Tracking RSS Activity via Webtrends
Leveraging WebTrends Analytics 8, I was able to track RSS feeds and some of their associated events. This posting will describe what I was able to track and how I went about doing it:
How many times the RSS feed was being pulled into an RSS aggregator (Google Reader, etc). This was done by using the tag builder (http://tagbuilder.webtrends.com/) and appending on the tracking parameters to the destination URLs of my RSS links. This was done just to get the number of times the RSS aggregators pulled the feed from the site. This will not give you page views.
The number of times each article referenced was viewed. This functionality requires using the SmartSource Data Collector. What the SDC will do is when an article is viewed, insert a request for the 1×1 pixel to be called from the SDC server. This will track the view. If you wish to track those that are not using JavaScript (say some mobile devices), you will need to hardcode that the dcs.gif image gets called from the SDC server.
Clickthroughs from the viewer to the article page. To do this, tag the target page with an SDC tag and include the necessary tracking parameters in the link from the article description to the target page (an example of this is WT.rss=rss)
Leveraging WebTrends Analytics 8, I was able to track RSS feeds and some of their associated events. This posting will describe what I was able to track and how I went about doing it:
- How many times the RSS feed was being pulled into an RSS aggregator (Google Reader, etc). This was done by using the tag builder (http://tagbuilder.webtrends.com/) and appending on the tracking parameters to the destination URLs of my RSS links. This was done just to get the number of times the RSS aggregators pulled the feed from the site. This will not give you page views.
- The number of times each article referenced was viewed. This functionality requires using the SmartSource Data Collector. What the SDC will do is when an article is viewed, insert a request for the pixel to be called from the SDC server. This will track the view. If you wish to track those that are not using JavaScript (say some mobile devices), you will need to hardcode that the dcs.gif image gets called from the SDC server.
- Clickthroughs from the viewer to the article page. To do this, tag the target page with an SDC tag and include the necessary tracking parameters in the link from the article description to the target page (an example of this is WT.rss=rss2009).
- You can also bind onClick events to track via an aggregator someone who boomarks vs. someone who clicks the link within their browser. To accomplish this, you can use the dcsmultitrack code.
Written by:
Dorian D. Regester
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