[Tutorial] Advanced tracking of RSS using GA

leehughes

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This is my first tutorial so go easy ;)

This method is for people who work hard on their blogs (whitehat) and would like to know more about their subscribers and focus on those areas.

What you need:

Google analytics
Tracking code (I will provide)
5 mins of time

The results:

With what I will show you, you will be able to see from what source people came from who subscribed to your RSS.
You will be able to see what page in your blog they came from as well so you can focus on writing better content etc.

These are only two things but the possibilities are in the hundreds.

I'm going to assume you already have GA setup and are using the latest version which is Asynchronous tracking and already have a blog with a RSS feed.

So, what we need to do is to add a simple line of code next to our RSS feed that we want to track.

This piece of code is
Code:
onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'rss', 'clicked'])"

So, you will need to place this in your feed link like so

Code:
<a href="Your feedburner feed" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'rss', 'clicked'])">Subscribe To Our RSS Feed</a>

You now need to set it up using GA.

Open up GA so that you are looking at your dashboard.

On the left there is something called custom reporting, click that and and click manage custom reports.

Now top right you should see create new custom report. Click it.

Ok, now you have a screen with green and blue colours and a simple drag and drop interface.

I will walk you through 2 different ones to get the following results.

1. Which content on your blog gets you more subscribers
2. With other websites are bringing you the most subscribers.


For number 1.

Open content on the left from the metric panel and select total events. Drag it over to the metric tabs.

You should now have a blue square saying total events.

Now open up in the dimensions panel content and drag page titles to the dimensions drag and drop area.

This will now show you which blog posts gave you the most subscribers via the page title. You can go further and add more such as keywords in the 2nd dimension.

Save and name what you want. Name it something like content for RSS, whatever.

Number 2.

Repeat instructions again until you get to the point where you have to drag and drop things. For this we want to see which websites are giving us the most subscribers.

So, we need total events again as our metric.
Dimension = source
2nd dimension = page title.

So, if your blog gets a review or something without you knowing, you will be able to see how effective that single review was and how many subscribers it gave you.

As you can see there are hundreds and hundreds of different combinations you can use to understand your readers more. Once you have data on where they are coming from you can concentrate on those areas spend less time on those areas which are not giving you results.

Same things goes for writing content, by seeing which posts give you more subscribers you can tell what is working and what isn't.

Right, eyes are stinging.

I'm out :)

I hope you find this useful.
 
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