Since we first wrote about RSS in 2005, and called it “an emerging content delivery channel for marketers and content managers”, its time has come.

RSS readers have gone mainstream – users choose their favourite tool and love wielding the power of getting the news they want to come to them.

Helping to push RSS into the spotlight has been the enormous growth in the number of blogs. Technorati claims it is tracking 112.8 million blogs, and about 1.6 million posts per day.

Most of these blogs have RSS by default – and ‘growing your RSS list’ is the order of the day.

The benefits of RSS haven’t changed. It still offers greater anonymity to the end-user, due to its pull-nature. As a pull medium, you only send messages to those who want them, so you don’t have to worry about opt-ins and unsubscribe forms.

It still helps you with your search engine rankings. And to keep your audience loyal to your RSS feed, you still need to focus on supplying a steady stream of new content.

But what has changed? How far have we come in terms of measuring RSS marketing and its impact on site traffic?

FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google last year, provides free access to a number of metrics, such as:

• Number of subscribers

• Reach (the total number of users who take action – view or click – on the content)
• Number of views by post
• Number of clicks by post

One thing to be aware of with FeedBurner is that the user subscribes to the FeedBurner feed, not your site. That said, FeedBurner can be used to drive traffic to your site, and can automatically get your RSS feed seen in a number of places using ‘Pingshot’ (see below).

Pingshot

Others, like Pheedo, provide similar traffic stats: subscriber counts, engagement triggers, user agents, items viewed.

So, what do you do with RSS metrics once you’ve got them? Use the data derived from RSS analytics to learn about the hot topics – what your readers enjoy – and expand on these.

Bearing in mind that a subscriber to an RSS feed is almost as valuable as an email subscriber, any knowledge you gain about how many people are reading, and what they’re reading, can be used to your benefit.

While email is a more valuable online marketing medium – because of its targeting and tracking abilities – RSS makes a great stepping-stone towards engaging with your customers, particularly those who are not willing to divulge their email address.

Overcoming RSS hurdles

What RSS still can’t do is track the actions of individuals or target specific messages. Is this likely to change in the near future?

Perhaps, but don’t hold your breath. There’s no way you can use tracking codes for links (as in emails) at present, but FeedBurner and co. may well be working on it as we write.

At present, the most you can do with FeedBurner is see which country an individual viewed your post in. It is likely that this is determined via IP address. If they are capturing the IPs of readers, there is potential to track a variety of other metrics.

But whether they want to pursue tracking of users is another thing. Think about it. Most of us use our newsreader as a ‘newspaper’ – and we don’t want a newspaper full of sales pitches and marketing spiels. If my newsreader gets too ‘salesy’, I’ll drop it and find a new one.

With this in mind, it pays to view RSS as a PR tool rather than a marketing tool. By getting your blog or website right, your RSS will help you build your brand by positioning you or your business as an authority in a particular area. And the best thing about it is that if a reader wants something from you, they’ll tell you about it.

Due to its pull-nature, RSS offers a greater anonymity to the end-user, much more so than email. However, it is not a substitute for email marketing. It is an additional content delivery channel that promises an extra level of convenience to the end-user.

RSS is suitable for public websites, intranets and extranets. It is possible to customise RSS through setting up individual feeds for different purposes such as news, press releases, events, product / program updates, classifieds, etc.

Another plus is that it increases search engine rankings. By having your website links on many RSS readers, the link popularity of your site will increase, which in turn positively impacts search engine ranking.

It is relatively easy to set up an RSS feed for your website, requiring basic XML knowledge. However, in order to get your target audiences to keep using your RSS feeds, you must continually supply new content.

An RSS reader is needed to read the RSS feeds. This market segment is, though, far from mature. There are so many options available with varying degrees of sophistication and functionality. Of the standalone RSS readers, NewsGator, for instance, allows users to set-up persistent searchers to continually monitor important keywords such as your company name or brands. Firefox incorporated RSS technology into Mozilla. The next version of Microsoft Internet Explorer is expected to include this technology. iPod users can read RSS feeds via the podcasts provided on iTunes.

Like any other online initiative, if you are setting up RSS you should consider the metrics for its measurement too. There are two main RSS metrics:

• Feed subscribers – new subscribers, cancellations
• Click-throughs from feeds

To further understand the RSS user behaviours, you should also consider:

• RSS usage patterns. This is the study of viewing versus clicking times and patterns to determine the best times to publish content. According to a research conducted by Pheedo – an RSS-WebLog marketing solutions company, users tend to read more in the mornings but click more at night.
• Site usage patterns for RSS traffic. This is the study of RSS user behaviours on your site via segmentation functionality provided by your Web Analytics tool.

Keywords: RSS Analytics, RSS metrics, RSS measurement, RSS resources, RSS effectiveness