any suggestions as well?
This Post was written for the bluejar.com “How To” Group Writing Project.
Comments: 53 Comments
Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay. 
Wow, this is well thought out and very useful.
I’m going to have to try this later today!
Happy to find you. I read the article on Shoemoney and frankly it was not well explained. Here its more than detailed: Great job.
I am going to try it out too.
Thanks for participating in my group writing project! This is really a unique way to track click on your website! I like the idea of tracking my rss readers. Will have to give this a try.
I had no idea you could even do that. thanks for sharin! stumbled this
Thank you for the step-by-step, I’ll give it a try too.
Wow…THANK you for this. My RSS subscribers have been jumping up and down for awhile now…and I’m trying to figure out where the majority of them are coming from.
I’ve been having the weirdest feedburner stats for the past week or two.
- Andrew
As a fellow stats whore, thanks for this! Haven’t had time to do it yet but it’s on the cards.
Hey a huge thanks to you for the how to post.
Not only was it very informative but it was real easy. I’ve now got it going on my site.
One question:
What is the above code used for. Pardon a javascript newbie.
Thanks for your guide. There are other ways of doing this, for example using Javascript, but you make it sound so simple. Well done!
Jacob
This is really great information. I’m stumbling it…I haven’t seen this info before…
Thanks for a great tutorial with some really useful information. Will stumble it too.
Excellent info.. I place a lot of weight on my RSS subscribers too! This is really a great way of tracking new subscriptions. I wish I knew this before I placed my big flashy icon and measured its effect on new subscriptions!
Atleast, now I can play with different colors and see how it works. Found this article at Kyle’s Cove!
Stumbled!
Very cool Rhys, and yet another stat to track! (LOL
)
Excellent entry into the group writing project!
Congratulations Rhys on winning with this excellent post.! It is well deserved.
Hello Rhys!
First of all Congratulations!
Actually I came to your blog through bluejar, to read what you have written and how you have written. I must say that you have articulated/explained the steps in detail. One can complete the process easily by just following your instructions. Thanks.
this looks like a good option but why don’t you just track the onclick event for when people sign up for your feed? you don’t even need feedburner for that.
It almost makes me want to get get Google Analytics.
this is actually pretty nifty, it doesn’t just work with GA though, if you have a locally hosted Urchin, you could do the same thing.
What about if you have multiple RSS feeds on the same website? Google Analytics only seems to allow you to set up 4 goals, which is pretty restrictive. Any thoughts on this?
Congratulations Rhys!
Thanks for a great tutorial . I will link to it from one of my sites.
how can you achieve something like this using blogger/blogspot?
Note that this solution breaks google reader and some feed readers for autodiscovery. Many feed readers, if relied on to follow your link rel tag to find the RSS feed, will choke on the meta refresh page and show no articles.
This is still a great way to track clicks for promos, etc. however!
Great article. Thanks!
Thanks so much for the tips. I’m going to give it a try. If I can figure it out..and I should be able to (after your easy step by step) then anyone can.
All the best!
Great Tutorial piece!
what if the feed is subscribed to through an RSS link/shortcut in the browser address bar of a page ..
how would you get it, for instance, to count suscribtions from there .. or could this also go to the subscribe.htm page ?