February 28, 2006
And There Was Much Rejoicing: New FeedBurner Statistics
UPDATE: All of FeedBurner's Statistics are now free! Read more in this "FreeBurner" blog post.
Our crack design team has emerged from their cave with a sweeping set of enhancements to our core statistics offering. There are some new concepts, more detailed visibilty into specific item statistics, and a simpler means of navigating between feed-level and item-level metrics. Here's the brief rundown before you sign in and see the new look for yourself:
StandardStats
- Uncommon Uses: This is a new concept we're introducing that really begins to leverage the critical mass of feed readers, bots, search engines, news filters, and other common feed sources that we observe. Uncommon Uses identifies and highlights places where your feed content is referenced or clicked that FeedBurner does not recognize as a common feed service. Uncommon uses includes contact with your feed by non-subscribers.
- Podcasts: We've (finally) added 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.
TotalStats (Premium Service)
- Reach (TotalStats): Another new concept and metric that tells you what percentage of your total subscriber base is actively reading and clicking on individual items within a feed. Like newspapers or magazines, some number of people subscribe and another number actively open and act on content. Reach begins to provide some insight into this second metric.
- Item popularity (TotalStats): More thorough drill-down on the popularity of individual items in a feed, giving you insight about specific posts on specific days as well as a history of activity.
You can read more about today's announcement in the press release. And, drop into our Support Forums with any service-related questions. The design team is going to gather some nuts and berries and head back into the cave soon, so get those bug reports in now, while they're still milling about out here with the rest of us.
Comments
You took the one stat I cared about away from me! Where did the click info go? I could care less about subscribers. WHY? Because I listen to podcasts, but then I rarely keep them in itunes. I'll listen to the latest episode, then I'll clear the cast from itunes.
Please give me my clicks back!
Makeshift (or is it Mr. Majesty?),
The click info is still in there... don't worry. The dashboard shows total clicks and the top three most popular feed items (with number of clicks for each item).
We've also added the ability to track downloads from within your feed. For podcasts, this is even more helpful than clicks since most podcatchers -- including iTunes -- do not let you click back to the web site from an item anyway.
In short, we haven't taken anything away, but we've added a bunch of stuff. If you have more questions, feel free to contact us or swing by our forums!
Nice update! I guess I finally need to get a hall pass...it's almost like you guys want to make money on this, rather than it just being the coolest service around. Could that be true? :-)
-Eric
Why did you skip from the free service:
- clickthroughs
- table with monthly overview
- export to excel
Is this the beginning of a vendor lock-in? I hope not, because that was in the old days.
User interface looks great but I have a strong feeling that some important things (as mentioned above) are skipped.
Whoops: Hans, Clickthrough tracking and export to excel missing are just bugs that are being fixed and will be live in the next few hours. Monthly overview table is replaced by the graphic that shows the month and highlights each day as clickable. We have a few other bugs for people who are not pro but are tracking clickthroughs. Working on them all now and should be live in the next few hours.
Looks great. I like the change! Thanks for making a great product. :)
As always I like your great and fast support. Thx for updating so fast!
nice new feautres, but the two key items i was interested in were missing from this release. Those being the ability to track downloads from the orginating site (for podcasts), and the aggregated weekly/monthly subscriber numbers. I do see this a great foundation for new feature, hopefully we dont have to wait too long for these added beni's
Thanks FB, keep it up :D
Very nice changes, folks. I took a spear in the heart as a test of who's who and what's what.
I purposely drove every subscriber away from my FeedBurner feed for 15 days. I directed the feed in an attempt, (a la Sally Field), to test for "popularity" among other podcasts. Basically, the test proved that Longtown Podcasts can be popular. Now, I'll take the services and download stats I get here at FeedBurner over all the other's combined.
Really creative work, cavedwellers. 60 bucks for a years stats? Best deal around.
-unc.
Feedburner, you're my heroes! I checked out your new stats services today and clicked on one of the "uncommon uses" links. Lo and behold, a feed thief using my content--without attribution or permission. Needless to say, I love what you're doing!
Wanna make me happy?. Put it back the way it was!.
Yay! Maybe now my question in the"support" forum will get answered.
I find the "uncommon uses" new function great and advertised it instantly by a post in french on my blog at http://media-tech.blogspot.com/2006/03/avec-le-nouveau-service-feedburner.html
I am a happy user of Feedburner for about a year. Keep up the good work
didier
Clyde, can you point us to the specific topic in the forum where you're not getting a response? We're very particular about responding to everything in the forums within a few hours, but sometimes another publisher responds to a question, we assume that's got you covered, etc.
Hey, I love the changes. Way to improve a free service, guys. I love having the daily sub numbers available to me in the dashboard. I like seeing the clickthroughs. If that feature was available before I never knew about it. Better feature layout.
I have only one request: Fix the OSX widget! :) I have to edit it's javascript files to get it to remember my feeds. I'd also love for it to have access to live sub data as an option.
Keep up the great work!
Great improvements! I always like looking at my stats and these new features let me spend more time mucking around looking at pretty charts. =D
Hi guys,
Just wanted to let you know about a post I did on the new stats - it covers things I'm not so sure on, things I like and things I'd like to see.
http://www.cre8d-design.com/blog/2006/03/02/comments-on-the-new-feedburner-stats/
Cheers
Rachel
i always loved visual reports.
so some features are not there for the free subscribers?
EDITOR: All the visual reports are still available to free subscribers. The visual trend chart is also now "clickable" to see individual historical days.
The change in service has hampered my ability to provide accurate reports to my non-profit organization's Board of Directors. You have removed the ability to view "last month's" activity in the pull down menu. While the "last 30 days" may be meaningful to some, others of us still operate on the calendar and aggregate our data by month.
We appreciate the free service. We credit Feedburner at every opportunity. We have even applied for a grant to fund access to enhanced statistics through Feedburner. However, this change means that we no longer have even a small window of opportunity (i.e., more than one day for any month other than February) to capture meaningful statistics for a non-technical audience of decision-makers.
Darn.
Carolyn -
Thanks for the note. In our excitement to launch the new updates, we inadvertently lost the "last month" option. But, we are aware of the bug and will have it corrected in the coming weeks. Apologies for the temporary inconvenience.
the news visual reports are awesome !
Thanks so much you guys and gals!!!
But how do I create a Podcast of a bunch of MP3s?
Phil at IRC
http://www.indierockcafe.com
Hi,
I just found out about feedburner. Seems like an interesting idea. I was thinking of starting a blog as an extension to my current project.
I think I'll take it for a ride.
I'll keep you posted :)
Thanks...
Keep up the great work!
