Google Feedburner Tutorial

What is Feedburner and How Can it Help My Blogs?

By now, if you've been blogging for a while you've probably heard of Google Feedburner. What is Feedburner? Well, Feedburner is a RSS feed generator service from Google. What sets Feedburner apart from all the other services that just produce a feed for you is that it goes the additional step in giving you statistics and analytics. This is extremely helpful to know if you are driving traffic to your blog or website through your feed and where that traffic is coming from.

And as we all know, knowledge is power.

Using Google Feedburner, you can find out stats like how many people have subscribed to your RSS feed, who's re-posting your feed and how many podcast downloads you're getting. You can also see which links are clicked on, etc. In this tutorial, we will take you on an introductory tour of the Feedburner interface.

Google Feedburner's Main Screen

When you first log into Feedburner, you'll be presented with the main screen that looks something like this:

Here are the three most important things you need to know about the main screen interface:

First, select which feed you want to manage. Note: once you've setup your RSS feed, you'll most often use the stats screen versus the main screen.
Copy and paste your blog URL address in this field to start a new RSS feed.
You can use this to export your stats if you want to save your stats or view them offline instead of using the online interface.

Click on the feed whose stats you want to see to continue.

Google Feedburner Tabs Explained

Within each feed, you'll see the tabs along the top that give you a variety of options on what you can do:

Analyze - Generally this is the tab you'll be using the most. It gives you a wide range of statistics on your Feedburner feed.
Optimize - Use tools here to tweak and improve your feed.
Publicize - Use these tools to increase your conversions, subscriptions, virality and traffic. I use the e-mail subscription function to allow visitors to sign up to receive my feed in e-mail. This is an especially helpful option for your readers who may not use an RSS reader.
Monetize - Make money with Google AdSense and Feedburner.
Troubleshootize - If your feed isn't working the way you think it should, click here to troubleshoot.

Let's move on to the Analyze interface.

Navigating the Analyze Interface

On the left of the Analyze interface is the Analyze navigation column.

Here's what each tab means:

Subscribers is basically how many subscribers you have to your RSS. Google feedburner calculates this by tracking how many people are consistently requesting data from your RSS feed.
Item use tracks how many people are using specific items. For example, if you want to know how many people are downloading a specific podcast, that can be tracked here.
Uncommon uses tells you who's using your feed in unusual ways. For example, someone may have streamed your RSS feed on their site and be sending you a lot of traffic. If that's the case, you want to know who that person is and what that site is.

Click on any of the above categories to learn more about your stats.

The Subscribers Interface

Here are the most important parts of the interface:

Select the date(s) you want to see your stats for. Unlike Google Analytics, Feedburner only allows you to select specific dates or a 7 day range. If you want to see more stats laid out at the same time, export your data.

If you use the 7 day report, the data will be based on an average of the last 7 days.

Here a graph of your stats will be displayed. You can see if you're trending up or down using this chart.

Here you'll see your two most important stats: Subscribers and Reach.

Subscribers - This is the number of people subscribed to your RSS. This number is calculated not tracked. In other words, this is a number that's calculated by Google based on data from how many times a certain IP address asked for your RSS data within 24 hours. It's generally quite accurate.
Reach - This is how many people actually read or clicked on something in your RSS feed. There's a big difference between people just requesting your feed and people actually reading content in your feed.

The Item Use Page

The item use page looks similar to your Subscribers page. It shows you a chart of your items usage and gives you a list of items along with how many times it's been called. This gives you a good idea of what posts are most popular in your feed.

Generally it's a good idea to take your winning posts and ideas and expand on them. You can track which posts are doing well on a daily or on a weekly basis.

The Uncommon Uses Page

The uncommon uses page is interesting in that the stats it gives you are different. Rather than giving you concrete numbers, what Google Feedburner does here is give you uses of your feed that it thinks are a little strange.

That could mean someone has taken your feed and used it as data on their site. Or, it might have ended up on a spammer's website as content they're trying to pass off on their own. But then again, it could be a fan who's just passing on your content.

In our example below, there has been no uncommon usage found:

Google Feedburner doesn't make a distinction about whether the uncommon use is good or bad; all they do is tell you that someone is using your feed for something other than an RSS reader. From then on it's up to you to decide what to do with that data.

So, hopefully from this tutorial, you know much more about what is feedburner and all it has to offer you. Now, it's time to put it to use. Go sign up now at: http://feedburner.google.com