Analyzing Your RSS Subscriber Statistics
Monitoring your web site statistics is an important part of maintaining an online presence and there are many excellent tools you can use to keep track of your raw traffic numbers (see Statistics and Analytics: Tools).
But traffic isn’t everything however. For content producers in niche verticals (like real estate) – numbers alone can’t and don’t tell the whole story. Basically it reduces to the old quantity versus quality argument – does have a lot readers mean more than having the right reader?
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around one for the last couple of weeks. What are the measures of success for a blog and what metrics can be used to keep track of them?
Technorati authority, Alexa rank, Google PageRank (see Signaling A Retreat From Multi-Author Blogs), inbound links, indexed pages are all metrics one can consider – but none offer the definitive answer. For more on this, SEOMoz has a get breakdown on How to Use Search Engines & Web Data to Conduct Competitive Brand Analysis.
One stat I’m personally paying more and more attention to is the number of RSS subscribers a site has. Why? Because it signals the audience’s engagement/loyalty to the blog.
As a publisher, RSS stats are hard to come by, but If you use Feedburner to manage your RSS subscriptions, here’s a great tool from Feedperfume (Feed Analysis v1.0) that will give you some in depth reporting on your numbers.
You need to output your Feedburner stats in CSV format (instructions are on the site) and then upload them to FeedPerfume and it will churn out some graphs and do some of the heavy number crunching automatically for you.
By way of example, I’ve embedded the results from FOREM. As a blogger, I find this fantastic information to measure my site’s growth.
- Monthly Increase Range: -92-495 Average Increase / Month: 156
- Total Increase(Last 3 Months): 591 Monthly Increase(Last 3 Months): 197
Growth Rate
- Growth Rate (Last Month): 12.65%
- Average Subscribers (Current Month): 3,117
- Predicted Subscribers After 3 Months: 4,456
- Predicted Subscribers After 6 Months: 6,369
- Predicted Subscribers After 12 Months: 13,016
- Best Day of A Week: Friday
- Worst Day of A Week: Saturday
What other metrics are you paying attention to these days?
[poll=3]
(h/t) Problogger
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Madison Albright | Dec 3, 2007 | Reply
this is reat information. i value posts like this. thank you for sharing.
Chris Dowell | Dec 4, 2007 | Reply
Great posts! Has a real estate blogger, I’m going to checkout these stats on my site.
Fizber | Dec 6, 2007 | Reply
I can’t agree with the results of the voting. For sure, RSS is very important in today web2.0 world. But it’s incorrect to say that Google PR or maybe even Google index is twice less important. As I see the results of our site (Fizber) the Google index brings us much more than RSS.
Rebecca | Dec 6, 2007 | Reply
Your post is really very interesting and informative. The article particularly interest me as soon I will be coming up with my own blog. I think it is very beneficial for a agent to have his own blog, through which he can not only express his views but also interact with other agents. Thus the whole look and feel of the blog becomes very important. Also, with regard to RSS feed for automatic updates it should be perfect. In this regard, I feel your blog is not only interesting but also appeals to one’s visual senses. And this the thing I want to have in my blog. I am an agent listed with resortscape.com ( http://www.resortscape.com/default.aspx?ct=r&q=&utm_medium=linktous&utm_source=PT ) and so many a times my clients are even foreigners. So my blog should also be beneficial in assisting them. My plans for the blog are still in the initial stages. Through your post I have gained a lot of insight in developing my blog.