One of the most frustrating things about RSS is not being able to track RSS subscription rates from source traffic.
There are other problems such as how people interact with your RSS content, but even being able to determine which sources of traffic result in subscribers would be a huge commercial advantage for bloggers, allowing them to focus their efforts on traffic generation strategies that will grow their business.
Hamlet Batista has been doing some digging, and has worked out how to track RSS subscribers based upon the source of traffic, and it even works with Feedburner’s RSS to Email feature.
This is a little technical, and you will have to setup goal tracking as well in Google Analytics, but I am sure for many of my readers this will be something they will be making a high priority.
How to track feed subscriber referrals with Google Analytics
It is likely that this method can’t detect a signup if a user first clicks through to read a feed on Feedburner, and then chooses a subscription option.
As Hamlet says
Of course it is possible that someone might click on the subscription and not complete the process, but I think that knowing where the attempts are coming from should be useful at least. It will help you discover the blogs/sites/forums where you need to concentrate your networking efforts.
Even for those bloggers who concentrate on email subscriptions, I am sure this will still help with another piece of the puzzle.
