Seems like they stay cooking at Feedburner. I thought my favorite development of theirs was going to be the feature they added that allows you to make them transparent to your users. Turns out that last Tuesday when I was in bed trying to keep my lungs from jumping out of my chest, they were leaving me treats to enjoy when I came back.
Here’s an excerpt about some of the developments from the press release last week:
# Podcasts: The ability to track the number of downloads of rich media enclosures within a feed, including audio and video, in addition to the number of subscriptions.
# Uncommon Uses: The identification and highlighting of uncommon uses of subscription feeds beyond feed readers/aggregators and email clients. These include any contact with a publisher’s feed by a non-subscriber.
# Item popularity (TotalStats): More thorough drill-down on the popularity of individual items in a feed, giving publishers insight about specific posts on specific days as well as a history of activity.
# Reach (TotalStats): A new metric that tells publishers what percentage of their total subscriber base is actively clicking and reading individual items within a feed.
Now at first glance, it may seem like it’s not such a big deal. But what it’s doing is giving you an extra level of metrics to help you understand your audience better and cater to their needs.
Now you know how many people Downloaded your podcast, not just how many people are subscribed to listen. With the item popularity improvement, if you have Total Stats, you can see how many people read the Feedburner version of your feed in your reader, and how many of them were compelled to visit your site.
And “Reach” tells you how much of your subscribed audience you’re really reaching – think of open rates with a newsletter.
My favorite though, is “Uncommon Uses” – where is someone displaying your feed somewhere on their site?
And yes, if you give people license to republish your headlines, you’ll see that, think “that’s oool” and be on your way. Maybe give them a link back if you weren’t aware of them before.
But what sweet justice it is to be able to click through to a site that is ripping off your content and republishing it as their own. I’ll keep my naughty adventures with this one to myself, but suffice it to say there were quite a few rude awakenings to folks who think it’s cool to just nab your words, and that you’ll never find out or care.
Be sure to log into Feedburner, on the Analyze tab, and turn on the new features if you have Total Stats. with Standard Stats, according to the set up screen, they’re on by default.
There’s more about this in Burning Questions – The Official FeedBurner Weblog. You can leave feedback there and make any additions.
Feedburner is free, and Total Stats is quite inexpensive. I only use it to analyze the minority of my audience that picks up my feed from feed/blog directories – at least until I take the time to figure out their MyBrand option. Still, it gives a great slice of what the audience response is to my blog. So if you don’t know? Ya betta ask somebody….
No, seriously, ask me. In the comments section below. I love it when you stop by…
