Are You Seeing All Your Traffic?

So you've burned your feed and you've dropped the "FeedBurner chicklet" on your web page or blog. Congratulations! When you go look at your feed stats, however, are you seeing all of your feed traffic? Maybe not. The rest of this entry contains some hints and tips to make your stats as useful and accurate as they can be.

Tip #1: Offer a single feed
If a visitor comes to your site and sees a number of different chicklets for the same feed (RSS 1.0! RSS 2.0! FeedBurner! Atom!), all you're really doing is fracturing your traffic and making it harder to get a handle on who's subscribing to what. This is why we created the SmartFeed service: so that you could publish a single feed and rest assured that it can be read in all newsreaders out there, no matter what your source format is. So, sure, if you're a Blogger user and you have an Atom feed, you could use FeedBurner to convert it to RSS 2.0 and then offer both feeds on your site. But it really makes much more sense to offer a single SmartFeed: that way, clients that understand Atom will get the original Atom version and clients that don't understand Atom will get a converted-on-the-fly RSS 2.0 version. And you have a single place to go for all your stats. Cool, huh?

Tip #2: Check your Autodiscovery links
So, you dropped your new brand new FeedBurner chicklet on your page and removed the link to the original feed. So now everyone who comes to your page will use the FeedBurner version, right? Not necessarily. In the syndication world, there's something called "Autodiscovery", which means that a user could just type in the address of your web site into a feed reader and the reader will "autodiscover" the Atom or RSS feed that's associated with your site. How does that work? Check out the source to your page and look for lines like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://mysite.com/rss.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml" title="RSS" href="http://mysite.com/index.rdf" />
<link rel="service.feed" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="http://mysite.com/atom.xml" />

In each of those cases, just replace the href with the URL of your burned feed, so it'll look something like this instead:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2" />

Now, the autodiscovery process will find the same feed that is displayed on your page.

Tip #3: Redirect requests for your old feed
This tip's a little more advanced and is detailed in this posting. It basically lets you redirect requests for your old feed URL to go to your new burned URL. This actually gives you the best possible results, but you have to be in a position to configure the settings for your web server, which is out of bounds for many hosted communities.

I hope these tips help you get a more accurate measurement of your feed statistics!