How to Track RSS via Omniture SiteCatalyst
One day my boss came in and asked me if it was possible to track RSS feeds via Omniture. I did some research and was able to uncover the following solution below. This posting provides instructions for how to track RSS and then leverage other variables to gain further insight.
Variables Needed
| Variable | Purpose |
| event1 | RSS Subscriptions |
| event2 | RSS Click-Through |
| s.Prop1/s.eVar1 | RSS Subscription Title |
| s.Prop2/s.eVar2 | RSS Tagline ID |
Steps to Implement
- Within the RSS link, locate the onClick function.
- Add the following (you may need to adjust based upon your variable declarations and tracking needs):
<a href=”http://www.webanalytics.com/?feed=rss2″ onClick=”var s=s_gi(s_account); s.prop1=s.eVar1=’How To Use The Omniture Debugger’; s.events=’event1,event2′; s.linkTrackVars=’eVar1,events’; s.linkTrackEvents=’event1′; s.tl(this,’o',’Web Analytics Central Subscription’);”>WebAnalyticsCentral.com RSS Feed</a>The code above adds in the necessary onClick handlers to track the variables as well as pass them along to omniture via the s.tl() call. The s.linkTrackVars and s.linkTrackEvents are necessary to pass variables and custom events via an onClick function. Please refer to the s.linkTrackVars, s.linkTrackEvents, and s.tl calls in the Omniture Implementation Guide for more information.
- Assign a unique tracking parameter and unique ID to each RSS Tagline link. Below is an example of how to add the tracking parameter to a destination URL:
http://www.webanalyticscentral.com/?feed=rss2&rssID=oxxx120509
- On the destination URL, after a user clicks on a RSS tagged link, grab the RSS ID and throw it in to an sProp and eVar. Also set a custom event. Below is an example:
s.Prop2=s.eVar2=”oxxx120509″s.events=”event2″
- Set up a correlation between time parting and RSS Title ID. Other correlations that can be used are RSS Title by getPreviousValue (pageName), by geolocation (country, state, cities), by referring domain, and by search engines (if referring domain isn’t good enough).
Written by:
Dorian D. Regester
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Google+
Dorian,I’ve been trying to figure out how to read the RSS reports but Omniture doesn’t seem to have any documentation. Do you know what the difference is between “RSS:”, “RSS (x)”, and “RSS (h)”?
Dorian,Is what you are talking about only based on “onclick” because you still do not know if you subscribed? When people click on the RSS icon, most likly they are taken to an external page, in that case you can’t grab the values. Any ideas?
yes correct